he Manitou of the Wyandots, and your God, merely looks on, and permits
the stronger to be the victor."
"Then," said Henry, "why not make peace with us here in the West, lest
your tribes meet the same fate?"
The nostrils of Timmendiquas dilated.
"Because in the end we should be eaten up in the same way. Here in the
West you are few and your villages are tiny. The seed is not planted so
deep that it cannot be uprooted."
Henry sighed.
"I can see the question from your side as well as from mine, White
Lightning," he replied. "It seems as you say, that the white men and the
red men cannot dwell together. Yet I could wish that we were friends in
the field as well as at heart."
Timmendiquas shook his head and replied in a tone tinged with a certain
sadness:
"I, too, could wish it, but you were born of one race and I of another.
It is our destiny to fight to the end."
He strode away through the camp. Henry watched the tall and splendid
figure, with the single small scarlet feather set in the waving scalp
lock, and once more he readily acknowledged that he was a forest king, a
lofty and mighty spirit, born to rule in the wilderness. Then he took
the two blankets which had been left him, enfolded himself between them,
and, despite the noises around him, slept soundly all through the night.
Early the next morning they began the last stretch of the march to
Detroit.
It was with a deep and peculiar interest that they approached Detroit,
then a famous British and Indian post, now a great American city.
Founded by the French, who lost it to the British, who, in turn, were
destined to lose it to the Americans, it has probably sent forth more
scalping parties of Indians than any other place on the North American
continent. Here the warlike tribes constantly came for rifles,
ammunition, blankets and other supplies, and here the agents of the king
incited them with every means in their power to fresh raids on the young
settlements in the South. Here the renegades, Girty, Blackstaffe and
their kind came to confer, and here Boone, Kenton and other famous
borderers had been brought as prisoners.
The Indians in the party of Timmendiquas already showed great
jubilation. In return for the war that they had made and should make,
they expected large gifts from the king, and with such great chiefs as
White Lightning, Red Eagle and Yellow Panther at their head, it was not
likely that they would be disappointed.
As they dre
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