population of the village was packed densely in front of the
council house, and when the door was shut upon the victorious war band
all the female kin of the warriors within, except those too young or too
old to take part, advanced, while the crowd swung back to give them
room, and arranged themselves in two parallel lines, facing each other
on either side of the door of the council house.

These women were dressed in all their barbaric finery. They wore
beautiful headdresses of feathers, red and white and blue and yellow.
Their faces were painted, but not so glaringly as those of the warriors.
Even here in the wilderness woman's taste, to a certain extent,
prevailed. They wore tunics of finely dressed deerskins, or, in some
cases, bright red and blue shawls, bought at British posts, deerskin
leggings, and moccasins. Much work had been lavished upon the moccasins,
which were of the finest skin, delicately tanned and ornamented with
hundreds of little beads, red, yellow, blue, green and every other
color.

Many of the younger women, not yet wrinkled or bent by hard work, were
quite pretty. They were slim and graceful, and they had the lightness
and freedom of wild things. Henry was impressed by the open and bold
bearing of them all, women as well as men. He had heard much of the
Wyandots, the flower of all the western tribes, and now at close range
he saw that all he had heard was true, and more.

As soon as the two lines were formed, and they were arranged with the
greatest exactitude and evenness, the women, as they faced one another,
began a slow monotonous chant, which, however, lasted only a minute. At
the end of this minute there was profound silence for ten minutes. The
women, trained for these ceremonies, stood so perfectly still that Henry
could not see a body quiver. At the end of the ten minutes there was
another minute of chanting, and then ten more minutes of silence, and
thus, in this proportion of ten minutes of silence to one minute of
song, the alternation would be kept up all day and all night.

Once every three hours Timmendiquas would come forth at the head of his
warriors, raise the war whoop, pass around the war pole, bearing aloft a
branch of cedar, and then return to the council house, closing the door
firmly as before.

Meanwhile Henry's attention was taken from the ceremonies by a most
significant thing. He had been conscious for a while that some one in
the closely packed ring of Wyandot