subtle fiend of the entire crew was one fiend called the “Devil.”  He was a thoughtful person and viewed with alarm the ever increasing tendency among his neighbors toward fighting and general wickedness.  The whole tribe met every summer to have a tournament after their fashion, and at one of these reunions the Devil arose and made a pacific speech.  He took occasion to enlarge on the evils of constant warfare, and suggested that a general reconciliation take place and that they all live in peace.  The astonished fiends could not understand any such unwarlike procedure from him, and with one accord, suspecting treachery, made straight at the intended reformer, who, of course, took to his heels.  The fiends pressed him hard as he sped over the plains of The Dalles, and as he neared the defile he struck a Titanic blow with his tail on the pavement—­and a chasm opened up through the valley, and down rushed the waters of the inland sea.  But a battalion of the fiends still pursued him, and again he smote with his tail and more strongly, and a vaster cleft went up and down the valley, and a more terrific torrent swept along.  The leading fiends took the leap, but many fell into the chasm—­and still the Devil was sorely pursued.  He had just time to rap once more and with all the vigor of a despairing tail.  And this time he was safe.  A third crevice, twice the width of the second, split the rocks, riving a deeper cleft in the mountain that held back the inland sea, making a gorge through the majestic chain of the Cascades and opening a way for the torrent oceanward.  It was the crack of doom for the fiends.  Essaying the leap, they fell far short of the edge, where the Devil lay panting.  Down they fell and were swept away by the flood; so the whole race of fiends perished from the face of the earth.  But the Devil was in sorry case.  His tail was unutterably dislocated by his last blow; so, leaping across the chasm he had made, he went home to rear his family thoughtfully.  There were no more antagonists; so, perhaps, after all, tails were useless.  Every year he brought his children to The Dalles and told them the terrible history of his escape.  And after a time the fires of the Cascades burned away; the inland sea was drained and its bed became a fair and habitable land, and still the waters gushed through the narrow crevices roaring seaward.  But the Devil had one sorrow.  All his children born before the catastrophe were crabbed, unregenerate, stiff-tailed fiends.  After that event every new-born imp wore a flaccid, invertebrate, despondent tail—­the very last insignium of ignobility.  So runs the legend of The Dalles—­a shining lesson to reformers.