perplexed by Tohomish s mysterious hints of some
impending calamity, weighed down by a dread pre
sentiment, he came that night on a strange and super
stitious 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, prac tised 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 chi-efs of the blood royal who had ruled the Willamettes for many gen erations. The giant bones of warriors rested beside the more delicate skeletons of their women, or the skeletons, slenderer still, of little children of the ancient race. The warrior s bow lay beside him with rotting string; the child s playthings were still clasped in fleshless fingers; beside the squaw s skull the ear- pendants of hiagua shells lay where they had fallen from the crumbling flesh years before.
Near the door, and where the slanting moonbeams fell full upon it, was the last who had been borne to the death hut, the mother of Wallulah. Six years be fore Multnomah had brought her body, brought it alone, with no eye to behold his grief; and since then no human tread had disturbed the royal burial- place.
