The grim Mollalie met the speaker’s glance, and for a moment wavered. He felt within himself that the words were true, that the plague had sapped his life, that his hour was near at hand. Then his hesitation passed, and he lifted his head with scornful defiance.
“So be it! Mishlah accepts his doom. Come, you that were once the warriors of Multnomah, but whose hearts are become the hearts of women; come and learn from a Mollalie how to die!”
Again his glance swept the circle of chiefs as if summoning them to follow him,—then, with weak and staggering footsteps, he left the grove; and it was as if the last hope of the Willamettes went with him. The 274 dense atmosphere of smoke soon shut his form from view. Silence fell on the council. The hearts of the Indians were dead within them. Amid their portentous surroundings,—the appalling signs of the wrath of the Great Spirit,—the fatal apathy which is the curse of their race crept over them.
Then rose the medicine-man, wild priest of a wild and debasing superstition, reverenced as one through whom the dead spoke to the living.
“Break up your council!” he said with fearful look and gesture. “Councils are for those who expect to live! and you!—the dead call you to them. Choose no chief, for who will be left for him to rule? You talk of plans for the future. Would you know what that future will be? I will show you; listen!” He flung up his hand as if imposing silence; and, taken by surprise, they listened eagerly, expecting to hear some supernatural voice or message prophetic of the future. On their strained hearing fell only the labored breathing of the sick chiefs in the council, the ominous muttering of the far-off volcano, and loud and shrill above all the desolate cry of the women wailing their dead.
“You hear it? That death-wail tells all the future holds for you. Before yonder red shadow of a sun”—pointing to the sun, which shone dimly through the smoke—“shall set, the bravest of the Mollalies will be dead. Before the moon wanes to its close, the Willamette race will have passed away. Think you Multnomah’s seat is empty? The Pestilence sits in Multnomah’s place, and you will all wither in his hot and poisonous breath. Break up your council. Go to your lodges. The sun of the Willamettes is set, 275 and the night is upon us. Our wars are done; our glory is ended. We are but a tale that old men tell around the camp-fire, a handful of red dust gathered from mimaluse island,—dust that once was man. Go, you that are as the dead leaves of autumn; go, whirled into everlasting darkness before the wind of the wrath of the Great Spirit!”
He flung out his arms with a wild gesture, as if he held all their lives and threw them forth like dead leaves to be scattered upon the winds. Then he turned away and left the grove. The crowd of warriors who had been looking on broke up and went away, and the chiefs began to leave the council, each muffled in his blanket. The grave and stately sachem who had opened the council tried for a little while to stay the fatal breaking up, but in vain. And when he saw that he could do nothing, he too left the grove, wrapped in stoical pride, sullenly resigned to whatever was to come.
And so the last council ended, in hopeless apathy, in stubborn indecision,—indecision in everything save the recognition that a doom was on them against which it was useless to struggle.
And Mishlah? He returned to his lodge, painted his face as if he were going to battle, and then went out to a grove near the place where the war-dances of the tribe were held. His braves followed him; others joined them; all watched eagerly, knowing that the end was close at hand, and wondering how he would die.
He laid aside his blanket, exposing his stripped body; and with his eagle plume, in his hair and his stone tomahawk in his hand, began to dance the war-dance 276 of his tribe and to chant the song of the battles he had fought.