"

"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! Hiawath