You have killed the one I love. Yes, I loved him; and I hate
you and will hate you till I die."

The passion in her voice thrilled even the canoe-men, and their paddle
strokes fell confusedly for an instant, though they did not
understand; for both Wallulah and Snoqualmie had spoken in the royal
tongue of the Willamettes. He sat abashed for an instant, taken
utterly by surprise.

Then the wild impulse of defiance passed, and the awful sense of
bereavement came back like the falling of darkness over a sinking
flame. Cecil was gone from her, gone for all time. The world seemed
unreal, empty. She sunk among the furs like one stricken down.
Snoqualmie, recovering from his momentary rebuff, heaped bitter
epithets and scornful words upon her; but she neither saw nor heard,
and lay with wide, bright, staring eyes. Her seeming indifference
maddened him still more, and he hurled at her the fiercest abuse. She
looked at him vaguely. He saw that she did not even know what he was
saying, and relapsed into sullen silence. She lay mute and still, with
a strained expression of pain in her eyes. The canoe sped swiftly on.

One desolating thought repeated itself again and again,--the thought
of hopeless and irreparable loss. By it past and present were blotted
out. By and by, when she awoke from the stupor of despair and realized
her future, destined to be passed with the murderer of her lover, what
then? But now she was stunned with the shock of a grief that was mercy
compared with the awakening that must come.

They were in the heart of the Cascade Mountains, and a low deep roar
began to reach their ears, rousing and startling all but Wallulah. It
was the sound of the cascades, of the new cataract formed by the fall
of the Great Bridge. Rounding a bend in the river they came in sight
of it. The mighty arch, the long low mountain of stone, had fallen in,
damming up the waters of the Columbia, which were pouring over the
sunken mass in an ever-increasing volume. Above, the river, raised by
the enormous dam, had spread out like a lake, almost submerging the
trees that still stood along the former bank. Below the new falls the
river was comparatively shallow, its rocky bed half exposed by the
sudden stoppage of the waters.

The Indians gazed with superstitious awe on the vast barrier over
which the white and foaming waters were pouring. The unwonted roar of
the falls, a roar that seemed to increase every moment as the swelling
wate