“God sent me to proclaim salvation to these children of darkness,” he thought, “and I have turned aside to fill my heart with a woman’s love. His wrath is on me. He has taken his spirit from me. I am 203 a thing rejected and accursed, and this people will go down to death because I have failed in my mission.”
While he sat absorbed in these bitter, self-accusing thoughts, the speaking went on. Wau-ca-cus the Klickitat made a strong “talk,” picturesque in Indian metaphor, full of energy. But the chief that followed surpassed him. Orator caught fire from orator; thoughts not unworthy a civilized audience were struck out by the intensity of the emulation; speakers rose to heights which they had never reached before, which they were destined never to reach again. In listening to and admiring their champions, the tribes forgot the smoking mountains and the feeling of apprehension that had oppressed them. At length Snoqualmie made a speech breathing his own daring spirit in every word. It went immeasurably beyond the others; it was the climax of all the darkly splendid eloquence of the day.
No, not of all. From his place among the chiefs rose a small and emaciated figure; the blanket that had muffled his face was thrown aside, and the tribes looked on the mis-shapen and degraded features of Tohomish the Pine Voice. He stood silent at first, his eyes bent on the ground, like a man in a trance. For a moment the spectators forgot the wonderful eloquence of the man in his ignoble appearance. What could he do against Wau-ca-cus the Klickitat and Snoqualmie the Cayuse, whose sonorous utterances still rang in their ears, whose majestic presence still filled their minds!
“The Willamettes are beaten at last,—the Willamette speakers can no more be called the best,” was the one exultant thought of the allies, and the Willamettes 204 trembled for the fame of their orators. Back in the shadow of the cottonwoods, an old Willamette warrior put an arrow on the string and bent his bow unseen on Tohomish.
“He cannot beat them, and it shall never be said that Tohomish failed,” he muttered. At that moment, even as death hung over him, the orator’s voice was heard beginning his “talk;” and the warrior’s hand fell, the bent bow was relaxed, the arrow dropped from the string. For with the first accents of that soft and lingering voice the tribes were thrilled as with the beginning of music.
The orator’s head was still bent down, his manner abstracted; he spoke of the legends and the glories of the Willamette tribe, but spoke of them as if that tribe belonged to the past, as if it had perished from the earth, and he was telling the tale of a great dead race. His tones were melodious but indescribably mournful. When at length he lifted his face, his eyes shone with a misty light, and his brutal features were illuminated with a weird enthusiasm. A shudder went through the vast and motley assembly. No boastful rant was this, but a majestic story of the past, the story of a nation gone forever. It was the death-song of the Willamettes, solemnly rendered by the last and greatest orator of the race.
At length he spoke of Multnomah and of the power of the confederacy in his time, but spoke of it as of old time, seen dimly through the lapse of years. Then, when as it seemed he was about to go on and tell how this power came to fall, he hesitated; the words faltered on his lips; he suddenly broke off, took his seat, and drew his robe again over his face.
“It was the Death-song of the Willamettes.”