Page:Cathlamet On the Columbia.djvu/92

 of her sober, hard-working life. For unnumbered centuries the burden of the toil and responsibility of her people had been upon her shoulders, and so far as she had anything to think with, she was a thoughtful, earnest woman. Inarticulate and coy in the expression of her feeling to a degree that imposed upon people who did not know of the fires that glowed beneath, she was in reality alive and earnest and had great capacities for joy and suffering. Above all things she was a simple, law-abiding creature.

In the tribe, as a maiden, she obeyed without question the moral code such as it was, of her people. Married to an Indian husband she was his slave, and married to a white man and made acquainted with his moral law, for his wife, she would have passed through fire, torture and death before she would have gone one step out 72