Page:Bridge of the Gods (Balch).djvu/145

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ultitude

of dusky faces and diverse costumes. The Nootka with his tattooed face was there, clad in his woollen blanket, his gigantic form pushing aside the short Chinook of the lower Columbia, with his crooked legs, his half- naked body glistening with grease, his slit nose and ears loaded with hiagua shells. Choppunish women, clad in garments of buckskin carefully whit ened with clay, looked with scorn on the women of the Cowlitz and Clatsop tribes, whose only dress was a fringe of cedar bark hanging from the waist. The abject Siawash of Puget Sound, attired in a scanty patch-work of rabbit and woodrat skin, stood beside the lordly Yakima, who wore deerskin robe and leg- giL,?. And among them all, conscious of his supremacy, moved the keen and imperious Willamette.

They all gazed wonderingly at Cecil, "the white man," the " long beard," the " man that came from the Great Spirit," the " shaman of strong magic," for rumors of Cecil and his mission had spread from tribe to tribe.

Though accustomed to savage sights, this seemed to Cecil the most savage of all. Flat heads and round heads; faces scarred, tattooed, and painted j faces as wild as beasts; faces proud and haughty, degraded and debased; hair cut close to the head, tangled, matted, clogged with filth, carefully smoothed and braided, every phase of barbarism in its most blood thirsty ferocity, its most abject squalor, met his glance as he looked around him. It seemed like some wild phantasmagoria, some weird and wondrous dream; and the discord of tongues, the confusion of dialects, completed the bewildering scene.

Through the surging crowd they found their