ablaze with excitement, his eyes were
glowing like coals. He had scarcely enough intellect to understand the
game, but enough combativeness to fling himself into it body and soul.
He bet his horses and lost them; he bet his slaves and lost again; he
bet his lodges, with their rude furnishings of mat and fur, and lost
once more. Maddened, furious, like a lion in the toils, the desperate
savage staked his wives and children on the throw of the _ahikia_, and
they were swept from him into perpetual slavery.

Then he rose up and glared upon his opponents, with his tomahawk
clinched in his hand,--as if feeling dimly that he had been wronged,
thirsting for vengeance, ready to strike, yet not knowing upon whom
the blow should fall. There was death in his look, and the chiefs
shrunk from him, when his eyes met Multnomah's, who was looking on;
and the war-chief checked and awed him with his cold glance, as a
tamer of beasts might subdue a rebellious tiger. Then the Molallie
turned and went away, raging, desperate, a chief still, but a chief
without lodge or wife or slave.

The sight was painful to Cecil, and he too went away while the game
was at its height. Drawn by an influence that he could not resist, he
took the trail that led down the bank of the river to the retreat of
Wallulah.

CHAPTER V.

A DEAD QUEEN'S JEWELS.

For round about the walls yclothed were
With goodly arras of great maiesty,
Woven with golde and silke so close and nere
That the rich metall lurked privily.

_The Faerie Queene._

He found the sentinels by the pathway half reluctant to let him pass,
but they did not forbid him. Evidently it was only their awe of him as
the "Great White Prophet," to whom Multnomah had added the dignity of
an Indian sachem, that overcame their scruples. It was with a sense of
doing wrong that he went on. "If Multnomah knew," he thought, "what
would he do?" And brave as Cecil was, he shuddered, thinking how
deadly the wrath of the war-chief would be, if he knew of these secret
visits to his daughter.

"It is an abuse of hospitality; it is clandestine, wrong," he thought
bitterly. "And yet she is lonely, she needs me, and I must go to her;
but I will never go again."

Where he had met her before, he found her waiting for him now, a
small, graceful figure, standing in the shadow of the wood. She heard
his footsteps before h