Again he waited, as though he found speech difficult. I stared at him in
amazement, he was so changed in so short a time.

He spoke at last: "When the dance is over, and the fires are low, and
the sunrise is at hand, then will Opechancanough come to you to bid you
farewell. He will give you the pearls that he wears about his neck for a
present to the Governor, and a bracelet for yourself. Also he will give
you three men for a guard through the forest. He has messages of love to
send the white men, and he would send them by you who were his enemy and
his captive. So all the white men shall believe in his love."

"Well," I said dryly as he paused. "I will take his messages. What
next?"

"Those are the words of Opechancanough. Now listen to the words of
Nantauquas, the son of Wahunsonacock, a war chief of the Powhatans.
There are two sharp knives there, hanging beneath the bow and the quiver
and the shield. Take them and hide them."

The words were scarcely out of his mouth before Diccon had the two keen
English blades. I took the one he offered me, and hid it in my doublet.

"So we go armed, Nantauquas," I said. "Love and peace and goodwill
consort not with such toys."

"You may want them," he went on, with no change in his low, measured
tones. "If you see aught in the forest that you should not see, if they
think you know more than you are meant to know, then those three, who
have knives and tomahawks, are to kill you, whom they believe unarmed."

"See aught that we should not see, know more than we are meant to know?"
I said. "To the point, friend."

"They will go slowly, too, through the forest to Jamestown, stopping to
eat and to sleep. For them there is no need to run like the stag with
the hunter behind him."

"Then we should make for Jamestown as for life," I said, "not sleeping
or eating or making pause?"

"Yea," he replied, "if you would not die, you and all your people."

In the silence of the hut the fire crackled, and the branches of the
trees outside, bent by the wind, made a grating sound against the bark
roof.

"How die?" I asked at last. "Speak out!"

"Die by the arrow and the tomahawk," he answered,--"yea, and by the
guns you have given the red men. To-morrow's sun, and the next, and the
next,--three suns,--and the tribes will fall upon the English. At the
same hour, when the men are in the fields and the women and children
are in the houses, they will strike,--Kecoughtans, Paspaheghs,
C