eased--evil hawks fly out of him. Good Indian come
back. One is tied to the other. One no let the other go. What was that low
music I hear? Baby music! Chinook wind in the bushes! Quail--mother-bird
singing to her nest! I love that music.

"Say, you play at Potlatch, frighten away the hawks; mother-birds sing. No
devil dance. Say, I have been good; no harm old wah-wah. Will you--will
you play--play that tin-tin at Potlatch under the big moon?"

A great thought had taken possession of the young Indian's mind, and a
great plan--one worthy of a leader of a peace congress. Gretchen saw the
plan in part, but did not fully comprehend it. She could only see that his
life had become a struggle between good and evil, and that he was now
following some good impulse of his better nature.

CHAPTER IV.

MRS. WOODS'S TAME BEAR.

Mrs. Woods was much alone during this summer. Her husband was away from
home during the working days of the week, at the saw and shingle mill on
the Columbia, and during the same days Gretchen was much at school.

The summer in the mountain valleys of Washington is a long serenity. The
deep-blue sky is an ocean of intense light, and the sunbeams glint amid
the cool forest shadows, and seem to sprinkle the plains with gold-dust
like golden snow. Notwithstanding her hard practical speech, which was a
habit, Mrs. Woods loved Nature, and, when her work was done, she often
made little journeys alone into the mountain woods.

In one of these solitary excursions she met with a little black cub and
captured it, and, gathering it up in her apron like a kitten, she ran with
it toward her cabin, after looking behind to see if the mother bear was
following her. Had she seen the mother of the cunning little black
creature in her apron pursuing her, she would have dropped the cub, which
would have insured her escape from danger. But the mother bear did not
make an early discovery of the loss in her family. She was probably out
berrying, and such experiences of stolen children were wholly unknown to
the bear family in Washington before this time. The Indians would not have
troubled the little cub.

The black bear of the Cascades is quite harmless, and its cubs, like
kittens, seem to have a sense of humor unusual among animals. For a white
child to see a cub is to desire it to tame for a pet, and Mrs. Woods felt
the same childish instincts when she caught up the little creature, which
seemed to have no fear o