of the night, coming faint but clear upon the light land breeze, the
first quivering notes of a Choctaw war chant. How familiar it was.
Was I mistaken? I listened more intently. No. It was in very truth
the voice of Tuskahoma, my old friend on many marches.

I cared nothing for the Seamew or her crew, and determined to seek my
old friends to fight out the day with them.

What little thought I gave it justified the deed. My position as an
officer of the King would palliate deserting the ship which had brought
me over.

CHAPTER XXI

THE FALL OF PENSACOLA

I slipped down the anchor chain without noise into the throbbing sea,
and swam ashore to a point some three or four cable lengths away.
Guided by the single voice which still sang of war, of glory and of
death, I pushed easily into the ring of hideously painted savages who
surrounded the singer. To unaccustomed eyes this would have been a
fearful sight.

Two hundred warriors sat motionless as bronze idols about their chief;
two hundred naked bodies glinted back the pine knot's fitful glow. In
the center of this threatening circle moved Tuskahoma, two great
crimson blotches upon his cheeks, treading that weird suggestive
measure the Indians knew so well. Round and round a little pine-tree,
shorn of its branches and striped with red, he crept, danced and sang.
His words came wild and irregular, a sort of rhythmic medley, now soft
and low as the murmur of the summer ocean, now thrilling every ear by
their sudden ferocity and fearful energy. Now it was the gentle
lullaby, the mother's crooning, the laughter of a child; again, the
bursting of the tempest, the lightning's flash, the thunder's rumbling
roar.

His arms raised to heaven like some gaunt priest of butchery, he
invoked the mighty Manitou of his tribe, then dropping prone upon the
ground he crawled, a sinuous serpent, among the trees.

For awhile his listeners wandered away upon their chieftain's words to
the waiting ones at home, to hunting grounds of peace and plenty;
melodious as a maiden's sigh that song breathed of love and lover's
hopes, it wailed for departed friends, extolled their virtues, and
called down heaven's curses upon the coward of tomorrow's fight. Then
the fierce gleam of shining steel, one wild war-whoop and all again was
still. His words faded away in the echoless night till a holy hush
brooded o'er beach and forest.

Then the solitary dancer wound about the ring as