have touched him but that with a
slight motion of his hand he kept me back.

"Well!" I asked at last. "What is the matter, my friend?"

For a full minute he made no answer, and when he did speak his voice
matched his strained and troubled features.

"My _friend_," he said, "I am going to show myself a friend indeed to
the English, to the strangers who were not content with their own
hunting-grounds beyond the great salt water. When I have done this, I do
not know that Captain Percy will call me 'friend'."

"You were wont to speak plainly, Nantaquas," I answered him. "I am not
fond of riddles."

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, Opechancanough will come to you to bid you farewell.
He will give you the pearls 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 drily as he paused. "I will bear the messages. What
next?"

"Your guards will take you slowly through the forest, stopping to eat
and sleep. For them there is no need to run like the stag with the
hunter behind it."

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

"Yes," 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--all the tribes, as one man; 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 I asked, "All die? There are three thousand Englishmen in
Virginia."

"They are scattered a