The Reckoning

He obeyed without a word. Elsin hesitated, gave me one anxious, backward glance, but my smile seemed to reassure her, and she walked her black mare forward. Past me marched the little column. I watched it drawing away northward, until a turn in the forest road hid the wagon and the brown-clad rear-guard. Then I dismounted and sat down, my back to the giant pine, my rifle across my knees, to wait for the red ambassador whom I knew would come.

Minute after minute slipped away. So still it grew that the shy forest creatures came back to this forest runway, made by dreaded man; and because it is the work of a creature they dread and suspect, their curiosity ever draws them to man-made roads. A cock-grouse first stepped out of the thicket, crest erect, ruff spread; then a hare loped by, halting to sniff in the herbage. I watched them for a long while, listening intently. Suddenly the partridge wheeled, crest flattened, and ran into the thicket, like a great rat; the hare sat erect, flanks palpitating, then leaped twice, and was gone as shadows go.

I saw the roadside bushes stir, part, and, as I rose, an Indian leaped lightly into the road and strode straight toward me. He was curiously painted with green and orange, and he was stark naked, except that he wore ankle-moccasins, clout, and a fringed pouch, like a quiver, covered with scarlet beads in zigzag pattern.

He did not seem to notice that I was armed, for he carried his own rifle most carelessly in the hollow of his left arm, and when he had halted before me he coolly laid the weapon across his moccasins.

The dignified silence that always precedes a formal meeting of strange Iroquois was broken at length by a low, guttural exclamation as his narrow-slitted eyes fell upon the tattoo on my bared breast: "Salute, Roy-a-neh!"

"Welcome, O Keeper of the Gate," I said calmly.

"Does my younger brother know to which gate-warden he speaks?" asked the savage warily.

"When a Wolf barks, the Eastern Gate-Keepers of the Long House listen," I replied. "It was so in the beginning. What has my elder brother of the Canienga to say to me?"

His cunning glance changed instantly to an absolutely expressionless mask. My white skin no longer made any difference to him. We were now two Iroquois.

"It is the truth," he said. "This is the message sent to my younger brother, Onehda, chief ensign of the Wolf Clan of the Oneida nation. I am a belt-bearer. Witness the truth of what I say to you—by this belt. Now read the will of the Iroquois."

He drew from his beaded pouch a black and white belt of seven rows. I took it, and, holding it in both hands, gazed attentively into his face.

"The Three Wolves listen," I said briefly.

"Then listen, noble of the noble clan. The council-fire is covered at Onondaga; but it shall burn again at Thendara. This was so from the first, as all know. The council therefore summons their brother, Onehda, as ensign of his clan. The will of the council is the will of the confederacy. Hiro! I have spoken."

"Does a single coal from Onondaga still burn under the great tree, my elder brother?" I asked cautiously.

"The great tree is at Onondaga," he answered sullenly; "the fire is covered."

Which was as much as to say that there was no sanctuary guaranteed an Oneida, even at a federal council.

"Tell them," I said deliberately, "that a belt requires a belt; and, when the Wolves talk to the Oneidas, they at Thendara shall be answered. I have spoken."

"Do the Three Wolves take counsel with the Six Bears and Turtles?" he asked, with a crafty smile.

"The trapped wolf has no choice; his howls appeal to the wilderness entire," I replied emphatically.

"But—a trapped wolf never howls, my younger brother; a lone wolf in a pit is always silent."

I flushed, realizing that my metaphor had been at fault. Yet now there was to be nothing between this red ambassador and me except the subtlest and finest shades of metaphor.

"It is true that a trapped wolf never howls," I said; "because a pitted wolf is as good as a dead wolf, and a dead wolf's tongue hangs out sideways. But it is not so when the pack is trapped. Then the prisoners may call upon the Wilderness for aid, lest a whole people suffer extermination."

"Will my younger brother take counsel with Oneidas?" he asked curiously.

"Surely as the rocks of Tryon point to the Dancers, naming the Oneida nation since the Great Peace began, so surely, my elder brother, shall Onehda talk to the three ensigns, brother to brother, clan to clan, lest we be utterly destroyed and the Oneida nation perish from the earth."

"My younger brother will not come to Thendara?" he inquired without emotion.

"Does a chief answer as squirrels answer one to another?—as crow replies to crow?" I asked sternly. "Go teach the Canienga how to listen and how to wait!"

His glowing eyes, fastened on mine, were lowered to the symbol on my breast, then his shaved head bent, and he folded his powerful arms.

"Onehda has spoken," he said respectfully. "Even a Delaware may claim his day of grace. My ears are open, O my younger brother."

"Then bear this message to the council: I accept the belt; my answer shall be the answer of the Oneida nation; and with my reply shall go three strings. Depart in peace, Bearer of Belts!"

Lightly, gracefully as a tree-lynx, he stooped and seized his rifle, wheeled, passed noiselessly across the road, turned, and buried himself in the tufted bushes. For an instant the green tops swayed, then not a ripple of the foliage, not a sound marked the swift course of the naked belt-bearer through the uncharted sea of trees.

Mounting my roan, I wheeled him north at a slow walk, preoccupied, morose, sadly absorbed in this new order of things where an Oneida now must needs answer a Mohawk as an Iroquois should once have answered an Erie or an Algonquin. Alas for the great League! alas for the mighty dead! Hiawatha! Atotarho! Where were they? Where now was our own Odasete; and Kanyadario, and the mighty wisdom of Dekanawidah? The end of the Red League was already in sight; the Great Peace was broken; the downfall of the Confederacy was at hand.

At that northern tryst at Thendara, the nine sachems allotted to the Canienga, the fourteen sachems of the Onondaga, the eight Senecas, the Cayuga ten must look in vain for nine Oneidas. And without them the Great Peace breaks like a rotten arrow where the war-head drops and the feathers fall from the unbound nock.

Strange, strange, that I, a white man of blood untainted, must answer for this final tragic catastrophe! Without me, perhaps, the sachems of the three clans might submit to the will of the League, for even the surly Onondagas had now heeded the League-Call—yes, even the Tuscaroras, too. And as for those Delaware dogs, they had come, belly-dragging, cringing to the lash of the stricken Confederacy, though now was their one chance in a hundred years to disobey and defy. But the Lenape were ever women.

Strange, strange, that I, a white man of unmixed blood, should stand in League-Council for the noblest clan of the Oneida nation!

That I had been adopted satisfied the hereditary law of chieftainship; that I had been selected satisfied the elective law of the sachems. Rank follows the female line; the son of a chief never succeeded to rank. It is the matron—the chief woman of the family—who chooses a dead chief's successor from the female line in descent; and thus Cloud on the Sun chose me, her adopted; and, dying, heard the loud, imperious challenge from the council-fire as the solemn rite ended with:

"Now show me the man!"

And so, knowing that the antlers were lifted and the quiver slung across my thigh, she died contented, and I, a lad, stood a chief of the Oneida nation. Never since time began, since the Caniengas adopted Hiawatha, had a white councilor been chosen who had been accepted by family, clan, and national council, and ratified by the federal senate, excepting only Sir William Johnson and myself. That Algonquin word "sachem," so seldom used, so difficult of pronunciation by the Iroquois, was never employed to designate a councilor in council; there they used the title, Roy-a-neh, and to that title had I answered the belt of the Iroquois, in the name of Kayanehenh-Kowa, the Great Peace.

For what Magna Charta is to the Englishman, what the Constitution is to us, is the Great Peace to an Iroquois; and their gratitude, their intense reverence and love for its founder, Hiawatha, is like no sentiment we have conceived even for the beloved name of Washington.

Now that the Revolution had split the Great Peace, which is the Iroquois League, the larger portion of the nation had followed Brant to Canada—all the Caniengas, the greater part of the Onondaga nation, all the Cayugas, the one hundred and fifty of our own Oneidas. And though the Senecas did not desert their western post as keepers of the shattered gate in a house divided against itself, they acted with the Mohawks; the Onondagas had brought their wampum from Onondaga, and a new council-fire was kindled in Canada as rallying-place of a great people in process of final disintegration.

It was sad to me who loved them, who knew them first as firm allies of New York province, who understood them, their true character, their history and tradition, their intimate social and family life.

And though I stood with those whom they struck heavily, and who in turn struck them hip and thigh, I bear witness before God that they were not by nature the fiends and demons our historians have painted, not by instinct the violent and ferocious scourges that the painted Tories made of these children of the forest, who for five hundred years had formed a confederacy whose sole object was peace.

I speak not of the brutal and degraded gens de prairie—the horse-riding savages of the West, whose primal instincts are to torture the helpless and to violate women—a crime no Iroquois, no Huron, no Algonquin, no Lenni-Lenape can be charged with. But I speak for the gens de bois—the forest Indians of the East, and of those who maintained the Great League, which was but a powerful tribunal imposing peace upon half a continent.

Left alone to themselves, unharassed by men of my blood and color, they are a kindly and affectionate people, full of sympathy for their friends in distress, considerate of their women, tender to their children, generous to strangers, anxious for peace, and profoundly reverent where their League or its founders were concerned.

Centuries of warfare for self-preservation have made them efficient in the arts of war. Ferocity, craft, and deception, practised on them by French, Dutch, and English, have taught them to reply in kind. Yet these somber, engrafted qualities which we have recorded as their distinguishing traits, no more indicate their genuine character than war-paint and shaven head display the customary costume they appear in among their own people. The cruelties of war are not peculiar to any one people; and God knows that in all the Iroquois confederacy no savage could be found to match the British Provost, Cunningham, or Major Bromfield—no atrocities could obscure the atrocities in the prisons and prison-ships of New York, the deeds of the Butlers, of Crysler, of Beacraft, and of Bettys.

For, among the Iroquois, I can remember only two who were the peers in cruelty of Walter Butler and the Tory Beacraft, and these were the Indian called Seth Henry, and the half-breed hag, Catrine Montour.

Pondering on these things, perplexed and greatly depressed, I presently emerged from the forest-belt through which I had been riding, and found our little column halted in the open country, within a few minutes' march of the Schenectady highway.

The rangers looked up at me curiously as I passed, doubtless having an inkling of what had been going on from questioning the Oneida scouts, for Murphy broke out impulsively, "Sure, Captain, we was that onaisy, alanna, that Elerson an' me matched apple-pipps f'r to inthrojuce wan another to that powwow forninst the big pine."

"Had you appeared yonder while I was talking to that belt-bearer it might have gone hard with me, Tim," I said gravely.

Riding on past the spot where Jack Mount stood, his brief authority ended, I heard him grumbling about the rashness of officers and the market value of a good scalp in Quebec; and I only said: "Scold as much as you like, Jack, only obey." And so cantered forward to where Elsin sat her black mare, watching my approach. Her steady eyes welcomed, mine responded; in silence we wheeled our horses north once more, riding stirrup to stirrup through the dust. On either side stretched abandoned fields, growing up in weeds and thistles, for now we were almost on the Mohawk River, the great highway of the border war down which the tides of destruction and death had rolled for four terrible years.

There was nothing to show for it save meadows abandoned to willow scrub, fallow fields deep in milk-weed, goldenrod, and asters; and here and there a charred rail or two of some gate or fence long since destroyed.