Page:McLoughlin and Old Oregon.djvu/149

 reti- cules, with pendent tails embroidered with beads and silk.

"My canoe is my castle," laughed the electric-eyed Monique, strutting in the bow of his boat under a bonnet like the headpiece of a drum-major.

At ten o'clock Dr. McLoughlin summoned them in to take the parting cup of good-fellowship. Some songs, some tears, and repeated hand-shakes wafted the halfwild, Arab-like voyageurs upon the wave.

"Good-bye! Bon voyage! "The New Caledonian brigade shot gracefully into the current. All the upriver boats fell in. The cannon boomed, the trading guns sent back a parting salute. The boat song struck, and Sarah Julia turned in a paroxysm of tears from the last, fond look of her Indian mother. No more she travelled up the zigzag rivers of the north.

The brigade bore straight toward the base of Mt. Hood. No mountain in the world looms like Hood beside the Columbia. Although twenty-five miles away, it appears to approaching boats to rest on the broad water, and towers pyramidal into the clouds.

The brigade turned to the left and was lost amid the hills. At Okanogan they transferred to horses, and to boats again on the upper Fraser. It was a thrilling sight when the caravans of two hundred and fifty and three hundred horses, laden with merchandise, wound through the pack-trails of the North. Merrily, as amid the lochs and bens of their home across the sea, the hardy Highlanders sent the skirl of bagpipes screaming from hill to hill. At old Fort Kamloops the rout and revel rang, as the trading brigades drove through the gates and hung their saddles on the wall.

Fort St. James, 54 North, on a peninsula in Stuart's Lake, was Ogden's castle. Here the humorous, eccen-