e. But these men were no Senecas."

He smiled gravely. "Listen, brother," he said. "The white men of the
Tidewater called me Seneca, and I suffered the name. But I am of a
greater and princelier house than the Sons of the Cat. Some little
while ago I spoke to you of the man who travelled to the Western Seas,
and of his son who returned to his own people. I am the son of him who
returned. I spoke of the doings of my own kin."

"But what is your nation, then?" I cried.

"One so great that these little clanlets of Cherokee and Monacan, and
even the multitudes of the Long House, are but slaves and horseboys by
their side. We dwelt far beyond these mountains towards the setting
sun, in a plain where the rivers are like seas, and the cornlands wider
than all the Virginian manors. But there came trouble in our royal
house, and my father returned to find a generation which had forgotten
the deeds of their forefathers. So he took his own tribe, who still
remembered the House of the Sun, and, because his heart was unquiet
with longing for that which is forbidden to man, he journeyed
eastward, and found a new home in a valley of these hills. Thine eyes
have seen it. They call it the Shenandoah."

I remembered that smiling Eden I had seen from that hill-top, and how
Shalah had spoken that very name.

"We dwelt there," he continued, "while I grew to manhood, living
happily in peace, hunting the buffalo and deer, and tilling our
cornlands. Then the time came when the Great Spirit called for my
father, and I was left with the kingship of the tribe. Strange things
meantime had befallen our nation in the West. Broken clans had come
down from the north, and there had been many battles, and there had
been blight, and storms, and sickness, so that they were grown poor and
harassed. Likewise men had arisen who preached to them discontent, and
other races of a lesser breed had joined themselves to them. My own
tribe had become fewer, for the young men did not stay in our valley,
but drifted back to the West, to that nation we had come from, or went
north to the wars with the white man, or became lonely hunters in the
hills. Then from the south along the mountain crests came another
people, a squat and murderous people, who watched us from the ridges
and bided their chance."

"The Cherokees?" I asked.

"Even so. I speak of a hundred moons back, when I was yet a stripling,
with little experience in war. I saw the peril, but I could not