S’Beow had eaten it.
With a second salmon they met with a like experience for S’Beow was very hungry. At supper their previous experience was repeated, so thinking the stick-pan was possessed of demons and being very angry at it for consuming so much of their food, they smashed it to pieces.
At this stage old S’Beow cried with the voice of an infant: “I’ll be your baby, I’ll be your baby, if you don’t hurt me.”
S’Beow became their baby, was taken to their rancheree and placed on a board, a weight placed on his head and suspended from posts by two strings so that he might swing as in a hammock instead of being rocked in a cradle.
S’Beow was a “de-late klosh ten-as” (a very good baby). When the women were at home he would do much loving and cooing, but would rarely or never cry, but when they went out fishing or gathering salmon berries he would transform himself into old S’Beow, get up and eat of their stores of dried salmon until his enormous appetite was satisfied and would then change himself back into a baby again before the women returned.
Badly as these childless, lonely women wanted a baby, they could not help thinking that the baby was possessed of evil spirits and that he ate the dried fish either when they were absent from the house or when they were asleep.
At length they reached the conclusion that the baby was old S’Beow, and one night while the fire was yet burning they talked the matter over and resolved to kill him.
S’Beow, hearing this, again took upon himself the real character of S’Beow and departed. At dawn he reached the fish-trap where the women had caught their salmon and trout. He found it full of fish. His heart was aching for revenge so he destroyed the dam and allowed the fish to escape.
The fish were all very grateful to him for his kindness and they remembered him for it, so as he proceeded down the river the salmon and trout came and poked their heads out of the water at every meal time so that S’Beow could choose from among them the fish that he wanted to eat.
There seems to be neither moral nor location to this fragment of legend, but it illustrates clearly some features of old S’Beow’s character as the average Puget Sound Indian used to understand him.