Page:Cathlamet On the Columbia.djvu/99

 and his bed placed over it so that he could drop handily into it when he died, and added, in a chuckle, that the old Indian did not die after all and the grave was wasted, and then he lapsed into silence, forgetting that he had left Kathla's story incomplete, until some one asked about it.

With an effort of the memory recalling the circumstances, the good man answered as if it were an ordinary occurrence of those old days:

"Kathla and her grandmother, poor creatures! Oh, the wolves took them!"

This is the seamy side of Indian life and the process of extinction of the Indian was grim in spots, but strange as it may seem, this period of fifty or one hundred years during which the natives of the Lower Columbia were passing away, was not on the whole an unhappy time for them. The Indian took life day by day and