TACOMA AND THE INDIAN LEGEND OF HAMITCHOU 



with Tamanoiis had not been a dream, and finally 

 whether all the hiaqua in the world was worth this 

 toil and anxiety. Fortunate is the sage who at such 

 a point turns back and buys his experience without 

 worse befalling him. 



"Past midnight he suddenly was startled from his 

 drowse, and sat bolt upright in terror. A light. 

 Was there another searcher in the forest, and a bolder 

 than he ? That flame just glimmering over the tree- 

 tops, was it a camp-fire of friend or foe ? Had Tama- 

 noiis been revealing to another the great secret ? No, 

 smiled the miser, his eyes fairly open, and discovering 

 that the new light was the moon. He had been wait- 

 ing for her illumination of paths heretofore untrodden 

 by mortal. She did not show her full, round jolly 

 face, but turned it askance as if she hardly liked to be 

 implicated in this night's transaction. 



"However, it was light he wanted, not sympathy, 

 and he started up at once to climb over the dim snows. 

 The surface was packed by the night's frost, and his 

 moccasins gave him firm hold ; yet he travelled but 

 slowly, and could not always save himself from a 

 glissade backwards, and a bruise upon some project- 

 ing knob or crag. Sometimes, upright fronts of ice 

 diverted him for long circuits, or a broken wall of cold 

 cliff arose, which he must surmount painfully. Once 

 or twice he stuck fast in a crevice, and hardly drew 

 himself out by placing his bundle of picks across the 

 crack. As he plodded and floundered thus deviously 

 and toilsomely upward, at last the wasted moon gan 

 pale overhead, and under foot the snow grew rosy 

 with coming dawn. The dim world about the moun- 

 tain's base displayed something of its vast detail. 

 He could see, more positively than by moonlight, the 

 far-reaching arteries of mist marking the organism 

 of Whulge beneath ; and what had been but a black 

 chaos now revealed itself into the Alpine forest whence 

 he had come. 



47 



