her lips will close in unbreakable silence.

"I have heard no story, but I have heard the Falls 'whisper, laugh
and weep.' That is enough for me," I said, with seeming
indifference.

"What do you see when you look at them from across the canyon?" she
asked. "Do they look to you like anything else but falling water?"

I thought for a moment before replying. Memory seemed to hold up
against an indistinct photograph of towering fir-crested heights,
where through a broken ridge of rock a shower of silvery threads
cascaded musically down, down, down, until they lost themselves in
the mighty Fraser, that hurled itself through the yawning canyon
stretched at my feet. I have never seen such slender threads of
glowing tissue save on early morning cobwebs at sun-up.

"The Falls look like cobwebs," I said, as the memory touched me.
"Millions of fine misty cobwebs woven together."

"Then the legend must be true," she uttered, half to herself. I
slipped down on my treasured wolf-skin rug near her chair, and with
hands locked about my knees, sat in silence, knowing it was the one
and only way to lure her to speech. She arose, helped herself to
more tea, and with the toe of her beaded moccasin idly stroked one
of the wolf-skin paws. "Yes," she said, with some decision, "the
Indian men of magic say that the falls are cobwebs twisted and
braided together."

I nodded, but made no comment; then her voice droned into the
broken English, that, much as I love it, I must leave to the
reader's imagination. "Indian mothers are strange," she began.
I nodded again.

"Yes, they are strange, and there is a strange tie between them
and their children. The men of magic say they can _see_ that tie,
though you and I cannot. It is thin, fine silvery as a cobweb, but
strong as the ropes of wild vine that swing down the great canyons.
No storm ever breaks those vines; the tempests that drag the giant
firs and cedars up by their roots, snap their branches and break
their boles, never break the creeping vines. They may be torn from
their strongholds, but in the young months of the summer the vine
will climb up, and cling again. _Nothing_ breaks it. So is the
cobweb tie the Men of Magic see between the Indian mother and her
child.

"There was a time when no falls leapt and sang down the heights at
Lillooet, and in those days our men were very wild and warlike; but
the women were gentle and very beautiful, and they loved and lived
and bore childre