"Always," answered the chief.

The Indians remembered these words. Somehow there seemed to be something
prophetic in them. Wherever, from that day, Umatilla or Young Eagle's
Plume was seen, each wore the black feather from the great eagle's nest,
amid the mists and rainbows or mist-bows of the Falls of the Missouri.

It was a touch of poetic sentiment, but these Indian races of the Columbia
lived in a region that was itself a school of poetry. The Potlatch was
sentiment, and the Sun-dance was an actual poem. Many of the tents of skin
abounded with picture-writing, and the stories told by the night fires
were full of picturesque figures.

Gretchen's poetic eye found subjects for verse in all these things, and
she often wrote down her impressions, and read them to practical Mrs.
Woods, who affected to ignore such things, but yet seemed secretly
delighted with them.

"You have _talons_" she used to say, "but they don't amount to anything,
anyway. Nevertheless--"

The expedition to the Falls of the Missouri, and the new and strange
sights which Benjamin saw there, led him to desire to make other trips
with the schoolmaster, to whom he became daily more and more attached. In
fact, the Indian boy came to follow his teacher about with a kind of
jealous watchfulness. He seemed to be perfectly happy when the latter was
with him, and, when absent from him, he talked of him more than of any
other person.

In the middle of autumn the sky was often clouded with wild geese, which
in V-shaped flocks passed in long processions overhead, _honking_ in a
trumpet-like manner. Sometimes a flock of snowy geese would be seen, and
the laughing goose would be heard.

"Where do they go?" said Mr. Mann one day to Benjamin.

The boy told him of a wonderful island, now known as Whidby, where there
were great gatherings of flocks of geese in the fall.

"Let's go see," said he. "The geese are thicker than the bushes there--the
ponds are all alive with them there--honk--honk--honk! Let's go see."

"When the school is over for the fall we will go," said Mr. Mann.

The Indian boy's face beamed with delight. He dreamed of another
expedition like that to the wonderful Falls. He would there show the
master the great water cities of the wild geese, the emigrants of the air.
The thought of it made him dance with delight.

Often at nightfall great flocks of the Canada geese would follow the
Columbia towards the sea. Benjamin would watch them w