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Show Once I drew on TREASURE ISLAND and the marooned seaman who found the gold coins buried by the pirates. The rushing runoff from the cloudburst had cut down into sand and clay to uncover an ancient Indian campground in the swale. There were fire-crumbled stones, a mortar and two pestles for grinding seeds, hundreds of bits of black obsidian or volcanic glass where Indians had ^hipped arrowheads and lance heads. I found several broken arrowheads and one perfect little point, a real jewel, fashioned from almost clear obsidian. Using my boat for a "rescue mission" was another proud incident. When I'd tired of the north pond we hauled the boat to a larger "lake" to the south. San Pedro surveyors had faced a problem in crossing the deepest broadest swale in the valley. They did it largely by heaping up a high grade but in the deepest part they designed a trestle of big timbers to bear the rails across. The graders had heaped enough dirt under the trestle to form an effective dam. Here was the longest of our ponds, and the widest. Having overflowed a hundred yards or more up the swale, it flooded the trail from Nada station to our store. Once when I was sailing Trestle Lake a homesteader's wife came driving a team and wagon to the store for groceries. She tried to stay on the trail along the borrow pit. Her horses were a sober old plodder and a skittish young animal. When she reached the place where the pond overflowed the trail she cracked the whip and drove right into the water. Soon the horses were belly-deep and the water rose to the wagon bed. The wagon sank into a foot or two of mud under three feet of water. Feeling the wagon begin to mire down, the young horse reared, floundered and fell in a tangle of harness. The old one simply stopped. Finally the young horse staggered to his feet but the tangled harness left him confused. He stood there trembling. Neither horse pulled. I sailed to the rear of the wagon and offered to ferry the woman and her two little sons, about seven and five years old, to shore. She refused, unnerved by |