untains and grinding
them to powder in its terrific progress. Gasping with fatigue, the
unhappy one toiled up a hill and surveyed his work with satisfaction, for
the flood engulfed the fiend men and they left no member of their race
behind them.

When they had all been happily smashed or drowned, the devil skipped
lightly over the channels he had cut and sought his family, though with a
subdued expression of countenance, for his tail--his strength and
pride--was bruised and broken beyond repair, and all the little imps that
he fathered to the world afterward had little dangling tails like
monkeys' instead of megatheriums', and in time these appendages
disappeared. But what was the use of them? The fiend men they had fought
against were dead and the rising race they could circumvent by subtler
means. The inland sea drained off. Its bed is now the prairie, and the
three strokes of the devil's tail are indelibly recorded in the bed of
the Columbia at the Dalles. And the devil never tried to be good again.

CASCADES OF THE COLUMBIA

When the Siwash, as the Northwestern Indians called themselves, were few,
Mount Hood was kept by the Spirit of Storms, who when he shook his robe
caused rain or snow to fall over the land, while the Fire Spirit flashed
his lightnings from Mount Adams. Across the vale between them stretched a
mighty bridge of stone, joining peak to peak, and on this the Siwash laid
his offering of salmon and dressed skins. Here, too, the tribal festivals
were kept. The priestess of the arch-Mentonee, who fed the fire on the
tribal altar "unimpassioned by a mortal throb"--had won the love of the
wild tamanouses of the mountains, but she was careless alike of coaxing
and threats, and her heart was as marble to them.

Jealous of each other, these two spirits fell to fighting, and, appalled
by the whirl of fire and cloud, of splintering trees and crumbling rocks,
the Indians fled in terror toward the lowlands, but she, unhurt and
undaunted, kept in her place, and still offered praise to the one god.
Yet she was not alone, for watchful in the shadow of a rock stood a
warrior who had loved her so long, without the hope of lovers, that he,
too, had outgrown fear. Though she had given him but passing words and
never a smile, his own heart was the warmer and the heavier with its
freight, and it was his way to be ever watching her in some place where
she might not be troubled by the sight of him.

The war waxed