Legends of Vancouver - E. Pauline Johnson (finding audrey .TXT) 📗

live on. Let it help some other fighter to greatness and victory.”

As if to confirm their decision, the next day a small sealing-vessel anchored in the Inlet. All the men aboard spoke Russian, save two thin, dark, agile sailors, who kept aloof from the crew and conversed in another language. These two came ashore with part of the crew and talked in French with a wandering Hudson’s Bay trapper, who often lodged with the Squamish people. Thus the women, who yet mourned over their dead warrior, knew these two strangers to be from the land where the great “Frenchman” was fighting against the world.

Here I interrupted the chief. “How came the Frenchmen in a Russian sealer?” I asked.

“Captives,” he replied. “Almost slaves, and hated by their captors, as the majority always hate the few. So the women drew those two Frenchmen apart from the rest and told them the story of the bone of the sea-serpent, urging them to carry it back to their own country and give it to the great ‘Frenchman’ who was as courageous and as brave as their dead leader.

“The Frenchmen hesitated; the talisman might affect them, they said; might jangle their own brains, so that on their return to Russia they would not have the sagacity to plan an escape to their own country; might disjoint their bodies, so that their feet and hands would be useless, and they would become as weak as children. But the women assured them that the charm only worked its magical powers over a man’s enemies, that the ancient medicine-men had ‘bewitched’ it with this quality. So the Frenchmen took it and promised that if it were in the power of man they would convey it to ‘the Emperor.’

“As the crew boarded the sealer, the women watching from the shore observed strange contortions seize many of the men; some fell on the deck; some crouched, shaking as with palsy; some writhed for a moment, then fell limp and seemingly boneless; only the two Frenchmen stood erect and strong and vital⁠—the Squamish talisman had already overcome their foes. As the little sealer set sail up the gulf she was commanded by a crew of two Frenchmen⁠—men who had entered these waters as captives, who were leaving them as conquerors. The palsied Russians were worse than useless, and what became of them the chief could not state; presumably they were flung overboard, and by some trick of a kindly fate the Frenchmen at last reached the coast of France.

“Tradition is so indefinite about their movements subsequent to sailing out of the Inlet that even the ever-romantic and vividly coloured imaginations of the Squamish people have never supplied the details of this beautifully childish, yet strangely historical fairytale. But the voices of the trumpets of war, the beat of drums throughout Europe heralded back to the wilds of the Pacific Coast forests the intelligence that the great Squamish ‘charm’ eventually reached the person of Napoleon; that from this time onward his career was one vast victory, that he won battle after battle, conquered nation after nation, and, but for the direst calamity that could befall a warrior, would eventually have been master of the world.”

“What was this calamity, Chief?” I asked, amazed at his knowledge of the great historical soldier and strategist.

The chief’s voice again lowered to a whisper⁠—his face was almost rigid with intentness as he replied:

“He lost the Squamish charm⁠—lost it just before one great fight with the English people.”

I looked at him curiously; he had been telling me the oddest mixture of history and superstition, of intelligence and ignorance, the most whimsically absurd, yet impressive, tale I ever heard from Indian lips.

“What was the name of the great fight⁠—did you ever hear it?” I asked, wondering how much he knew of events which took place at the other side of the world a century agone.

“Yes,” he said, carefully, thoughtfully; “I hear the name sometime in London when I there. Railroad station there⁠—same name.”

“Was it Waterloo?” I asked.

He nodded quickly, without a shadow of hesitation. “That the one,” he replied. “That’s it, Waterloo.”

The Lure in Stanley Park

There is a well-known trail in Stanley Park that leads to what I always love to call the “Cathedral Trees”⁠—that group of some half-dozen forest giants that arch overhead with such superb loftiness. But in all the world there is no cathedral whose marble or onyx columns can vie with those straight, clean, brown tree-boles that teem with the sap and blood of life. There is no fresco that can rival the delicacy of lacework they have festooned between you and the far skies. No tiles, no mosaic or inlaid marbles, are as fascinating as the bare, russet, fragrant floor outspreading about their feet. They are the acme of Nature’s architecture, and in building them she has outrivalled all her erstwhile conceptions. She will never originate a more faultless design, never erect a more perfect edifice. But the divinely moulded trees and the man-made cathedral have one exquisite characteristic in common. It is the atmosphere of holiness. Most of us have better impulses after viewing a stately cathedral, and none of us can stand amid that majestic forest group without experiencing some elevating thoughts, some refinement of our coarser nature. Perhaps those who read this little legend will never again look at those cathedral trees without thinking of the glorious souls they contain, for according to the Coast Indians they do harbour human souls, and the world is better because they once had the speech and the hearts of mighty men.

My tillicum did not use the word “lure” in telling me this legend. There is no equivalent for the word in the Chinook tongue, but the gestures of his voiceful hands so expressed the quality of something between magnetism and charm that I have selected this word “lure” as best fitting what he wished to convey. Some few yards beyond the cathedral trees, an overgrown disused trail