the walls; game-bags, revolvers in their holsters, hunting and
fishing knives in their sheaths, depended from hooks above them.
In one corner stood a harpoon; in another, two or three Indian
spears for salmon. The carpetless floor and rude chairs and
settles were covered with otter, mink, beaver, and a quantity of
valuable seal-skins, with a few larger pelts of the bear and elk.
The only attempt at decoration was the displayed wings and breasts
of the wood and harlequin duck, the muir, the cormorant, the gull,
the gannet, and the femininely delicate half-mourning of petrel and
plover, nailed against the wall. The influence of the sea was
dominant above all, and asserted its saline odors even through the
spice of the curling drift-wood smoke that half veiled the ceiling.

A berry-eyed old Indian woman with the complexion of dried salmon;
her daughter, also with berry eyes, and with a face that seemed
wholly made of a moist laugh; 'Yellow Bob,' a Digger 'buck,' so
called from the prevailing ochre markings of his cheek, and
'Washooh,' an ex-chief; a nondescript in a blanket, looking like a
cheap and dirty doll whose fibrous hair was badly nailed on his
carved wooden head, composed the Culpepper household. While the
two former were preparing supper in the adjacent dining-room,
Yellow Bob, relieved of his burden of game, appeared on the gallery
and beckoned mysteriously to his master through the window. James
Culpepper went out, returned quickly, and after a minute's
hesitation and an uneasy glance towards his sister, who had
meantime pushed back her sou'wester from her forehead, and without
taking off her jacket had dropped into a chair before the fire with
her back towards him, took his gun noiselessly from the rack, and
saying carelessly that he would be back in a moment, disappeared.