ay of light grew through the darkened
chambers of my brain. And now I knew, now I remembered, now I
understood where that lost town must lie--the town of Thendara, lost
ever and forever, only to be forever found again as long as the dark
Confederacy should endure.

Awed, I sat in silence; and he turned his gloomy eyes now on me, now on
the darkened window, gnawing his lip in savage retrospection.

Instantly I was aware that he doubted me, and why. I looked up at him,
astounded; he lifted his brooding head and I made a rapid sign, saying
in the Mohawk tongue: "Karon-ta-Ke?--at the Tree?"

"Karon-ta-Kowa-Kon--at the great tree. Sat-Kah-tos--thou seest. There
lies the lost town of Thendara. And, save for the council, where you
and I have a Wolf's clan-right, no living soul could know what that
word Thendara means. God help the Oneida who betrays!"

"Since when and by what nation have _you_ been raised up to sit in the
council of condolence?" I asked haughtily; for, strange as it may appear
to those who know not what it means to wear the Oneida clan-mark of
nobility, I, clean-blooded and white-skinned, was as fiercely proud of
this Iroquois honor as any peer of England newly invested with the
garter. And it was strange, too, for I was but a lad when chosen for the
mystic rite; but never except once--the day before I left the north to
serve his Excellency's purpose in New York--had I been present when that
most solemn rite was held, and the long roll of dead heroes called in
honor of the Great League's founder, Hiawatha.

And so, though I am pure white in blood and bone and every instinct,
and having nigh forgotten that I wore the Wolf--and, too, the Long
House being divided and I siding with the Oneidas, and so at civil war
with the shattered league that served King George--yet I turned on
Walter Butler as a Mohawk might turn upon a Delaware, scornfully
questioning his credentials, demanding his right to speak as one who
had heard the roll-call of those Immortals who founded the "Great
Peace" three hundred years ago.

"The Delawares named me, and the council took me," he said with perfect
calmness. "The Delaware nation mourned their dead; and now I sit for
the Wolf Clan--my elder brother, Renault."

"A Delaware clan is not named in the Rite," I said coldly--"nor is
there kinship between us because you are adopted by the Delawares. I am
aware that clanship knows no nations; and I, an Oneida Wolf, am brother
to a Cayu