y 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 passed 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.

On every side the prairie sweeps away in long grassy swells and
hollows, rolling off to the base of the Blue Mountains.

The camp has the sluggish aspect that an Indian camp always presents
at noonday.

Suddenly a keen-sighted warrior points to a dim speck far over the
prairie toward the land of the Bannocks. A white man would have
scarcely noticed it; or if he ha