thoughtful
person and viewed with alarm the ever increasing tendency among his
neighbors toward fighting and general wickedness. The whole tribe met
every summer to have a tournament after their fashion, and at one of
these reunions the Devil arose and made a pacific speech. He took
occasion to enlarge on the evils of constant warfare, and suggested
that a general reconciliation take place and that they all live in
peace. The astonished fiends could not understand any such unwarlike
procedure from _him_, and with one accord, suspecting treachery, made
straight at the intended reformer, who, of course, took to his heels.
The fiends pressed him hard as he sped over the plains of The Dalles,
and as he neared the defile he struck a Titanic blow with his tail on
the pavement--and a chasm opened up through the valley, and down rushed
the waters of the inland sea. But a battalion of the fiends still
pursued him, and again he smote with his tail and more strongly, and a
vaster cleft went up and down the valley, and a more terrific torrent
swept along. The leading fiends took the leap, but many fell into the
chasm--and still the Devil was sorely pursued. He had just time to rap
once more and with all the vigor of a despairing tail. And this time he
was safe. A third crevice, twice the width of the second, split the
rocks, riving a deeper cleft in the mountain that held back the inland
sea, making a gorge through the majestic chain of the Cascades and
opening a way for the torrent oceanward. It was the crack of doom for
the fiends. Essaying the leap, they fell far short of the edge, where
the Devil lay panting. Down they fell and were swept away by the flood;
so the whole race of fiends perished from the face of the earth. But
the Devil was in sorry case. His tail was unutterably dislocated by his
last blow; so, leaping across the chasm he had made, he went home to
rear his family thoughtfully. There were no more antagonists; so,
perhaps, after all, tails were useless. Every year he brought his
children to The Dalles and told them the terrible history of his
escape. And after a time the fires of the Cascades burned away; the
inland sea was drained and its bed became a fair and habitable land,
and still the waters gushed through the narrow crevices roaring
seaward. But the Devil had one sorrow. All his children born before the
catastrophe were crabbed, unregenerate, stiff-tailed fiends. After that
event every new-born imp wore a fl