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And from tepee and lodge rose the cracked and crazy strains of cheap music-boxes. An old squaw, peeling a willow pole in the sunshine of an open doorway, raised her head and uttered a shrill cry. "Hee-Hee! Tenas Hee-Hee!" she muttered as well and as excitedly as her toothless gums would permit. Frona thrilled at the cry. Tenas Hee-Hee! Little Laughter! Her name of the long gone Indian past!
"Him stop along gal tenas klootchman, you savvy. Go walkee along gal. P'laps, bimeby, two, tlee hou', him come back." Simon grunted gutturally. "Ya-as," he drawled. "Hiyu lich gal," Feng proceeded. "Have hiyu dolla'. You bet. She one hiyu dam' plitty gal, savvy?" "Hush!" Clyde whispered, as Casey would have put an end to this risky eavesdropping. "I didn't think that Feng had such good taste.
Across its little forehead hung locks of black, straight hair, and its sturdy limbs were vainly endeavoring to free themselves from the lacing of the "blankets." Maarda took the basket, with an expression on her face that was transfiguring. "Yes, this is my little Tenas Klootchman," she said, as she unlaced the bands, then lifted the plump little creature out on to her lap.
Its huge body began to shrink, to shrivel; it became dwarfed and withered, until nothing but the bones of its back remained, and they, sea-bleached and lifeless, soon sank to the bed of the ocean leagues off from the rim of land. But as the Tenas Tyee swam homeward and his clean, young body crossed through the black stain left by the serpent, the waters became clear and blue and sparkling.
"I would sell it to-day if they came," she would murmur. "I would not be strong enough to refuse, to say no." Then Tenas, knowing her desperate thoughts, would slip, mouse-like, beside her and say: "Hoolool, you are looking with love on our great Totem Pole with love, as you always do. It means that I shall be a great man some day, does it not, Hoolool?"
"Mine was a Tenas Klootchman, too," she said. "Then I will go to her, and be her mother, wherever she is, in the Spirit Islands they tell us of," said the woman. "We will be but exchanging our babies, after all." When morning dawned, the woman did not awake.
Then she again saw those fever-haunted eyes of the stranger who was within her gates, again heard the half wail of the Tenas Klootchman in her own baby's cradle basket, and at the sound she turned her back on the possible safety of shelter, and forged ahead. It was a wearied woman who finally knocked at the doctor's door and bade him hasten.
It was bitterly cold. Kalitan Tenas felt it more than he had in the long winter, for then it was still and calm as night, and now the wind was blowing straight in from the sea, and the river was frozen tight. A month before, the ice had begun to break and he had thought the cold was over, and that the all too short Alaskan summer was at hand.
'Go, they commanded, 'and fight this thing with your strongest weapons cleanliness and generosity. "The Tenas Tyee turned to his mother. 'I shall be gone four days, he told her, 'and I shall swim all that time. I have tried all my life to be generous, but the people say I must be clean also to fight this unclean thing.
"But the flocks I saw were not flying grey geese, that make such fat eating, but around the foot of our Totem Pole I saw flocks and flocks of little tenas Totem Poles, hundreds of them. They were not half as high as I am. They were just baby ones you could take in your hand, Hoolool. Could you take my knife the trader gave me and make me one just like our big one?
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