When at length he was marched into the lodge he saw the councillors seated on the floor in a half-circle round a small fire. All of them wore feathered war bonnets and had their faces painted. Falling Water himself, a grim, wizen-featured old man, sat in the middle, smoking a tobacco pipe that was shaped like a tomahawk and adorned with coloured beads and feathers.

On the side facing the lake he found the source of the cook's intoxication. A tall and swarthy lumberjack squatted on his haunches, gabbling in the Chinook jargon to a klootchman and a wizen-featured old Siwash. The Indian woman was drunk beyond any mistaking, affably drunk. She looked up at Benton out of vacuous eyes, grinned, and extended to him a square-faced bottle of Old Tim gin.