eld his
subjects in his grip. To the tribes that were about to rebel he sent
messages, short, abrupt, but terrible in their threat of
vengeance,--messages that shook and awed the chiefs and pushed back
invasion. To the last, the great chief overawed the tribes; the
generation that had grown up under the shadow of his tyranny, even
when they knew he was dying, still obeyed him.

At length, one summer evening a few weeks after the burial of
Wallulah, there burst forth from the war-chief's lodge that peculiar
wail which was lifted only for the death of one of the royal blood. No
need to ask who it was, for only _one_ remained of the ancient line
that had so long ruled the Willamettes; and for him, the last of his
race, was the wail lifted. It was re-echoed by the inmates of the
surrounding lodges; it rang, foreboding, mournful, through the
encampment on Wappatto Island.

Soon, runners were seen departing in every direction to bear the fatal
news throughout the valley. Twilight fell on them; the stars came out;
the moon rose and sunk; but the runners sped on, from camp to camp,
from village to village. Wherever there was a cluster of Willamette
lodges, by forest, river, or sea, the tale was told, the wail was
lifted. So all that night the death-wail passed through the valley of
the Willamette; and in the morning the trails were thronged with bands
of Indians journeying for the last time to the isle of council, to
attend the obsequies of their chief, and consult as to the choice of
one to take his place.

The pestilence that had so ravaged the household of Multnomah was
spread widely now; and every band as it departed from the camp left
death behind it,--aye, took death with it; for in each company were
those whose haggard, sickly faces told of disease, and in more than
one were those so weakened that they lagged behind and fell at last
beside the trail to die.

The weather was very murky. It was one of the smoky summers of Oregon,
like that of the memorable year 1849, when the smoke of wide-spread
forest fires hung dense and blinding over Western Oregon for days, and
it seemed to the white settlers as if they were never to breathe the
clear air or see the sky again. But even that, the historic "smoky
time" of the white pioneers, was scarcely equal to the smoky period of
more than a century and a half before. The forest fires were raging
with unusual fury; Mount Hood was still in course of eruption; and all
the valley