The main body of the fiends shrunk back terror-stricken; but a battalion of the van sprang across and made one bound toward the heart-sick and fainting Devil. He smote again with his tail, and more strongly. Another vaster cleft went up and down the valley, with an earth quaking roar, and a vaster torrent swept along. Still the leading fiends were not appalled. They took the leap without craning. Many fell short, or were crowded into the roaring gulf, but enough were left, and those of the chiefest braves, to martyr their chase in one instant, if they overtook him. The Devil had just time enough to tap once more, and with all the vigor of a despairing tail. [Illustration: Along the Columbia River. "A region of surpassing scenery" Copyright 1912 by Kiser Co., Portland, Oregon.] He was safe. A third crevice, twice the width of the second, split the rocks. This way and that it went, wavering like lightning eastward and westward, riving a deeper cleft in the mountains that held back the inland sea, riving a vaster gorge through the majestic chain of the Cascades, and opening a way for the torrent to gush oceanward. It was the crack of doom for the fiends. A few essayed the leap. They fell far short of the stern edge, where the Devil had sunk panting. They alighted on the water, but whirlpools tripped them up, tossed them, bowled them along among floating boulders, until the buffeted wretches were borne to the broader calms below, where they sunk. Meanwhile, those who had not dared the final leap attempted a backward one, but wanting the impetus of pursuit, and shuddering at the fate of their comrades, every one of them failed and fell short; and they too were swept away, horribly sprawling in the flood. As to the fiends who had stopped at the first crevice, they ran in a body down the river to look for the mangled remains of their brethren, and, the undermined bank giving way under their weight, every fiend of them was carried away and drowned. So perished the whole race of fiends. As to the Devil, he had learnt a still deeper lesson. His tail also, the ensign of deviltry, was irremediably dislocated by his life-saving blow. In fact, it had ceased to be any longer a needful weapon! Its antagonists were all gone; never a tail remained to be brandished at it, in deadly encounter.