I$2 THE BRIDGE OF THE GODS.
and help him. And as he prayed, warm and glow ing was the love and tenderness that filled his heart. When the day was a little more advanced, he entered upon his work. The camp was astir with life; nearly all had finished their morning meal, and the various employments and diversions of the day were begun. Each tribe or band had pitched its lodges apart, though not far from the others. It was not so much an encampment as a group of many encampments, and the whole made up a scattered town of huts and wigwams.
A precarious and uncertain quiet had succeeded the agitation of the day before. Multnomah s energy had awed the malcontents into temporary submission, and the different bands were mingling freely with one another; though here and there a chief or warrior looked on contemptuously, standing moodily apart, wrapped in his blanket. Now and then when a Willa mette passed a group who were talking and gesticu lating animatedly they would become silent all at once till the representative of the dreaded race was out of hearing, when a storm of indignant gutterals would burst forth; but there were no other indications of hostility.
Groups were strolling from place to place observing curiously the habits and customs of other tribes; the common Willamette tongue, precursor of the more modern Chinook jargon, furnishing a means of inter course. Everywhere Cecil found talk, barter, diver sion. It was a rude caricature of civilization, the picture of society in its infancy, the rough dramati zation of that phase through which every race passes in its evolution fro
