The men and boys were busy with their bows and arrows. A difficulty had arisen between this tribe and one not far remote, and they were expecting an attack. Though the less powerful tribe of the two, they seemed not the least dismayed. The old men looked stern and grave, but the boys were full of glee as if mustering for a deer-hunt. The mothers with Spartan coolness were engaged in pointing arrows with flint stones, so shaped that they easily penetrate and break off in the effort to extract them, and always leave an ugly wound. They project these arrows from their bows with incredible force, often burying them to the feather in the luckless elk; the deer gives his last life-bound and falls, while the unsuspecting foe drops unwarned from his saddle. I saw no signs of intoxication among these Indians, and was told by Mr. Murphy that he allowed no liquors in the camp. He said a trader brought there a few days since a barrel of rum, and that he gave him exactly five minutes in which to decide whether he would quit the grounds, or have the head of the barrel knocked in. He of course took his fire-curse to some other place. WEDNESDAY, OCT. 4. Our camping-ground is in a broad ravine through which a rivulet wanders, and which is dotted with the frequent tents of gold-diggers. The sounds of the crowbar and pick, as they shake or shiver the rock, are echoed from a thousand cliffs; while the hum of human voices rolls off on the breeze to mingle with the barking of wolves, who regard with no friendly eyes this intrusion into their solitude. They resemble their great progenitrix, trembling in stone, as the Vandals broke into Rome. But little care the gold-diggers about the wolves, it is enough for them to know that this ravine contains gold; and it must be dug out, though an earthquake may slumber beneath. If you want to find men prepared to storm the burning threshold of the infernal prison, go among gold-diggers. The provisions with which we left San José are gone, and we have been obliged to supply ourselves here. We pay at the rate of four hundred dollars a barrel for flour; four dollars a pound for poor brown sugar, and four dollars a pound for indifferent coffee. And as for meat, there is none to be got except jerked-beef, which is the flesh of the bullock cut into strings and hung up in the sun to dry, and which has about as much juice in it as a strip of bark dangling in the wind from a dead tree. Still, when moistened and toasted, it will do something towards sustaining life; so also will the sole of your shoe. And yet I have seen men set and grind it as if it were nutritious and sweetly flavored. Oh ye who lose your temper because your sirloin has rolled once too much on the spit, come to the mines of California and eat jerked-beef!