and inviting his guests to begin their tribal dances.  Ta-la-pus never forgot the brilliant sight that he looked on for the next few hours.  Scores of young men and women went through the most graceful figures of beautiful dances, their shell ornaments jingling merrily in perfect time to each twist and turn of their bodies.  The wild music from the beat of Indian drums and shell “rattles” arose weirdly, half sadly, drifting up the mountain heights, until it lost itself in the timber line of giant firs that crested the summits.  The red blaze from the camp fires flitted and flickered across the supple figures that circled around, in and out between the three hundred canoes beached on the sands, and the smoke-tipped tents and log lodges beyond the reach of tide water.  Above it all a million stars shone down from the cloudless heavens of a perfect British Columbian night.  After a while little Ta-la-pus fell asleep, and when he awoke, dawn was just breaking.  Someone had covered him with a beautiful, white, new blanket, and as his young eyes opened they looked straight into the kindly face of the great Squamish chief.

“We are all aweary, ‘Tenas Tyee’ (Little Chief),” he said.  “The dancers are tired, and we shall all sleep until the sun reaches midday, but my guests cry for one more dance before sunrise.  Will you dance for us, oh, little Ta-la-pus?”

The boy sprang up, every muscle and sinew and nerve on the alert.  The moment of his triumph or failure had come.

“You have made me, even a boy like me, very welcome, O Great Tyee,” he said, standing erect as an arrow, with his slender, dark chin raised manfully.  “I have eaten of your kloshe muck-a-muck (very good food), and it has made my heart and my feet very skookum (strong).  I shall do my best to dance and please you.”  The boy was already dressed in the brilliant buckskin costume his mother had spent so many hours in making, and his precious wolfskin was flung over his arm.  The great Squamish chief now took him by the hand and led him towards the blazing fires round which the tired dancers, the old men and women, sat in huge circles where the chill of dawn could not penetrate.

“One more dance, then we sleep,” said the chief to the great circle of spectators.  “This Tenas Tyee will do his best to amuse us.”

Then Ta-la-pus felt the chief’s hand unclasp, and he realized that he was standing absolutely alone before a great crowd of strangers, and that every eye was upon him.

“Oh, my brother,” he whispered, smoothing the prairie wolf skin, “help me to be like you, help me to be worthy of your name.”  Then he pulled the wolf’s head over his own, twisted the fore legs about his throat, and stepped into the great circle of sand between the crouching multitude and the fires.

Stealthily he began to pick his way in the full red flare from the flames.  He heard many voices whispering, “Tenas,” “Tenas,” meaning “He is little, he is young,” but his step only grew more stealthy, until he “padded” into a strange, silent trot in exact imitation of a prairie wolf.  As he swung the second time round the fires, his young voice arose, in a thin, wild, wonderful barking tone, so weird and wolf-like that half the spectators leaped up to their knees, or feet, the better to watch and listen.  Another moment, and he was putting his chant into words.