at all."

* * * * *

He stood slim and straight as a Shawnee arrow, smooth-faced and
solemn, obviously not much past his twentieth birthday, yet by his own
account born before the Declaration of Independence was on paper. He
went on talking, sounding like a character out of James Fenimore
Cooper. His story, boiled down and translated, came out something like
this:

The sudden arrival of the strange object had literally paralyzed the
Indian encampment. The warriors dropped their weapons and called on
the spirits to protect them, while a hole opened in the side of what
couldn't be anything else but a spaceship. Then out of the opening
came huge steel caricatures of men. There were over a dozen of these
robots, each the height of two men, and their eyes were strange round
circles of faceted glass. In single file they moved down the ramp and
stalked through the ranks of fear-frozen Indians, disappearing into
the forest.

Enoch's father ordered his son to crawl up into a tree out of sight,
then shouldered his rifle and slipped away through the bushes to get a
better look at what was going on. Enoch "allowed" that his Pop was a
"moughty" brave man, and none of his audience gave him an argument on
that score.

From his place among the leaves, Enoch watched his father melt into
the trees. The sun was above the horizon by this time and the young
frontiersman discovered that his present position was the equivalent
of a box seat on the fifty-yard line.

The next figure to emerge from the spaceship brought an amazed murmur
from hundreds of throats. No twelve-foot robot this time, no alien
monster beyond description. Very simply, this was an Indian.

Yet what an Indian! He stood on the ramp, wearing only leather
breeches and unadorned moccasins, muscles rippling across a powerful
sun-tanned chest, his head thrown back in a posture of arrogant
dignity. He wore a single crimson feather in his black topknot, and at
his belt was a tomahawk only slightly less deadly looking than a
howitzer.

Arms folded across his chest, he swept his stunned audience with an
eye like an eagle's, then began to speak. His voice, deep and ringing,
carried beyond the edges of the crowd, so that Enoch was able to catch
a portion of what he was saying.

Wetzel admitted he understood very little of any of the Indian
tongues. He thought the one he was hearing had its roots in the
Delaware tribe, but admitted this was n