fire reddened the smoke that hung dense over the
water, and made it assume distorted and fantastic
shapes, which moved and writhed in the wavering
light, and to the Indians seemed spectres of the dead,
hovering over the canoe, reaching out their arms to
receive the soul of Multnomah.
"It is the dead people come for him," the Willa- mettes whispered to one another, as they stood upon the bank, watching the canoe drift farther and farther from them, with the wild play of light and shadow over it. Down the river, like some giant torch that was to light the war-chief along the shadowy ways of death, passed the burning canoe. Rounding a wooded point, it blazed a moment brilliantly beside it, and as it drifted to the farther side, outlined the intervening trees with fire, till every branch was clearly relieved against a flaming background; then, passing slowly on beyond the point, the light waned gradually, and at last faded quite away.
And not till then was a sound heard among the silent and impassive throng on the river-bank. But when the burning canoe had vanished utterly, when black and starless night fell again on wood and water, the death-wail burst from the Indians with one im pulse and one voice, a people s cry for its lost chief, a great tribe s lament for the strength and glory that had drifted from it, never to return.
Among a superstitious race, every fact becomes mingled more or less with fable; every occurrence, charged with fantastic meanings. And there sprang up among the Indians, no one could tell how, a pro phecy that some night when the Willamettes were
