A few years more, and all the old ones will be gone, and their successors will take the vacant places with prospects of more humane treatment than they have hitherto received.
Heaven pity the poor and old, for man has little for them that casts even a glimmer of hope, save on their waiting tombs!
CHAPTER IX.
THE AGED PAIR—BIRTHPLACE OF LEGENDS.
The scene changes, and we stand on the deck of a river steamer with its prow pointed eastward.
For hours we have steamed along in the shadows of the Cascade mountains, through deep, dark cañons, with walls so high that the smoke-stack of our little boat seemed like a pipe-stem. “Puny thing” it is. Yet it bears us over boiling eddies and up rapids that shoot between high rocks like immense streams of silver from the great furnace of creation.
We are startled at the sound of the whistle on our deck, and grow anxious when the nearest cañon answers back, and still another takes up the sound, and the echo turns to its original starting-point, and finds its own offspring talking back in fainter voice, until it dies away like the rumbling of some fast-retreating train rushing through the open field or wooded glens.
Soon we are on board the thundering train, whirling away toward the upper cascades, swinging around curves and beneath ledges, and overhanging the rushing floods hundreds of feet below. As we fly swiftly along, the conductor, or some one familiar with this cascade country, points out the battle-grounds where the red men fought white men for their homes. The battle was a fierce one, and lasted several days, when the Indians withdrew.