She found Benjamin there.  He met her with a happy face.

“Bad Indian come to your cabin last night,” said he.  “He mean evil; he hate old woman.  She wah-wah too much, and he hate.  Bad Indian hear music—­violin; he be pleased—­evil hawks fly out of him.  Good Indian come back.  One is tied to the other.  One no let the other go.  What was that low music I hear?  Baby music!  Chinook wind in the bushes!  Quail—­mother-bird singing to her nest!  I love that music.

“Say, you play at Potlatch, frighten away the hawks; mother-birds sing.  No devil dance.  Say, I have been good; no harm old wah-wah.  Will you—­will you play—­play that tin-tin at Potlatch under the big moon?”

A great thought had taken possession of the young Indian’s mind, and a great plan—­one worthy of a leader of a peace congress.  Gretchen saw the plan in part, but did not fully comprehend it.  She could only see that his life had become a struggle between good and evil, and that he was now following some good impulse of his better nature.

CHAPTER IV.

MRS. WOODS’S TAME BEAR.

Mrs. Woods was much alone during this summer.  Her husband was away from home during the working days of the week, at the saw and shingle mill on the Columbia, and during the same days Gretchen was much at school.

The summer in the mountain valleys of Washington is a long serenity.  The deep-blue sky is an ocean of intense light, and the sunbeams glint amid the cool forest shadows, and seem to sprinkle the plains with gold-dust like golden snow.  Notwithstanding her hard practical speech, which was a habit, Mrs. Woods loved Nature, and, when her work was done, she often made little journeys alone into the mountain woods.

In one of these solitary excursions she met with a little black cub and captured it, and, gathering it up in her apron like a kitten, she ran with it toward her cabin, after looking behind to see if the mother bear was following her.  Had she seen the mother of the cunning little black creature in her apron pursuing her, she would have dropped the cub, which would have insured her escape from danger.  But the mother bear did not make an early discovery of the loss in her family.  She was probably out berrying, and such experiences of stolen children were wholly unknown to the bear family in Washington before this time.  The Indians would not have troubled the little cub.

The black bear of the Cascades is quite harmless, and its cubs, like kittens, seem to have a sense of humor unusual among animals.  For a white child to see a cub is to desire it to tame for a pet, and Mrs. Woods felt the same childish instincts when she caught up the little creature, which seemed to have no fear of anything, and ran away with it toward her home.

It was Saturday evening when she returned, and she found both Mr. Woods and Gretchen waiting to meet her at the door.  They were surprised to see her haste and the pivotal turning of her head at times, as though she feared pursuit from some dangerous foe.