d.
He waved the staring domestics back. With his own hands the Cayuse chief broiled her venison, and brought her tea, and knelt before her couch of skins. Tradition says he was a handsome Indian, taller than his halfbrother, Chief Joseph, and fairly educated. But the white girl dreaded his eagle plumes and raven hair; she shrank from the touch of his moccasined toe, the brush of his painted robe. She did not hate, she feared him.
The impatient chiefs outside kept calling and spatting their hands, "Oh, Five Crows! Five Crows! Five Crows! "
Those voices seemed her deliverance. Still flushed with fever, she tottered toward the door. Five Crows sprang to her assistance, pleading at every step. He spread a new blanket and a tanned robe on the saddle of her horse and still he would detain her. His was a lover's parting, reluctant, seeking every pretext for delay. The chiefs interfered and ended the scene. Supported by her savage escort, the poor girl reached the fort.
Mr. Ogden came out. The tender-hearted trader lifted her in his arms as a father would.
"Thank God; I have got you safe at last! I had to pay the Indians more for you than for all the other captives, and I feared they would never give you up."
Scarcely were the captives in his hands when a rumor reached the fort "The Americans are coming up the Columbia."
"Tell it not to the Indians. T will be our death," said Ogden.
It turned his hair white to think of the situation with all those suspicious Indians camped around the illdefended fort. The Spaldings had not arrived. Dare he wait? They might be cut off. Two days and two
23
