130 Woodcraft Manual for Girls for you at the great potlatches Ici hours and hours, while the old people sing and the young people admire. I must sit with the old womm— akme with the <m ones and the u^y ones — alone! ' " 'You will never be old, never be ugly,' he assured her. 'Your face and your soul are things of beauty. They, with your laugh- ing heart, will always be young. Your mother named you Kah-Io-ka, The Swan, and you are always that — shall ever be that to me. Come, will you come with me — ^will you come from your mother's love — to mine? ' "And, womanlike, she went with him, and her father's lod^ knew her no more. "But daily her mother would come to see her, to rejoice in the happiness of the young wife — the happiness that made her forget her trailing foot, that made her ever-lovely face still more beautiful, and she would call the little bride-wife, 'Be-be, Be-be,* as though she were still her frail baby girL It is the way with mothers and a crippled child. " The years drifted on, and Kah-lo-ka bore her hunter-husband ax b^utiful children, but none of them had the trailing foot, nor yet the lovely face of their laughter-loving mother. She had not yet grown old to look upon as the Squamish women are apt to do while even yet young, and her face was like a flower as she sat among the old and ugly at the great potlatches, while the maidens and the young men danced and chanted, uid danced again. How often she longed to join them none ever knew, but no shadow ever blurred her eyes, no ache ever entered her always young heart until the day her husband's cousin came, a maiden strong, lithe, tall as the hunter himself, and who danced like the sunlight on the blue waters of the Pacific. "For hours and hours this cousin would dance tirelessly, and through all the hours he watched her, watched her sway like the branches of the Douglas ^r when storm beaten, watched her agile feet, her swift, light steps, her glorious strength, and when she ceased, Kah-lo-ka's husband and the voung braves and warriors gathered about her with gifts of shell necklaces and fair speeches. "And Kah-lo-ka looked down at her own poor trailing foot — and the laughter died in her eyes. In the lodge with her ibt little children about her she waited for him many days, many weeks, but the hunter-husband had left her for one who had no trailing foot to keep her sitting among the old and the ugly. "So Kah-b-ka waited, and waited, k»g, long yean through*
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