she was living, and made me feel
that I stood outside her heart even while my arms were around her. It
comes between us now and will not let her speak. If it was only
something I could see and grapple with!"

And the fierce warrior felt his blood kindle within him, that not only
death but something still more mysterious and incomprehensible should
separate him from the one he loved. He turned sadly away and passed on
to the interior of the hut. As he gazed on the crumbling relics of
humanity around him, the wonted look of command came back to his brow.
These _should_ obey; by iron strength of will and mystic charm he
would sway them to his bidding. The withered lips of death, or spirit
voices, should tell him what he wished to know. Abjectly superstitious
as was the idea it involved, there was yet something grand in his
savage despotic grasp after power that, dominating all he knew of
earth, sought to bend to his will even the spirit-land.

The chief believed that the departed could talk to him if they would;
for did they not talk to the medicine men and the dreamers? If so, why
not to him, the great chief, the master of all the tribes of the
Wauna?

He knelt down, and began to sway his body back and forth after the
manner of the Nootka _shamans_, and to chant a long, low, monotonous
song, in which the names of the dead who lay there were repeated over
and over again.

"Kamyah, Tlesco, Che-aqah, come back! come back and tell me the
secret, the black secret, the death secret, the woe that is to come.
Winelah, Sic-mish, Tlaquatin, the land is dark with signs and omens;
the hearts of men are heavy with dread; the dreamers say that the end
is come for Multnomah and his race. Is it true? Come and tell me. I
wait, I listen, I speak your names; come back, come back!"

Tohomish himself would not have dared to repeat those names in the
charnel hut, lest those whom he invoked should spring upon him and
tear him to pieces. No more potent or more perilous charm was known to
the Indians.

Ever as Multnomah chanted, the sullen roar of the volcano came like an
undertone and filled the pauses of the wild incantation. And as he
went on, it seemed to the chief that the air grew thick with ghostly
presences. There was a sense of breathing life all around him. He felt
that others, many others, were with him; yet he saw nothing. When he
paused for some voice, some whisper of reply, this sense of
hyper-physical perception became so