seemed to the chief that the air grew thick with
ghostly presences. There was a sense of breathing
life all around him. He felt that others, many others,
were with him; yet he saw nothing. When he paused
for some voice, some whisper of reply, this sense of
hyper-physical perception became so 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 moon beams 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, un responsive, uncommunicative forms that he could al most 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.
