and Gretchen was
at school. Mrs. Woods was trying to sing. She had a hard, harsh voice
always, and the tune was a battle-cry. The hymn on which she was
exercising her limited gifts was not one of the happy tunes of Methodism,
which early settlers on the Columbia loved to sing. It was a very
censorious rhyme and took a very despondent view of the human heart:

"The pure testimony poured forth from the Spirit
Cuts like a two-edged sword;
And hypocrites now are most sorely tormented
Because they're condemned by the Word."

She made the word "hypocrites" ring through the solitary log-cabin--she
seemed to have the view that a large population of the world were of this
class of people. She paused in her singing and looked out of the door.

"There's one honest woman alive," she remarked to herself. "Thank Heaven,
_I_ never yet feared the face of clay!"

A tall, dark form met her eye--a great shadow in the scintillant sunlight.
It was an aged Indian, walking with a staff. He was coming toward the
cabin.

"Umatilla!" she said. "What can he want of me?"

The old chief approached, and bowed and sat down on a log that answered
for a door-step.

"I walk with a staff now," he said. "My bow has drifted away on the tide
of years--it will never come back again. I am old."

"You have been a good man," said Mrs. Woods, yielding to an impulse of her
better nature. She presently added, as though she had been too generous,
"And there aren't many good Injuns--nor white folks either for that
matter."

"I have come to have a smoke-talk with you," said the old chief, taking
out his pipe and asking Mrs. Woods to light it. "Listen! I want to go
home. When a child is weary, I take him by the hand and point him to the
smoke of his wigwam. He goes home and sleeps. I am weary. The Great Spirit
has taken me by the hand; he points to the smoke of the wigwam. There
comes a time when all want to go home. I want to go home. Umatilla is
going home. I have _not_ spoken."

The smoke from his pipe curled over his white head in the pure, clear
September air. He was eighty or more years of age. He had heard the
traditions of Juan de Fuca, the Greek pilot, who left his name on the
straits of the Puget Sea. He had heard of the coming of Vancouver in his
boyhood, the English explorer who named the seas and mountains for his
lieutenants and friends, Puget, Baker, Ranier, and Townsend. He had known
the forest lords of the Hudson Bay