n]!"

She laughed, challenging me with eye and lip.

"And if you defy me to a bout with bowl or bottle I will not turn
coward, neah-wen-ha [I thank you]! but I will drink with you and let my
father judge whose legs best carry him to bed! Koue! Answer me, my
cousin, Tahoontowhe [the night hawk]."

We were laughing now, yet I knew she had spoken seriously, and to plague
her I said: "You boast like a Seminole chanting the war-song."

"I dare you to cast the hatchet!" she cried, reddening.

"Dare me to a trial less rude," I protested, laughing the louder.

"No, no! Come!" she said, impatient, unbolting the heavy door; and,
willy-nilly, I followed, meeting the pack all sulking on the stairs, who
rose to seize me as I came upon them.

"Let him alone!" cried Dorothy; "he says he can outcast me with the
war-hatchet! Where is my hatchet? Sammy! Ruyven! find hatchets and come
to the painted post."

"Sport!" cried Harry, leaping down-stairs before us. "Cecile, get your
hatchet--get mine, too! Come on, Cousin Ormond, I'll guide you; it's the
painted post by the spring--and hark, Cousin George, if you beat her
I'll give you my silvered powder-horn!"

Cecile and Sammy hastened up, bearing in their arms the slim
war-hatchets, cased in holsters of bright-beaded hide, and we took our
weapons and started, piloted by Harry through the door, and across the
shady, unkempt lawn to the stockade gate.

Dorothy and I walked side by side, like two champions in amiable confab
before a friendly battle, intimately aloof from the gaping crowd which
follows on the flanks of all true greatness.

Out across the deep-green meadow we marched, the others trailing on
either side with eager advice to me, or chattering of contests past,
when Walter Butler and Brant--he who is now war-chief of the loyal
Mohawks--cast hatchets for a silver girdle, which Brant wears still; and
the patroon, and Sir John, and all the great folk from Guy Park were
here a-betting on the Mohawk, which, they say, so angered Walter Butler
that he lost the contest. And that day dated the silent enmity between
Brant and Butler, which never healed.

This I gathered amid all their chit-chat while we stood under the
willows near the spring, watching Ruyven pace the distance from the post
back across the greensward towards us.

Then, making his heel-mark in the grass, he took a green willow wand and
set it, all feathered, in the turf.

"Is it fair for Dorothy to cast her ow