“Pardon me for disturbing you, sir, but there’s a man here from the undertaker’s, with a certificate for you to sign, and he says it is important, because the funeral is this afternoon, sir?” I took the ominous yellow form from the man, closed the door and returned to my desk. With the paper still in my hand I turned to my fair visitor. She paled perceptibly, and I fancied, trembled a little, but returned my gaze unflinchingly, although I was sure she knew. “Game to the core!” I thought. I turned slowly to my desk, picked up a pen and wrote--“Ptomaine poisoning--Acute Gastritis,” then, without a twinge of conscience, deliberately signed my name to the “yellow peril” and rang for my attendant. A LEGEND OF THE YOSEMITE THE LOVE OF TIS-SA-ACK AND TU-TOCH-A-NU-LAH “Ah-wi-yah--the Beautiful,” she was once justly called. And now that the weight of many, many years bore heavily upon her, the warriors of the tribe, recalling the traditions of the past, still called her “The Beautiful.” But who would ever think that the bent and withered old squaw was once the pride of her tribe? The scorching suns of many summers, and the keen, chilling blasts of many cruel winters had indeed made sad havoc in the beauty of Yosemite’s queen. No one knew how old Ah-wi-yah was--no one knew when she first came to the valley of Yosemite. There was none of all her people who could recall the time when she was not already very, very old and wrinkled. The most venerable sagamore of the tribe remembered that the old squaw was regarded as the only living relic of an age of by-gone majesty, when he was yet scarcely more than a small pappoose, boarded and strapped with thongs to his mother’s back. He recalled that it was she who smiled upon him, and patted his head approvingly on the glorious and never to be forgotten day when his little hands and feeble arms first drew a slender, feathered arrow to its barbed head, and from a child’s bow sent it hurtling on its deadly flight at a startled rabbit that traversed his path. He remembered too, that the venerable Ah-wi-yah, standing erect before her lodge with fiery, flashing eyes, led the wild, fierce shout of triumph when he, grown to the stature of a brave, came home from the warpath with his first scalp. And it was the old squaw who, with her own wrinkled hands, hung the still bleeding trophy on his lodge pole, and foretold that the ghastly, gory emblem of his valor would have many, many children. Yes, Ah-wi-yah was very, very old--so old that she recalled the time when the fair Po-ho-ho waterfall was but a silvery, gleaming ribbon no larger than a stalk of maize--so old that she remembered the days when the Mission Fathers had not yet come to the Land of the Golden Sunset.