hickahominies, Pamunkeys, Arrowhatocks, Chesapeakes, Nansemonds,
Accomacs,--as one man will they strike; and from where the Powhatan
falls over the rocks to the salt water beyond Accomac, there will not be
one white man left alive."

He ceased to speak, and for a minute the fire made the only sound in
the hut. Then, "All die?" I asked dully. "There are three thousand
Englishmen in Virginia."

"They are scattered and unwarned. The fighting men of the villages of
the Powhatan and the Pamunkey and the great bay are many, and they have
sharpened their hatchets and filled their quivers with arrows."

"Scattered," I said, "strewn broadcast up and down the river,--here a
lonely house, there a cluster of two or three; they at Jamestown and
Henricus off guard,--the men in the fields or at the wharves, the women
and the children busy within doors, all unwarned--O my God!"

Diccon strode over from the doorway to the fire. "We'd best be going, I
reckon, sir," he cried. "Or you wait until morning; then there'll be two
chances. Now that I've a knife, I'm thinking I can give account of one
of them damned sentries, at least. Once clear of them"--

I shook my head, and the Indian too made a gesture of dissent. "You
would only be the first to die."

I leaned against the side of the hut, for my heart beat like a
frightened woman's. "Three days!" I exclaimed. "If we go with all our
speed we shall be in time. When did you learn this thing?"

"While you watched the dance," he answered, "Opechancanough and I sat
within his lodge in the darkness. His heart was moved, and he talked to
me of his own youth in a strange country, south of the sunset, where he
and his people dwelt in stone houses and worshiped a great and fierce
god, giving him blood to drink and flesh to eat. To that country,
too, white men had come in ships. Then he spoke to me of Powhatan, my
father,--of how wise he was and how great a chief before the English
came, and how the English made him kneel in sign that he held his lands
from their King, and how he hated them; and then he told me that the
tribes had called me 'woman,' 'lover no longer of the warpath and the
scalp dance,' but that he, who had no son, loved me as his son, knowing
my heart to be Indian still; and then I heard what I have told you."

"How long had this been planned?"

"For many moons. I have been a child, fooled and turned aside from the
trail; not wise enough to see it beneath the flowers, through