The old chief raised himself on his elbow with an “Ugh!”

“Come out under the moon.”

The old chief arose and went out, and the two shadowy forms disappeared among a column of spruces on the musical banks of the Columbia.

Gretchen could not sleep.  The two Indians returned late, and, as they parted, Gretchen heard Umatilla’s deep voice say, “No!”

Her fears or instincts told her that the interview had reference to plots which were associated with the great Potlatch, now near at hand.  She had heard the strange visitor say, “The moon is growing,” and there was something shadowy in the very tone in which the words were spoken.

Mrs. Woods sat down in her home of bark and splints all alone after Gretchen’s departure.

“She offers to teach me,” she said to herself.  “I am so sorry that I was not able to teach her.  I never read much, any way, until I came under the influence of the Methody.  I might have taught her spiritual things—­any one can have spiritual knowledge, and that is the highest of all.  But I have loved my own will, and to give vent to my temper and tongue.  I will change it all.  There are times when I am my better self.  I will only talk and decide upon what is best in life at such times as these.  That would make my better nature grow.  When I am out of sorts I will be silent-like.  Heaven help me! it is hard to begin all these things when one’s hair is turnin’ gray, and I never knew any one’s gray hair to turn young again.”

She sat in the twilight crying over herself, and at last sang the mournful minor measures of a very quaint old hymn with a peculiar old history: 

    “From whence doth this union arise
      That hatred is conquered by love? 
     It fastens our souls in such ties
      As distance and time can’t remove.”

The October moon came up larger and larger night by night.  It stood on the verge of the horizon now in the late afternoon, as if to see the resplendent setting of the sun.  One wandered along the cool roads at the parting of day between the red sun in the west and the golden moon in the east, and felt in the light of the two worlds the melancholy change in the atmospheres of the year.  The old volcanoes glistened, for a wintry crust was widening over their long-dead ovens.  Mount Saint Helens, as the far range which led up to the relic of the ancient lava-floods that is now known by that name was called by the settlers, was wonderfully beautiful in the twilights of the sun and moon.  Mount Hood was a celestial glory, and the shadows of the year softened the glimmering glories of the Columbia.  The boatman’s call echoed long and far, and the crack of the flint-lock gun leaped in its reverberations from hill to hill as though the air was a succession of hollow chambers.  Water-fowl filled the streams and drifted through the air, and the forests seemed filled with young and beautiful animals full of happy life.