im, and an admiring crowd were standing around looking on. But
the taciturn brave sat coolly polishing and staining his arrows as if
he were totally unconscious of spectators, until the magical word
"buy" was mentioned, when he at once awoke to life and drove a bargain
in bow and quiver _versus_ dried berries and "ickters" that would have
done credit to a Yankee.

At one place sat an old warrior from the upper Columbia, making
arrow-heads, chipping off the little scales of flint with infinite
patience, literally _wearing_ the stone into the requisite shape.
Beside him lay a small pack of flints brought from beyond the
mountains, for such stone was rarely found along the lower Columbia.
Squaws sat in front of their wigwams sewing mats,--carefully sorting
the rushes, putting big ends with little ends, piercing each with a
bodkin, and sewing them all together with a long bone needle threaded
with buckskin or sinew. Others were weaving that water-tight
wickerwork which was, perhaps, the highest art to which the Oregon
Indians ever attained. Here a band of Indians were cooking, feasting,
laughing, shouting around a huge sturgeon captured the night before.
There a circle of gamblers were playing "hand,"--passing a small stick
secretly from hand to hand and guessing whose hand contained
it,--singing as they played that monotonous "ho-ha, ho-ha, ho-ha,"
which was the inseparable accompaniment of dancing, gambling, and
horseback riding.

Among them all Cecil moved with the calm dignity he had acquired from
long intercourse with the Indians. Wherever he went there was silence
and respect, for was he not the great white medicine-man? Gambling
circles paused in the swift passage of the stick and the monotone of
the chant to look and to comment; buyers and sellers stopped to gaze
and to question; children who had been building miniature wigwams of
sticks or floating bark canoes in the puddles, ran away at his
approach and took shelter in the thickets, watching him with twinkling
black eyes.

Wherever there was opportunity, he stopped and talked, scattering
seed-thoughts in the dark minds of the Indians. Wherever he paused a
crowd would gather; whenever he entered a wigwam a throng collected at
the door.

Let us glance for a moment into the domestic life of the Indians as
Cecil saw it that morning.

He enters one of the large bark huts of the Willamette Indians, a
long, low building, capable of sheltering sixty or seventy pers