om of drums was louder. There was a feeling of
expectancy in the air. The few whites, with the exception of Kilbuck,
sat on the platform in front of the store. The natives formed a
shifting, motley crowd in the courtyard. Kayak Bill, sitting next to
Ellen, smoked his pipe as he contemplated the scene.

"Wall, Lady," he drawled, leaning toward her, "I seen a heap o' this
sort o' jaberwocky doin's in my time up here, and it used to make me
feel like as if them Injines had a tank full o' doodle-bugs under their
hair--but I don't know-- Take us white folks down in the States now,
when we're a-celebratin' o' Decoration day without our speeches and our
peerades and our offerin's o' posies and such. It's the same principle
exact----"

The old man ceased speaking abruptly. Out of the door behind them and
down the platform steps walked the White Chief of Katleean and the
little Thlinget woman, Decitan. About her shoulders was draped a
fringed black and yellow blanket of wondrous design. On her dark,
thick hair she wore the crest of the Eagle clan--a privilege accorded
only to a chiefess.

The waiting Indians stood back from about these two principal figures
in the courtyard, and Paul Kilbuck, with the Indian woman beside him,
turned to face the white woman on the platform whose favors he hoped to
win.

He felt himself splendidly barbaric in the costume of a Shaman. The
greens and blues and yellows of his royal Chilcat blanket and dancing
shirt set off his dark beard and dead-white skin. Carved wooden
eagle-wings on each side of a tall hat crowned his hair. Below this
emblem of the Shaman spirit, the Unseeable, his eyes, narrow, pale and
dangerous sent straight into those of Ellen a look that might have come
down through the red pages of history.

She turned her face away with a frightened quickening of the pulses.

The White Chief and Decitan took their places at the head of the Indian
procession which had been forming, and the long, fantastic line wound
about the courtyard and down the trail that led to the Village. Before
the graveyard, with its totems and curious architecture of the dead,
they stopped and began a mournful ululation.

The wailing gradually gave way to the Potlatch songs in honor of the
deceased--songs of curious rhythm and halting cadences; songs with a
haunting plaintiveness that floated high above the throbbing of the
drums.

On the platform the white inhabitants of Katleean waited in