So, after due repose, the Devil sprang lightly across the chasms he had so successfully engineered, and went home to rear his family thoughtfully. Every year he brought his children down to the Dalles, and told them the terrible history of his escape. The fires of the Cascades burned away; the inland sea was drained, and its bed became a fair prairie, and still the waters gushed along the narrow crevice he had opened. He had, in fact, been the instrument in changing a vast region from a barren sea into habitable land. One great trial, however, remained with him, and made his life one of grave responsibility. All his children born before the catastrophe were cannibal, stiff-tailed fiends. After that great event, every newborn imp of his was like himself in character and person, and wore but a flaccid tail, the last insignium of ignobility. Quarrels between these two factions embittered his days and impeded civilization. Still it did advance, and long before his death he saw the tails disappear forever. Such is the Legend of The Dalles,--a legend not without a moral. CHAPTER IV The Land of Many Leagues It was a very "typical" stagecoach. That is, it was typical of the style Broadway would have expected in the production of a _Girl of the Golden West_ or _The Great Divide_. Very comfortably you may still see them in moving picture land--a region where the old West lives far woolier and wilder than it ever dared to be in actual life. However, this stage was neither make-believe nor comfortable. It was very real and very comfortless. The time was six years ago and the place the one hundred miles of worse than indifferent road between Shaniko and Bend, in Central Oregon. "Do you chew?" asked the driver. I who sat next to him, plead innocence of the habit. "Have a drink?" said he later, producing a flask. And again I asked to be excused. "Don't smoke, neither, I suppose?" The driver regarded me with suspicion. "Hell," said he, "th' country's goin' to the dogs. These here civilizin' inflooences is playing hob with everythin'. Las' three trips my passengers haven't been fit company for man or beast--they neither drank nor chawed. Not that I mean to be insultin'"--I assured him he was not--"but times certainly have changed. The next thing along 'll come a railroad and then all this goes to the scrap heap." His gesture, with the last word, included the battered stage, the dejected horses, and the immediate surroundings of Shaniko Flats. For the life of me I could see no cause for regret even supposing his prophecy came true to the letter! Twenty hours later, when the springless seat, influenced by the attraction of gravitation in conjunction with the passage of many chuck holes, had permanently warped my spinal column, I would have been even more ready to endorse the threatened cataclysm. [Illustration: Central Oregon travel in the old days]