第97章

IN the centre of the wigwam the customary fire burned clear and bright, showing the white mats, the dressed skins, the implements of war hanging upon the bark walls, - all the usual furniture of an Indian dwelling, - and showing also Nantauquas standing against the stripped trunk of a pine that pierced the wigwam from floor to roof. The fire was between us. He stood so rigid, at his full height, with folded arms and head held high, and his features were so blank and still, so forced and frozen, as it were, into composure, that, with the red light beating upon him and the thin smoke curling above his head, he had the look of a warrior tied to the stake.

"Nantauquas!" I exclaimed, and striding past the fire would have touched him but that with a slight and authoritative motion of the hand he kept me back. Otherwise there was no change in his position or in the dead calm of his face.

The Indian maid had dropped the mat at the entrance, and if she waited, waited without in the darkness. Diccon, now staring at the young chief, now eyeing the weapons upon the wall with all a lover's passion, kept near the doorway. Through the thickness of the bark and woven twigs the wild cries and singing came to us somewhat faintly; beneath that distant noise could be heard the wind in the trees and the soft fall of the burning pine.

"Well!" I asked at last. "What is the matter, my friend?"

For a full minute he made no answer, and when he did speak his voice matched his face.

"My friend," he said, "I am going to show myself a friend indeed to the English, to the strangers who were not content with their own hunting grounds beyond the great salt water. When I have done this, I do not know that Captain Percy will call me 'friend' again."

"You were wont to speak plainly, Nantauquas," I answered him. "I am not fond of riddles."

Again he waited, as though he found speech difficult. I stared at him in amazement, he was so changed in so short a time.

He spoke at last: "When the dance is over, and the fires are low, and the sunrise is at hand, then will Opechancanough come to you to bid you farewell. He will give you the pearls that he wears about his neck for a present to the Governor, and a bracelet for yourself.

Also he will give you three men for a guard through the forest. He has messages of love to send the white men, and he would send them by you who were his enemy and his captive. So all the white men shall believe in his love."

"Well," I said dryly as he paused. "I will take his messages. What next?"

"Those are the words of Opechancanough. Now listen to the words of Nantauquas, the son of Wahunsonacock, a war chief of the Powhatans. There are two sharp knives there, hanging beneath the bow and the quiver and the shield. Take them and hide them."

The words were scarcely out of his mouth before Diccon had the two keen English blades. I took the one he offered me, and hid it in my doublet.

"So we go armed, Nantauquas," I said. "Love and peace and goodwill consort not with such toys."

"You may want them," he went on, with no change in his low, measured tones. "If you see aught in the forest that you should not see, if they think you know more than you are meant to know, then those three, who have knives and tomahawks, are to kill you, whom they believe unarmed."

"See aught that we should not see, know more than we are meant to know?" I said. "To the point, friend."

"They will go slowly, too, through the forest to Jamestown, stopping to eat and to sleep. For them there is no need to run like the stag with the hunter behind him."

"Then we should make for Jamestown as for life," I said, "not sleeping or eating or making pause?"

"Yea," he replied, "if you would not die, you and all your people."

In the silence of the hut the fire crackled, and the branches of the trees outside, bent by the wind, made a grating sound against the bark roof.

"How die?" I asked at last. "Speak out!"

"Die by the arrow and the tomahawk," he answered, - "yea, and by the guns you have given the red men. To-morrow's sun, and the next, and the next, - three suns, - and the tribes will fall upon the English. At the same hour, when the men are in the fields and the women and children are in the houses, they will strike, -

Kecoughtans, Paspaheghs, Chickahominies, Pamunkeys, Arrowhatocks, Chesapeakes, Nansemonds, Accomacs, - as one man will they strike; and from where the Powhatan falls over the rocks to the salt water beyond Accomac, there will not be one white man left alive."

He ceased to speak, and for a minute the fire made the only sound in the hut. Then, "All die?" I asked dully. "There are three thousand Englishmen in Virginia."

"They are scattered and unwarned. The fighting men of the villages of the Powhatan and the Pamunkey and the great bay are many, and they have sharpened their hatchets and filled their quivers with arrows."

"Scattered," I said, " strewn broadcast up and down the river, - here a lonely house, there a cluster of two or three; they at Jamestown and Henricus off guard, - the men in the fields or at the wharves, the women and the children busy within doors, all unwarned - O my God!"

Diccon strode over from the doorway to the fire. "We'd best be going, I reckon, sir," he cried. "Or you wait until morning; then there'll be two chances. Now that I've a knife, I'm thinking I can give account of one of them damned sentries, at least. Once clear of them" -

I shook my head, and the Indian too made a gesture of dissent.

"You would only be the first to die."

I leaned against the side of the hut, for my heart beat like a frightened woman's. "Three days!" I exclaimed. "If we go with all our speed we shall be in time. When did you learn this thing?"

"While you watched the dance," he answered, "Opechancanough and I sat within his lodge in the darkness. His heart was moved, and he talked to me of his own youth in a strange country, south of the sunset, where he and his people dwelt in stone houses and worshiped a great and fierce god, giving him blood to drink and flesh to eat. To that country, too, white men had come in ships.