The Bridge of the Gods Part 8

"What is the name of the one you love? Speak it once, then never speak it again."

"Snoqualmie, chief of the Cayuses," faltered her tremulous lips.

A quick change of expression came into the gaze that was bent on her.

"Now lift your head and meet your fate like the daughter of a chief.

Do not let me see your face change while I tell you whom I have chosen."

She lifted her face in a tumult of fear and dread, and her eyes fastened pathetically on the chief.

"His name is--" she clasped her hands and her whole soul went out to her father in the mute supplication of her gaze--"the chief Snoqualmie, him of whom you have thought."

Her face was bewilderment itself for an instant; the next, the sudden light, the quick flash of expression which transfigured it in a moment of joy or surprise, came to her, and she raised his hand and kissed it. Was that all? Remember she had in her the deep, mute Indian nature that meets joy or anguish alike in silence. She had early learned to repress and control her emotions. Perhaps that was why she was so sad and brooding now.

"Where have you seen Snoqualmie?" asked Multnomah. "Not in your father's lodge, surely, for when strange chiefs came to him you always fled like a frightened bird."

"Once only have I seen him," she replied, flushing and confused. "He had come here alone to tell you that some of the tribes were plotting against you. I saw him as he went back through the wood to the place where his canoe was drawn up on the bank of the river. He was tall; his black hair fell below his shoulders; and his look was very proud and strong. His back was to the setting sun, and it shone around him robing him with fire, and I thought he looked like the Indian sun-G.o.d."

"I am glad it is pleasant for you to obey me. Now, listen while I tell you what you must do as the wife of Snoqualmie."

Stilling the sweet tumult in her breast, she tried hard to listen while he told her of the plans, the treaties, the friendships, and the enmities she must urge on her husband, when he became war-chief and was carrying on her father's work; and in part she understood, for her imagination was captivated by the splendid though barbarian dream of empire he set before her.

At length, as the sun was setting, one came to tell Multnomah that a runner from a tribe beyond the mountains had come to see him. Then her father left her; but Wallulah still sat on the mossy log, while all the woodland was golden in the glory of sunset.

Her beloved flute was pressed close to her cheek, and her face was bright and joyous; she was thinking of Snoqualmie, the handsome stately chief whom she had seen but once, but whose appearance, as she saw him then, had filled her girlish heart.

And all the time she knew not that this Snoqualmie, to whom she was to be given, was one of the most cruel and inhuman of men, terrible even to the grim warriors of the Wauna for his deeds of blood.

[1] Shipwrecks of Asiatic vessels are not uncommon on the Pacific Coast, several having occurred during the present century,--notably that of a j.a.panese junk in 1833, from which three pa.s.sengers were saved at the hands of the Indians; while the cases of beeswax that have been disinterred on the sea-coast, the oriental words that are found ingrafted in the native languages, and the Asiatic type of countenance shown by many of the natives, prove such wrecks to have been frequent in prehistoric times. One of the most romantic stories of the Oregon coast is that which the Indians tell of a buried treasure at Mount Nehalem, left there generations ago by shipwrecked men of strange garb and curious arms,--treasure which, like that of Captain Kidd, has been often sought but never found. There is also an Indian legend of a shipwrecked white man named Soto, and his comrades (See Mrs. Victor's "Oregon and Washington"), who lived long with the mid-Columbia Indians and then left them to seek some settlement of their own people in the south. All of these legends point to the not infrequent occurrence of such a wreck as our story describes.

[2] Indian name of the Nez Perces.

CHAPTER IV.

SENDING OUT THE RUNNERS.

Speed, Malise, speed; the dun deer's hide On fleeter foot was never tied; Herald of battle, fate and fear Stretch around thy fleet career.

SCOTT.

At early morning, the sachems had gathered in the council-grove, Multnomah on the seat of the war-chief, and twenty runners before him.

They were the flower of the Willamette youth, every one of royal birth, handsome in shape and limb, fleet-footed as the deer. They were slender and sinewy in build, with aquiline features and sharp searching eyes.

Their garb was light. Leggins and moccasins had been laid aside; even the _hiagua_ sh.e.l.ls were stripped from their ears. All stood nerved and eager for the race, waiting for the word that was to scatter them throughout the Indian empire, living thunderbolts bearing the summons of Multnomah.

The message had been given them, and they waited only to pledge themselves to its faithful delivery.

"You promise," said the chief, while his flashing glance read every messenger to the heart, "you promise that neither cougar nor cataract nor ambuscade shall deter you from the delivery of this summons; that you will not turn back, though the spears of the enemy are thicker in your path than ferns along the Santiam? You promise that though you fall in death, the summons shall go on?"

The spokesman of the runners, the runner to the Chopponish, stepped forward. With gestures of perfect grace, and in a voice that rang like a silver trumpet, he repeated the ancient oath of the Willamettes,--the oath used by the Shoshones to-day.

"The earth hears us, the sun sees us. Shall we fail in fidelity to our chief?"

There was a pause. The distant cry of swans came from the river; the great trees of council rustled in the breeze. Multnomah rose from his seat, gripping the bow on which he leaned. Into that one moment he seemed gathering yet repressing all the fierceness of his pa.s.sion, all the grandeur of his will. Far in the shade he saw Tohomish raise his hand imploringly, but the eyes of the orator sank once more under the glance of the war-chief.

"Go!"

An electric shock pa.s.sed through all who heard; and except for the chiefs standing on its outskirts like sombre shadows, the grove was empty in a moment.

Beyond the waters that girdled the island, one runner took the trail to Puyallup, one the trail to Umatilla, one the path to Chelon, and one the path to Shasta; another departed toward the volcano-rent desert of Klamath, and still another toward the sea-washed sh.o.r.es of Puget Sound.

The irrevocable summons had gone forth; the council was inevitable,--the crisis must come.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_The Earth hears us, the Sun sees us._"]

Long did Multnomah and his chiefs sit in council that day. Resolute were the speeches that came from all, though many secretly regretted that they had allowed Multnomah's oratory to persuade them into declaring for the council: but there was no retreat.

Across hills and canyons sped the fleet runners, on to the huge bark lodges of Puget Sound, the fisheries of the Columbia, and the crowded race-courses of the Yakima. Into camps of wandering prairie tribes, where the lodges stood like a city to-day and were rolled up and strapped on the backs of horses to-morrow; into councils where sinister chiefs were talking low of war against the Willamettes; into wild midnight dances of plotting dreamers and medicine-men,--they came with the brief stern summons, and pa.s.sed on to speak it to the tribes beyond.

BOOK III.

_THE GATHERING OF THE TRIBES._

CHAPTER I.

THE BROKEN PEACE-PIPE.

My full defiance, hate, and scorn.

SCOTT.

It is the day after the departure of the runners to call the great council,--eight years since Cecil Grey went out into the wilderness.

Smoke is curling slowly upward from an Indian camp on the prairie not far from the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon. Fifteen or twenty cone-shaped lodges, each made of mats stretched on a frame-work of poles, compose the village. It swarms with wolfish-looking dogs and dirty, unclad children. Heaps of refuse, heads and feet of game, lie decaying among the wigwams, tainting the air with their disgusting odor. Here and there an ancient withered specimen of humanity sits in the sun, absorbing its rays with a dull animal-like sense of enjoyment, and a group of warriors lie idly talking. Some of the squaws are preparing food, boiling it in water-tight willow baskets by filling them with water and putting in hot stones.[3] Horses are tethered near the lodges, and others are running loose on the prairie.

There are not many of them. The Indians have only scores now where a century later Lewis and Clark found thousands; and there are old men in the camp who can recall the time when the first horses ever seen among them were bought or stolen from the tribes to the south.