iving, a feeling that he was disloyal to his mission, disloyal to
her; that their love could have but one ending, and that a dark one.

Still he strove hard to forget everything, to shut out all the
world,--drinking to the full the bliss of the present, blinding his
eyes to the pain of the future.

But after they parted, when her presence was withdrawn and he was
alone, he felt like a man faithless and dishonored; like a prophet who
had bartered the salvation of the people to whom he had been sent, in
exchange for a woman's kisses, which could bring him only disgrace and
death.

As he went back to the camp in the stillness of midnight, he was
startled by a distant roar, and saw through the tree-tops flames
bursting from the far-off crater of Mount Hood. The volcano was
beginning one of its periodical outbursts. But to Cecil's mind, imbued
with the gloomy supernaturalism of early New England, and
unconsciously to himself, tinged in later years with the superstition
of the Indians among whom he had lived so long, that ominous roar,
those flames leaping up into the black skies of night, seemed a sign
of the wrath of God.

CHAPTER VII.

ORATOR AGAINST ORATOR.

The gravity, fixed attention, and decorum of these sons of the
forest was calculated to make for them a most favorable
impression.--GRAY: _History of Oregon_.

The next day all the Indians were gathered around the council grove.
Multnomah presided, and every sachem was in his place.

There was to be a trial of eloquence,--a tourney of orators, to see
which tribe had the best. Only one, the most eloquent of each tribe,
was to speak; and Multnomah was to decide who was victor. The mother
of Wallulah had introduced the custom, and it had become popular among
the Indians.

Cecil was in his place among the chiefs, with worn face and abstracted
air; Snoqualmie was present, with hawk-like glance and imperious mien;
there was Mishlah, with his sullen and brutal features; there, too,
wrapped closely in his robe of fur, sat Tohomish, brooding,
gloomy,--the wild empire's mightiest master of eloquence, and yet the
most repulsive figure of them all.

The Indians were strangely quiet that morning; the hush of a
superstitious awe was upon them. The smoking mountains, Hood and Adams
as the white man calls them, Au-poo-tah and Au-ka-ken in the Indian
tongue, were becoming active of late. The previous night flame had
been seen bursting from the top of