ed Henry, "listen to me. You will fail
here as you have failed before. Help, great help, is coming for these
people. I brought them the warning. I aroused them from sleep, and I
know that many men are coming. Pay heed to me, Yellow Panther, head
chief of the Miamis, and Red Eagle, head chief of the Shawnees, that you
may know who I am, and that my words are worth hearing. I am that bearer
of belts, Big Fox, who came with Brown Bear and The Bat into the council
lodge of the Miamis and sent the warriors of the Shawnees and the Miamis
astray. I was white and my comrades were white, but you did not know me,
cunning as you are."

Now Yellow Panther and Red Eagle stirred. These were true things that he
told, and curiosity and anger stirred in them.

"Who is this that taunts us?" they asked of Girty.

"It's a young fiend," replied the renegade. "Wyatt has told me all about
him. Boy as he is, he's worth a whole band of warriors to the people
behind those walls."

"There is more that you should remember, Red Eagle and Yellow Panther,"
continued Henry, wishing to impress them. "It was I and my comrades who
carried the message to the wagon train that you fought at the ford,
where you were beaten, where you lost many warriors. I see that you
remember. Tell your warriors that Manitou favors my friends and me, that
we have never yet failed. We were present when the Indians of the south
and many renegades like Girty and Wyatt here, men with black hearts who
told lies to their red friends, were beaten in a great battle. As they
failed in the south, so will you fail here. A mighty fleet is coming,
and it will scatter you as the winter wind scatters the dead leaves."

Henry paused. He had calculated his effects carefully. He wished to
create feeling between red man and renegade, and he wished to plant in
the red mind the belief that he was really protected by Manitou. The
tribes, at least, might hesitate and delay, and meanwhile the fleet was
coming.

"I'll see that you're burned at the stake when we take this place,"
shouted Girty, "and I'll see that it's the slowest fire a man ever died
over."

"I've said what I had to say," called back the youth.

He stepped down from the wall. The renegades and the chiefs retired to
the woods.

"What were you saying to them?" asked Major Braithwaite.

"I was telling them of their former failures," replied Henry. "I was
trying to discourage them and to make them hate the renegades."