“He disturbed the mimaluse tillicums [dead people], and they came for him,” said the old medicine men, as they looked at him.
Since then, no one had been on the island except in the daytime. Little bands of mourners had brought hither the swathed bodies of their dead, laid them in the burial hut, lifted the wail over them, and left upon the first approach of evening.
Who, then, was this,—the first for generations to set foot on the mimaluse illahee after dark?
It could be but one, the only one among all the tribes who would have dared to come, and to come alone,—Multnomah, the war-chief, who knew not what it was to fear the living or the dead.
Startled by the outburst of the great smoking mountains, which always presaged woe to the Willamettes, 219 perplexed by Tohomish’s mysterious hints of some impending calamity, weighed down by a dread presentiment, he came that night on a strange and superstitious errand.
On the upper part of the island, above reach of high water, the burial hut loomed dark and still in the moonlight as the chief approached it.
Some of the Willamettes, like the Chinooks, practised canoe burial, but the greater part laid their dead in huts, as did also the Klickitats and the Cascades.
The war-chief entered the hut. The rude boards that covered the roof were broken and decayed. The moonlight shone through many openings, lighting up the interior with a dim and ghostly radiance. There, swathed in crumbling cerements, ghastly in shrunken flesh and protruding bone, lay the dead of the line of Multnomah,—the chiefs of the blood royal who had ruled the Willamettes for many generations. The giant bones of warriors rested beside the more delicate skeletons of their women, or the skeletons, slenderer still, of little children of the ancient race. The warrior’s bow lay beside him with rotting string; the child’s playthings were still clasped in fleshless fingers; beside the squaw’s skull the ear-pendants of hiagua shells lay where they had fallen from the crumbling flesh years before.
Near the door, and where the slanting moonbeams fell full upon it, was the last who had been borne to the death hut, the mother of Wallulah. Six years before Multnomah had brought her body,—brought it alone, with no eye to behold his grief; and since then no human tread had disturbed the royal burial-place.