“Kla-how-ya, tillicum!” he replied, with the warmth of friendliness I have always met with among the Pacific tribes.

I drew my deck-stool nearer to him, and he acknowledged the action with another half smile, but did not stir from his entrenchment, remaining as if hedged about with an inviolable fortress of exclusiveness.  Yet I knew that my Chinook salutation would be a drawbridge by which I might hope to cross the moat into his castle of silence.

Indian-like, he took his time before continuing the acquaintance.  Then he began in most excellent English: 

“You do not know these northern waters?”

I shook my head.

After many moments he leaned forward, looking along the curve of the deck, up the channels and narrows we were threading, to a broad strip of waters off the port bow.  Then he pointed with that peculiar, thoroughly Indian gesture of the palm uppermost.

“Do you see it—­over there?  The small island?  It rests on the edge of the water, like a grey gull.”

It took my unaccustomed eyes some moments to discern it; then all at once I caught its outline, veiled in the mists of distance—­grey, cobwebby, dreamy.

“Yes,” I replied, “I see it now.  You will tell me of it—­tillicum?”

He gave a swift glance at my dark skin, then nodded.  “You are one of us,” he said, with evidently no thought of a possible contradiction.  “And you will understand, or I should not tell you.  You will not smile at the story, for you are one of us.”

“I am one of you, and I shall understand,” I answered.

It was a full half-hour before we neared the island, yet neither of us spoke during that time; then, as the “grey gull” shaped itself into rock and tree and crag, I noticed in the very centre a stupendous pile of stone lifting itself skyward, without fissure or cleft; but a peculiar haziness about the base made me peer narrowly to catch the perfect outline.

“It is the ‘Grey Archway,’” he explained, simply.

Only then did I grasp the singular formation before us:  the rock was a perfect archway, through which we could see the placid Pacific shimmering in the growing colors of the coming sunset at the opposite rim of the island.

“What a remarkable whim of Nature!” I exclaimed, but his brown hand was laid in a contradictory grasp on my arm, and he snatched up my comment almost with impatience.

“No, it was not Nature,” he said.  “That is the reason I say you will understand—­you are one of us—­you will know what I tell you is true.  The Great Tyee did not make that archway, it was—­” here his voice lowered—­“it was magic, red man’s medicine and magic—­you savvy?”

“Yes,” I said.  “Tell me, for I—­savvy.”

“Long time ago,” he began, stumbling into a half-broken English language, because, I think, of the atmosphere and environment, “long before you were born, or your father, or grandfather, or even his father, this strange thing happened.  It is a story for women to hear, to remember.  Women are the future mothers of the tribe, and we of the Pacific Coast hold such in high regard, in great reverence.  The women who are mothers—­o-ho!—­they are the important ones, we say.  Warriors, fighters, brave men, fearless daughters, owe their qualities to these mothers—­eh, is it not always so?”