an find what you call wolf around his wigwam, red man send arrow
through his head."

"Do you mean, you heathen, that you murdered these helpless, shipwrecked
white men? Murdered them in cold blood?" demanded Standish, seizing
Gideon's hilt and half drawing him from his scabbard.

"Tisquantum not here. Tisquantum not Mattakee, not Nauset; Tisquantum
Patuxet, where white men live," hastily replied Squanto; while Bradford
suggested in a rapid aside, "Best leave go thy sword and restrain thy
wrath, Captain, or we be but dead men. Look at the faces of those men
behind the sachem. Already they finger their tomahawks."

"More like, thy timidity will give the savages courage to fall upon us,
and we shall share the fate of these, who though naught but Frenchmen
were at least white, and wore breeches," retorted Standish angrily. The
color flashed into Bradford's cheek, but after an instant's silence he
quietly replied,--

"Thou knowest well enow, Standish, that my timidity is not for myself
but for these, and yet more for the helpless ones we have left behind. I
trust when it comes to blows, the Governor of Plymouth will be found
where he belongs, next to her fiery Captain."

"Be content, Will, be content. Once more thou 'rt right and I all wrong.
'T is not the first time nor the last, but let us ask in all patience
what these fellows mean with their White-Fool. Sure they have not made
me out so suddenly as this, have they?"

"Nay, Myles, I trow no man but thyself will ever call thee fool, nay,
nor overly white, either!" and glancing at the Captain's bronzed face
lighted once more by its smile of grim humor, Bradford turned to Squanto
and bade him explain in the hearing of both savages and white men the
meaning of this reference, and also the fate of the French mariners cast
ashore at Eastham.

Squanto nothing loth to display his oratory struck an attitude, and with
native eloquence and much gesticulation described, first, the storm
which four years ago had driven the French brig upon the sands; then the
efforts of the mariners to launch their boats, their defeat, and the
breaking up both of boats and brig; then the arrival upon shore of
thirteen men, two of whom died of wounds and exhaustion. The eleven
survivors finding some wreckage upon the beach proceeded the next
morning to build themselves a shelter, and finally erected the cabin and
threw up the earthwork discovered by the Pilgrims in their second
exploration.