The last stand of three troopers and a scout overtaken by a band of
hostile Indians

_Drawn by Frederic Remington. Courtesy of Collier's Weekly._]

"We think now that they followed us without attacking for so long
because they were waiting till the lay of the land suited them. They
wanted--no doubt--an absolutely flat piece of country, with no
depressions, no hills or stream-beds in which we could hide, but which
should be high upon the edges, like an amphitheatre. They would get us
in the centre and occupy the rim themselves. Roughly, this is the bit of
desert which witnesses our 'last stand.' On three sides the ground
swells a very little--the rise is not four feet. On the third side it is
open, and so flat that even lying on the ground as we do we can see
(leagues away) the San Jacinto hills--'from whence cometh no help.' It
is all sand and sage, forever and forever. Even the sage is sparse--a
bad place even for a coyote. The whole is flagellated with an
intolerable heat and--now that the shooting is relaxed--oppressed with a
benumbing, sodden silence--the silence of a primordial world. Such a
silence as must have brooded over the Face of the Waters on the Eve of
Creation--desolate, desolate, as though a colossal, invisible pillar--a
pillar of the Infinitely Still, the pillar of Nirvana--rose forever into
the empty blue, human life an atom of microscopic dust crushed under its
basis, and at the summit God Himself. And I find time to ask myself why,
at this of all moments of my tiny life-span, I am able to write as I do,
registering impressions, keeping a finger upon the pulse of the spirit.
But oh! if I had time now--time to write down the great thoughts that do
throng the brain. They are there, I feel them, know them. No doubt the
supreme exaltation of approaching death is the stimulus that one never