3.

Half a mile upstream from the Indian camp the Wildcat greeted the dawn.

Building a quick fire, he looked about him at the wrinkled little fish, drying in the early morning sunlight. Slithering past him in the water still persisted the mad rush of racing myriads. He threw the dead fish back into the stream and raked out a fresher breakfast.

He poulticed a dozen fish with maple leaves and threw them in the glowing coals of his fire. Ten minutes later he again began the business of gorging himself on free fish.

"Don't cost me nuthin'." He clawed the water for another dozen handfuls. "Free fish, howdy doo.

"I eats when I can git it.

I sleeps mos' all de time."

Gorged to the bursting point, the Wildcat rolled over in the warm sunlight. He preferred not to go to sleep again, but in five minutes he was snoring along at his old sixty-mile gait. He slept all day.

He was discovered and surrounded at evening by Running Bear and the rest of the tribe.

Running Bear sized up the situation and pulled off a pow-wow with three or four of his companions. They arrived at a verdict.

"A little black-face vaudeville might liven things up. These blasted tribal ceremonies need a cabaret attachment to jazz them up. How about it, redskins?"

"Let's go."

The verdict was unanimous.

Somewhere in the Wildcat's dreams there presently developed a rhythm in which the cadence of dancing feet punctuated his slumbers. His eyes opened finally, and within the range of his vision pa.s.sed a parade of leaping figures. To his ears came the regular booming beat of a deerskin tom-tom, punctuated by an occasional blood-curdling yell.

His memory failed him.

"How come dis voodoo bizness?"

He sat up. He got to his feet and instinctively crouched to a running position.

The ring of dancing warriors about him tightened up.

"Lady Luck, whah is you?"

Running Bear lifted a flint-tipped spear over his head and emitted a shriek compared to which the Rebel yell was a chirp from the weakened lungs of the dove of peace.

In spite of his fish-distended anatomy, the Wildcat shrivelled to boy's size.

Running Bear emitted several mouthfuls of language.

"Naw suh, not me." The Wildcat denied everything. "I ain't only a field han'. Lemme by, boy. Whah at's yo' pants? How come you runnin' around nekked?"

"Waugh!"

Six Indians seized the Wildcat, and a moment later he was seated in the stern of a twenty-foot skiff, which presently embarked upon the surface of the Columbia. Beside the Wildcat sat Running Bear, speaking a fluent mixture of Flathead and Chinook.

In time with Running Bear's measured periods, the Wildcat rolled his eyes. Now and then when the Indian's sense of humour got the best of him he varied his Chinook jargon with Wild shrieks of laughter.

"Sounds like dem crazy folks in dat car comin' from Chicago. Seems like de whole worl' done got crowded wid fools. What you laffin' at, boy?"

In a little while the party landed at Memloose Island. Before them, rising sharply against the evening sky, drooping cottonwoods lifted high above an undergrowth of willows. The party marched down a little trail for half the length of the island, and then, at a point where the trail divided into the sombre interior of the wooded terrain, they left the sunlight.

After a march of a hundred yards they came upon a clearing. About the clearing in the fringing woods were fifty rickety structures lifted on poles. On each of these, with its grinning skull lying towards the east, lay a skeleton.

The Wildcat began to sweat. He counted a dozen skeletons and added a few dozen prayers to his perspiration. In a green alcove opening from the wider clearing seven skeletons stood erect in a ring about a flat stone.

His captors carried the Wildcat to this stone and held him. A little apart from him Running Bear opened the services with a yell which echoed like a chorus from the inferno.

The Wildcat gave up hope.

"They sho' got me. What dey is I don' know. Lemme go, boys."

The smoke from a dozen fires lifted in the clearing. Staggering in from half a dozen paths came as many painted warriors, each bearing on his back a salmon nearly as long as its red-skinned carrier.

Running Bear abandoned the vernacular for a moment and dropped into English.

"The G.o.ds of the waters have sent the salmon. The black man can feast with his red brothers."

"Them words sure sounds n.o.ble. How come you pester me talkin' voodoo talk?"

"After the feast the fires of sacrifice will be lighted. It is written that one of our number shall be burned at the stake."

To the Wildcat's ears this sounded homelike, but not rea.s.suring.

"Lemme go! Lemme go!"

He leaped from the rock and plunged through the fringing skeletons.

Running Bear and a dozen of his companions loped along after the Wildcat. The galloping party covered the length of the island. Running Bear and his companions deployed in open order, to permit the Wildcat to double on his trail; but that panic-stricken individual had fixed his course, and he sailed true to it.

He headed for a twenty-foot bank, and his racing legs did not stop until the swirling waters of the Columbia had closed heavily over them.

Running Bear, who had followed as swiftly as his civilized muscles would permit, gazed anxiously at the swimming Wildcat for a moment, to rea.s.sure himself of his victim's safety.

"Go to it," he commented. "You'll make the mile in nothing flat with that panic crawl." He watched the Wildcat until the current swept him around the bend downstream.

"He's safe," Running Bear commented. "On with the dance."

He resumed the redskin role of a distant yesterday.

"Waugh!"

4.

In the gathering dusk the Wildcat swam and floated for a mile downstream in the currents of the Columbia; then under the insistent drag of a wide-swinging eddy he headed for the leading fences of a great salmon wheel whose plunging buckets dived into the black currents and lifted with their gamble of fifty-pound salmon. Now and then a heavier fish would punctuate the monotony of the catch.

Flopping among their more substantial companions a fleet of leaping steel heads added splashes of silver to the Chinook background.