The Bridge of the Gods Part 18

He told it all,--the story of his home and his work, his call of G.o.d to go to the Indians, his long wanderings, the message he had to deliver, how it had been received by some and rejected by many; now he was here, a messenger sent by the Great Spirit to tell the tribes of the Wauna the true way of life. He told it all, and never had he been so eloquent. It was a striking contrast, the grim Indian sitting there leaning on his bow, his sharp, treacherous gaze bent like a bird of prey on the delicately moulded man pleading before him.

He listened till Cecil began to talk of love and forgiveness as duties enjoined by the Great Spirit. Then he spoke abruptly.

"When you stood up in the council the day the bad chief was tried, and told of the weakness and the wars that would come if the confederacy was broken up, you talked wisely and like a great chief and warrior; now you talk like a woman. Love! forgiveness!" He repeated the words, looking at Cecil with a kind of wondering scorn, as if he could not comprehend such weakness in one who looked like a brave man. "War and hate are the life of the Indian. They are the strength of his heart.

Take them away, and you drain the blood from his veins; you break his spirit; he becomes a squaw."

"But my people love and forgive, yet they are not squaws. They are brave and hardy in battle; their towns are great; their country is like a garden."

And he told Multnomah of the laws, the towns, the schools, the settled habits and industry of New England. The chief listened with growing impatience. At length he threw his arm up with an indescribable gesture of freedom, like a man rejecting a fetter.

"How can they breathe, shut in, bound down like that? How can they live, so tied and burdened?"

"Is not that better than tribe forever warring against tribe? Is it not better to live like men than to lurk in dens and feed on roots like beasts? Yet we will fight, too; the white man does not love war, but he will go to battle when his cause is just and war must be."

"So will the deer and the cayote fight when they can flee no longer.

The Indian loves battle. He loves to seek out his enemy, to grapple with him, and to tread him down. That is a man's life!"

There was a wild grandeur in the chief's tone. All the tameless spirit of his race seemed to speak through him, the spirit that has met defeat and extermination rather than bow its neck to the yoke of civilization. Cecil realized that on the iron fibre of the war-chief's nature his pleading made no impression whatever, and his heart sank within him.

Again he tried to speak of the ways of peace, but the chief checked him impatiently.

"That is talk for squaws and old men. Multnomah does not understand it. Talk like a man, if you wish him to listen. Multnomah does not forgive; Multnomah wants no peace with his enemies. If they are weak he tramples on them and makes them slaves; if they are strong he fights them. When the Shoshones take from Multnomah, he takes from them; if they give him war he gives them war; if they torture one Willamette at the stake, Multnomah stretches two Shoshones upon red-hot stones. Multnomah gives hate for hate and war for war. This is the law the Great Spirit has given the Indian. What law he has given the white man, Multnomah knows not nor cares!"

Baffled in his attempt, Cecil resorted to another line of persuasion.

He set before Multnomah the arts, the intelligence, the splendor of the white race.

"The Indian has his laws and customs, and that is well; but why not council with the white people, even as chiefs council together? Send an emba.s.sy to ask that wise white men be sent you, so that you may learn of their arts and laws; and what seems wise and good you can accept, what seems not so can be set aside. I know the ways that lead back to the land of the white man; I myself would lead the emba.s.sy."

It was a n.o.ble conception,--that of making a treaty between this magnificent Indian confederacy and New England for the purpose of introducing civilization and religion; and for a moment he lost sight of the insurmountable obstacles in the way.

"No," replied the chief, "neither alone nor as leader of a peace party will your feet ever tread again the path that leads back to the land of the white man. We want not upon our shoulders the burden of his arts and laws. We want not his teachers to tell us how to be women. If the white man wants us, let him find his way over the desert and through the mountains, and we will grapple with him and see which is the strongest."

So saying, the war-chief rose and left him.

"He says that I shall never be allowed to go back," thought Cecil, with a bitter consciousness of defeat. "Then my mission ends here in the land of the Bridge, even as I have so often dreamed that it would.

So be it; I shall work the harder now that I see the end approaching.

I shall gather the chiefs in my own lodge this evening and preach to them."

While he was forming his resolution, there came the recollection that Wallulah would look for him, would be expecting him to come to her.

"I cannot," he thought, though he yearned to go to her. "I cannot go; I must be faithful to my mission."

Many chiefs came that night to his lodge; among them, to his surprise, Tohomish the seer. Long and animated was Cecil's talk; beautiful and full of spiritual fervor were the words in which he pointed them to a better life. Tohomish was impa.s.sive, listening in his usual brooding way. The others seemed interested; but when he was done they all rose up and went away without a word,--all except the Shoshone renegade who had helped him bury the dead Bannock. He came to Cecil before leaving the lodge.

"Sometime," he said, "when it will be easier for me to be good than it is now, I will try to live the life you talked about to-night."

Then he turned and went out before Cecil could reply.

"There is one at least seeking to get nearer G.o.d," thought Cecil, joyfully. After awhile his enthusiasm faded away, and he remembered how anxiously Wallulah must have waited for him, and how bitterly she must have been disappointed. Her face, pale and stained with tears, rose plainly before him. A deep remorse filled his heart.

"Poor child! I am the first white person she has seen since her mother died; no wonder she longs for my presence! I must go to her to-morrow.

After all, there is no danger of my caring for her. To me my work is all in all."

CHAPTER IV.

ARCHERY AND GAMBLING.

To gambling they are no less pa.s.sionately addicted in the interior than on the coast.--BANCROFT: _Native Races_.

The next morning came the archery games. The best marksmen of each tribe contended together under the eyes of Multnomah, and Snoqualmie the Cayuse won the day.

These diversions were beginning to produce the result that the politic chief had intended they should. Better feeling was springing up. The spirit of discontent that had been rife was disappearing. Every day good-fellowship grew more and more between the Willamettes and their allies. Every day Snoqualmie the Cayuse became more popular among the tribes, and already he was second in influence to none but Multnomah himself.

The great war-chief had triumphed over every obstacle; and he waited now only for the last day of the council, when his daughter should be given to Snoqualmie and the chiefs should recognize him as the future head of the confederacy.

Knowing this, the sight of Snoqualmie's successful archery was almost intolerable to Cecil, and he turned away from the place where the games were held.

"I will seek the young Willamette who is sick," he said to himself.

"Then this evening I will go and visit Wallulah."

The thought sent the blood coursing warmly through his veins, but he chided himself for it. "It is but duty, I go to her only as a missionary," he repeated to himself over and over again.

He went to the lodge of the young Willamette and asked for him.

"He is not here," the father of the youth told him. "He is in the sweat-house. He is sick this morning, _hieu_ sick."

And the old man emphasized the _hieu_ [much], with a prolonged intonation and a comprehensive gesture as if the young man were very sick indeed. To the sweat-house went Cecil forthwith. He found it to be a little arched hut, made by sticking the ends of bent willow-wands into the ground and covering them over with skins, leaving only a small opening for entrance. When a sick person wished to take one of those "sweat baths" so common among the Indians, stones were heated red hot and put within the hut, and water was poured on them. The invalid, stripped to the skin, entered, the opening was closed behind him, and he was left to steam in the vapors.

When Cecil came up, the steam was pouring between the overlapping edges of the skins, and he could hear the young Willamette inside, chanting a low monotonous song, an endlessly repeated invocation to his _totem_ to make him well. How he could sing or even breathe in that stifling atmosphere was a mystery to Cecil.

By and by the Willamette raised the flap that hung over the entrance and crawled out, hot, steaming, perspiring at every pore. He rushed with unsteady footsteps down to the river, only a few yards away, and plunged into the cold water. After repeatedly immersing himself, he waded back to the sh.o.r.e and lay down to dry in the sun. The shock to his nervous system of plunging from a hot steam-bath into ice-cold water fresh from the snow peaks of the north had roused all his latent vitality. He had recovered enough to be sullen and resentful to Cecil when he came up; and after vainly trying to talk with or help him, the missionary left him.

It is characteristic of the Indian, perhaps of most half-animal races, that their moral conduct depends on physical feeling. Like the animal, they are good-humored, even sportive, when all is well; like the animal, they are sluggish and unreasoning in time of sickness.

Cecil went back to the camp. He found that the archery games were over, and that a great day of gambling had begun. He was astonished at the eagerness with which all the Indians flung themselves into it.

Multnomah alone took no part, and Tohomish, visible only at the council, was not there. But with those two exceptions, chiefs, warriors, all flung themselves headlong into the game.

First, some of the leading chiefs played at "hand," and each tribe backed its chief. Furs, skins, weapons, all manner of Indian wealth was heaped in piles behind the gamblers, const.i.tuting the stakes; and they were divided among the tribes of the winners,--each player representing a tribe, and his winnings going, not to himself, but to his people. This rule applied, of course, only to the great public games; in private games of "hand" each successful player kept his own spoils.

Amid the monotonous chant that always accompanied gambling, the two polished bits of bone (the winning one marked, the other not) were pa.s.sed secretly from hand to hand. The bets were made as to who held the marked stick and in which hand, then a show of hands was made and the game was lost and won.

From "hand" they pa.s.sed to _ahikia_, a game like that of dice, played with figured beaver teeth or disks of ivory, which were tossed up, everything depending on the combination of figures presented in their fall. It was played recklessly. The Indians were carried away by excitement. They bet anything and everything they had. Wealthy chiefs staked their all on the turn of the ivory disks, and some were beggared, some enriched. Cecil noticed in particular Mishlah the Cougar, chief of the Molallies. He was like a man intoxicated. His huge b.e.s.t.i.a.l face was all ablaze with excitement, his eyes were glowing like coals. He had scarcely enough intellect to understand the game, but enough combativeness to fling himself into it body and soul.

He bet his horses and lost them; he bet his slaves and lost again; he bet his lodges, with their rude furnishings of mat and fur, and lost once more. Maddened, furious, like a lion in the toils, the desperate savage staked his wives and children on the throw of the _ahikia_, and they were swept from him into perpetual slavery.

Then he rose up and glared upon his opponents, with his tomahawk clinched in his hand,--as if feeling dimly that he had been wronged, thirsting for vengeance, ready to strike, yet not knowing upon whom the blow should fall. There was death in his look, and the chiefs shrunk from him, when his eyes met Multnomah's, who was looking on; and the war-chief checked and awed him with his cold glance, as a tamer of beasts might subdue a rebellious tiger. Then the Molallie turned and went away, raging, desperate, a chief still, but a chief without lodge or wife or slave.