ves had ventured upon the island
after nightfall, and had paid the awful forfeit. They were struck by
unseen hands. Weapons that had lain for years beside the decaying
corpses of forgotten warriors wounded them in the dark. Fleeing to
their canoes in swiftest fear, they found the shadowy pursuit was
swifter still, and were overtaken and struck down, while the whole
island rung with mocking laughter. One only escaped, plunging all torn
and bruised into the river and swimming to the farther shore. When he
looked back, the island was covered with moving lights, and the shrill
echo of fiendish mirth came to him across the water. His companions
were never seen again. A little while afterward the dogs barked all
night around his lodge, and in the morning he was found lying dead
upon his couch, his face ghastly and drawn with fear, as if at some
frightful apparition.

"He disturbed the _mimaluse tillicums_ [dead people], and they came
for him," said the old medicine men, as they looked at him.

Since then, no one had been on the island except in the daytime.
Little bands of mourners had brought hither the swathed bodies of
their dead, laid them in the burial hut, lifted the wail over them,
and left upon the first approach of evening.

Who, then, was this,--the first for generations to set foot on the
_mimaluse illahee_ after dark?

It could be but one, the only one among all the tribes who would have
dared to come, and to come alone,--Multnomah, the war-chief, who knew
not what it was to fear the living or the dead.

Startled by the outburst of the great smoking mountains, which always
presaged woe to the Willamettes, perplexed by Tohomish's mysterious
hints of some impending calamity, weighed down by a dread
presentiment, he came that night on a strange and superstitious
errand.

On the upper part of the island, above reach of high water, the burial
hut loomed dark and still in the moonlight as the chief approached
it.

Some of the Willamettes, like the Chinooks, practised canoe burial,
but the greater part laid their dead in huts, as did also the
Klickitats and the Cascades.

The war-chief entered the hut. The rude boards that covered the roof
were broken and decayed. The moonlight shone through many openings,
lighting up the interior with a dim and ghostly radiance. There,
swathed in crumbling cerements, ghastly in shrunken flesh and
protruding bone, lay the dead of the line of Multnomah,--the chiefs of
the bloo