We Were Thus Allowed To Take A General View Of The Place
And Return To Our Canoe Unmolested.
But ere we could get away, three
old women came swaggering and grinning down to the beach, and Toyatte
Was discovered by a man with whom he had once had a business
misunderstanding, who, burning for revenge, was now jumping and
howling and threatening as only a drunken Indian may, while our
heroic old captain, in severe icy majesty, stood erect and
motionless, uttering never a word. Kadachan, on the contrary, was
well nigh smothered with the drunken caresses of one of his father's
tillicums (friends), who insisted on his going back with him into the
house. But reversing the words of St. Paul in his account of his
shipwreck, it came to pass that we all at length got safe to sea and
by hard rowing managed to reach a fine harbor before dark, fifteen
sweet, serene miles from the howlers.
Our camp this evening was made at the head of a narrow bay bordered
by spruce and hemlock woods. We made our beds beneath a grand old
Sitka spruce five feet in diameter, whose broad, winglike branches
were outspread immediately above our heads. The night picture as I
stood back to see it in the firelight was this one great tree,
relieved against the gloom of the woods back of it, the light on the
low branches revealing the shining needles, the brown, sturdy trunk
grasping an outswelling mossy bank, and a fringe of illuminated
bushes within a few feet of the tree with the firelight on the tips
of the sprays.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 132 of 316
Words from 35811 to 36082
of 85542
