acute that he could almost _see_,
almost _hear_, in the thick blackness and the silence; yet no answer
came.

Again he resumed his mystic incantation, putting all the force of his
nature into the effort, until it seemed that even those shadowy things
of the night must yield to his blended entreaty and command. But there
came no response. Thick and thronging the viewless presences seemed to
gather, to look, and to listen; but no reply came to his ears, and no
sight met his eyes save the swathed corpses and the white-gleaming
bones on which the shifting moonbeams fell.

Multnomah rose to his feet, baffled, thwarted, all his soul glowing
with anger that he should be so scorned.

"Why is this?" said his stern voice in the silence. "You come, but you
give no reply; you look, you listen, but you make no sound. Answer me,
you who know the future; tell me this secret!"

Still no response. Yet the air seemed full of dense, magnetic life, of
muffled heart-beats, of voiceless, unresponsive, uncommunicative forms
that he could almost touch.

For perhaps the first time in his life the war-chief found himself set
at naught. His form grew erect; his eyes gleamed with the terrible
wrath which the tribes dreaded as they dreaded the wrath of the Great
Spirit.

[Illustration: "_Come back! Come back!_"]

"Do you mock Multnomah? Am I not war-chief of the Willamettes? Though
you dwell in shadow and your bodies are dust, you are Willamettes, and
I am still your chief. Give up your secret! If the Great Spirit has
sealed your lips so that you cannot speak, give me a sign that will
tell me. Answer by word or sign; I say it,--I, Multnomah, your chief
and master."

Silence again. The roar of the volcano had ceased; and an ominous
stillness brooded over Nature, as if all things held their breath,
anticipating some mighty and imminent catastrophe. Multnomah's hands
were clinched, and his strong face had on it now a fierceness of
command that no eye had ever seen before. His indomitable will reached
out to lay hold of those unseen presences and compel them to reply.

A moment of strained, commanding expectation: then the answer came;
the sign was given. The earth shook beneath him till he staggered,
almost fell; the hut creaked and swayed like a storm-driven wreck; and
through the crevices on the side toward Mount Hood came a blinding
burst of flame. Down from the great gap in the Cascade Range through
which flows the Columbia rolled the