Mrs. Woods, unaware of her visitor, paused to take breath, looked up, beheld the tall form with staring eyes, and started back.

“Medicine-woman—­conjure!” said the Indian, in Chinook.

Mrs. Woods was filled with terror, but a moment’s thought recalled her resolution.  She lifted her hand, and, pointing to the saw in the wood, she said, with a commanding tone: 

“Saw!”

The Indian obeyed awkwardly, and wondering at the progress of the teeth of the saw through the wood.  It was a hot day; the poor Indian soon became tired, and stopped work with a beating heart and bursting veins.

“Saw—­saw!” said Mrs. Woods, with a sweep of her hands, as though some mysterious fate depended upon the order.

The saw went very hard now, for he did not know how to use it, and the wood was hard, and the Indian’s only thought seemed to be how to escape.  Mrs. Woods held him in her power by a kind of mental magnetism, like that which Queen Margaret exercised over the robber.

“Water!” at last gasped the Indian.

“Saw—­saw!” said Mrs. Woods; then turned away to bring him water.

When she looked around again, an unexpected sight met her eyes.  The Indian was flying away, taking the saw with him.  She never beheld either again, and it was a long time before any Indian appeared at the clearing after this odd event, though Mrs. Woods ultimately had many adventures among the wandering Siwashes.

A saw was no common loss in these times of but few mechanical implements in Oregon, and Mrs. Woods did not soon forgive the Indian for taking away what he probably regarded as an instrument of torture.

“I do hate Injuns!” she would often say; but quite likely would soon after be heard singing one of the hymns of the missionaries at the Dalles: 

    “O’er Columbia’s wide-spread forests
      Haste, ye heralds of the Lamb;
     Teach the red man, wildly roaming,
      Faith in Immanuel’s name,”

which, if poor poetry, was very inspiring.

CHAPTER III.

BOSTON TILICUM.

Marlowe Mann—­“Boston tilicum,” as the Siwashes called all the missionaries, teachers, and traders from the East—­sat down upon a bench of split log and leaned upon his desk, which consisted of two split logs in a rough frame.  A curious school confronted him.  His pupils numbered fifteen, representing Germany, England, Sweden, New England, and the Indian race.

“The world will some day come to the Yankee schoolmaster,” he used to say to the bowery halls of old Cambridge; and this prophecy, which had come to him on the banks of the Charles, seemed indeed to be beginning to be fulfilled on the Columbia.

He opened the school in the same serene and scholarly manner as he would have done in a school in Cambridge.

“He is not a true gentleman who is not one under all conditions and circumstances,” was one of his views of a well-clothed character; and this morning he addressed the school with the courtesy of an old college professor.