The Bridge of the Gods

“Look forward,” he said, “not back; look forward to your life with Snoqualmie and to the lodge that awaits you in the land of the Cayuses.”

She started, and her face flushed painfully; then without looking at him she replied, —

“Wallulah loves her home, and leaving it saddens her.”

A sparkle of vindictive delight came into his eyes.

“Do the women of the Willamette feel sad when they go to live with their husbands? It is not so with the Cayuse women. They are glad; they care for the one they belong to. They love to sit in the sun at the door of the wigwam and say to the other women, ‘My man is brave; he leads the war party; he has many scalps at his belt. Who is brave like my man?’”

Wallulah shuddered. He saw it, and the sparkle of malice in his eyes flashed into sudden anger.

“Does the young squaw tremble at these things? Then she must get used to them. She must learn to bring wood and water for Snoqualmie’s lodge, too. She must learn to wait on him as an Indian’s wife ought. The old wrinkled squaws, who are good for nothing but to be beasts of burden, shall teach her.”

There came before her a picture of the ancient withered hags, the burden-bearers, the human vampires of the Indian camps, the vile in word and deed, the first to cry for the blood of captives, the most eager to give taunts and blows to the helpless; were they to be her associates, her teachers? Involuntarily she lifted her hand, as if to push from her a future so dreadful.

“Wallulah will bring the wood and the water. Wallulah will work. The old women need not teach her.”

“That is well. But one thing more you must learn; and that is to hold up your head and not look like a drooping captive. Smile, laugh, be gay. Snoqualmie will have no clouded face, no bent head in his lodge.”

She looked at him imploringly. The huge form, the swarthy face, seemed to dominate her, to crush her down with their barbarian strength and ferocity. She dropped her eyes again, and lay there on the furs like some frightened bird shrinking from the glance of a hawk.

“I will work; I will bear burdens,” she repeated, in a trembling tone. “But I cannot smile and laugh when my heart is heavy.”

He watched her with a half angry, half malicious regard, a regard that seemed ruthlessly probing into every secret of her nature.

She knew somehow that he was aware of her love for Cecil, and she dreaded lest he should taunt her with it. Anything but that. He knew it, and held it back as his last and most cruel blow. Over his bronzed face flitted no expression of pity. She was to him like some delicate wounded creature of the forest, that it was a pleasure to torture. So he had often treated a maimed bird or fawn, – tantalizing it, delighted by its fluttering and its pain, till the lust of torture was gratified and the death-blow was given.

He sat regarding her with a sneering, malicious look for a little while; then he said, —

“It is hard to smile on Snoqualmie; but the white man whom you met in the wood, it was not so with him. It was easy to smile and look glad at him, but it is hard to do so for Snoqualmie.”

Wallulah shrunk as if he had struck her a blow; then she looked at him desperately, pleadingly.

“Do not say such cruel things. I will be a faithful wife to you. I will never see the white man again.”

The sneering malice in his eyes gave way to the gleam of exultant anger.

“Faithful! You knew you were to be my woman when you let him put his arms around you and say soft things to you. Faithful! You would leave Snoqualmie for him now, could it be so. But you say well that you will never see him again.”

She gazed at him in terror.

“What do you mean? Has anything happened to him? Have they harmed him?”

Over the chief’s face came the murderous expression that was there when he slew the Bannock warrior at the torture stake.

“Harmed him! Do you think that he could meet you alone and say sweet things to you and caress you, – you who were the same as my squaw, – and I not harm him? He is dead; I slew him.”

False though it was, in so far as Snoqualmie claimed to have himself slain Cecil, it was thoroughly in keeping with Indian character. White captives were often told, “I killed your brother,” or, “This is your husband’s scalp,” when perhaps the person spoken of was alive and well.

“Dead!”

He threw his tomahawk at her feet.

“His blood is on it. You are Snoqualmie’s squaw; wash it off.”

Dead, dead, her lover was dead! That was all she could grasp. Snoqualmie’s insulting command passed unheeded. She sat looking at the Indian with bright, dazed eyes that saw nothing. All the world seemed blotted out.

“I tell you that he is dead, and I slew him. Are you asleep that you stare at me so? Awaken and do as I bid you; wash your lover’s blood off my tomahawk.”

At first she had been stunned by the terrible shock, and she could realize only that Cecil was dead. Now it came to her, dimly at first, then like a flash of fire, that Snoqualmie had slain him. All her spirit leaped up in uncontrollable hatred. For once, she was the war-chief’s daughter. She drew her skirts away from the tomahawk in unutterable horror; her eyes blazed into Snoqualmie’s a defiance and scorn before which his own sunk for the instant.

“You killed him! I hate you. I will never be your wife. You have thrown the tomahawk between us; it shall be between us forever. Murderer! You have killed the one I love. Yes, I loved him; and I hate you and will hate you till I die.”

The passion in her voice thrilled even the canoe-men, and their paddle strokes fell confusedly for an instant, though they did not understand; for both Wallulah and Snoqualmie had spoken in the royal tongue of the Willamettes. He sat abashed for an instant, taken utterly by surprise.

Then the wild impulse of defiance passed, and the awful sense of bereavement came back like the falling of darkness over a sinking flame. Cecil was gone from her, gone for all time. The world seemed unreal, empty. She sunk among the furs like one stricken down. Snoqualmie, recovering from his momentary rebuff, heaped bitter epithets and scornful words upon her; but she neither saw nor heard, and lay with wide, bright, staring eyes. Her seeming indifference maddened him still more, and he hurled at her the fiercest abuse. She looked at him vaguely. He saw that she did not even know what he was saying, and relapsed into sullen silence. She lay mute and still, with a strained expression of pain in her eyes. The canoe sped swiftly on.

One desolating thought repeated itself again and again, – the thought of hopeless and irreparable loss. By it past and present were blotted out. By and by, when she awoke from the stupor of despair and realized her future, destined to be passed with the murderer of her lover, what then? But now she was stunned with the shock of a grief that was mercy compared with the awakening that must come.

They were in the heart of the Cascade Mountains, and a low deep roar began to reach their ears, rousing and startling all but Wallulah. It was the sound of the cascades, of the new cataract formed by the fall of the Great Bridge. Rounding a bend in the river they came in sight of it. The mighty arch, the long low mountain of stone, had fallen in, damming up the waters of the Columbia, which were pouring over the sunken mass in an ever-increasing volume. Above, the river, raised by the enormous dam, had spread out like a lake, almost submerging the trees that still stood along the former bank. Below the new falls the river was comparatively shallow, its rocky bed half exposed by the sudden stoppage of the waters.

The Indians gazed with superstitious awe on the vast barrier over which the white and foaming waters were pouring. The unwonted roar of the falls, a roar that seemed to increase every moment as the swelling waters rushed over the rocks; the sight of the wreck of the mysterious bridge, foreshadowing the direst calamities, – all this awed the wild children of the desert. They approached the falls slowly and cautiously.

A brief command from Snoqualmie, and they landed on the northern side of the river, not far from the foot of the falls. There they must disembark, and the canoes be carried around the falls on the shoulders of Indians and launched above.

The roar of the Cascades roused Wallulah from her stupor. She stepped ashore and looked in dazed wonder on the strange new world around her. Snoqualmie told her briefly that she must walk up the bank to the place where the canoe was to be launched again above the falls. She listened mutely, and started to go. But the way was steep and rocky; the bank was strewn with the débris of the ruined bridge; and she was unused to such exertion. Snoqualmie saw her stumble and almost fall. It moved him to a sudden and unwonted pity, and he sprang forward to help her. She pushed his hand from her as if it had been the touch of a serpent, and went on alone. His eyes flashed: for all this the reckoning should come, and soon; woe unto her when it came.

The rough rocks bruised her delicately shod feet, the steep ascent took away her breath. Again and again she felt as if she must fall; but the bitter scorn and loathing that Snoqualmie’s touch had kindled gave her strength, and at last she completed the ascent.

Above the falls and close to them, she sat down upon a rock; a slight, drooping figure, whose dejected pose told of a broken heart.

Before her, almost at her feet, the pent-up river was widened to a vast flood. Here and there a half-submerged pine lifted its crown above it; the surface was ruffled by the wind, and white-crested waves were rolling among the green tree-tops. She looked with indifference upon the scene. She had not heard that the Bridge had fallen, and was, of course, ignorant of these new cascades; and they did not impress her as being strange.

Her whole life was broken up; all the world appeared shattered by the blow that had fallen on her, and nothing could startle her now. She felt dimly that some stupendous catastrophe had taken place; yet it did not appear unnatural. A strange sense of unreality possessed her; everything seemed an illusion, as if she were a shadow in a land of shadows. The thought came to her that she was dead, and that her spirit was passing over the dim ghost trail to the shadow-land. She tried to shake off the fancy, but all was so vague and dreamlike that she hardly knew where or what she was; yet over it all brooded the consciousness of dull, heavy, torturing pain, like the dumb agony that comes to us in fevered sleep, burdening our dreams with a black oppressing weight of horror.

Her hand, hanging listlessly at her side, touched her flute, which was still suspended from her belt by the golden chain. She raised it to her lips, but only a faint inharmonious note came from it. The music seemed gone from the flute, as hope was gone from her heart. To her overwrought nerves, it was the last omen of all. The flute dropped from her fingers; she covered her face with her hands, and the hot tears coursed slowly down her cheeks.

Some one spoke to her, not ungently, and she looked up. One of the canoe-men stood beside her. He pointed to the canoe, now launched near by. Snoqualmie was still below, at the foot of the falls, superintending the removal of the other.

Slowly and wearily she entered the waiting canoe and resumed her seat. The Indian paddlers took their places. They told her that the chief Snoqualmie had bidden them take her on without him. He would follow in the other canoe. It was a relief to be free from his presence, if only for a little while; and the sadness on her face lightened for a moment when they told her.

A few quick paddle-strokes, and the boat shot out into the current above the cascades and then glided forward. No, not forward. The canoe-men, unfamiliar with the new cataract, had launched their vessel too close to the falls; and the mighty current was drawing it back. A cry of horror burst from their lips as they realized their danger, and their paddles were dashed into the water with frenzied violence. The canoe hung quivering through all its slender length between the desperate strokes that impelled it forward and the tremendous suction that drew it down. Had they been closer to the bank, they might have saved themselves; but they were too far out in the current. They felt the canoe slipping back in spite of their frantic efforts, slowly at first, then more swiftly; and they knew there was no hope.

The paddles fell from their hands. One boatman leaped from the canoe with the desperate idea of swimming ashore, but the current instantly swept him under and out of sight; the other sat motionless in his place, awaiting the end with Indian stolidity.

The canoe was swept like a leaf to the verge of the fall and downward into a gulf of mist and spray. As it trembled on the edge of the cataract, and its horrors opened beneath her, Wallulah realized her doom for the first time; and in the moment she realised it, it was upon her. There was a quick terror, a dreamlike glimpse of white plunging waters, a deafening roar, a sudden terrible shock as the canoe was splintered on the rocks at the foot of the fall; then all things were swallowed up in blackness, a blackness that was death.

Below the falls, strong swimmers, leaping into the water, brought the dead to land. Beneath a pine-tree that grew close by the great Columbia trail and not far from the falls, the bodies were laid. The daughter of Multnomah lay in rude state upon a fawn-skin; while at her feet were extended the brawny forms of the two canoe-men who had died with her, and who, according to Indian mythology, were to be her slaves in the Land of the Hereafter. Her face was very lovely, but its mournfulness remained. Her flute, broken in the shock that had killed her, was still attached to her belt. The Indians had placed her hand at her side, resting upon the flute; and they noticed in superstitious wonder that the cold fingers seemed to half close around it, as if they would clasp it lovingly, even in death. Indian women knelt beside her, fanning her face with fragrant boughs of pine. Troop after troop, returning over the trail to their homes, stopped to hear the tale, and to gaze at the dead face that was so wonderfully beautiful yet so sad.

All day long the bands gathered; each stopping, none passing indifferently by. At length, when evening came and the shadow of the wood fell long and cool, the burials began. A shallow grave was scooped at Wallulah’s feet for the bodies of the two canoe-men. Then chiefs – for they only might bury Multnomah’s daughter – entombed her in a cairn; being Upper Columbia Indians, they buried her, after the manner of their people, under a heap of stone. Rocks and bowlders were built around and over her body, yet without touching it, until the sad dead face was shut out from view. And still the stones were piled above her; higher and higher rose the great rock-heap, till a mighty cairn marked the last resting-place of Wallulah. And all the time the women lifted the death-wail, and Snoqualmie stood looking on with folded arms and sullen baffled brow. At length the work was done. The wail ceased; the gathering broke up, and the sachems and their bands rode away, Snoqualmie and his troop departing with them.

Only the roar of the cascades broke the silence, as night fell on the wild forest and the lonely river. The pine-tree beside the trail swayed its branches in the wind with a low soft murmur, as if lulling the sorrow-worn sleeper beneath it into still deeper repose. And she lay very still in the great cairn, – the sweet and beautiful dead, – with the grim warriors stretched at her feet, stern guardians of a slumber never to be broken.