e sun, and the arm next his heart
was bound up with the skin of the deer. His eye was hollow and his
body gaunt, as though he had fasted long. His quiver held no arrows.

"Where are our sons?" inquired the head chief of the warrior.

"Ask the wolf and the panther," he answered.

"Brother! tell us where are our sons!" exclaimed the chief. "Our
women ask us for their sons. They want them. Where are they?"

"Where are the snows of last year?" replied the warrior. "Have they
not gone down the swelling river into the Great Lake? They have, and
even so have your sons descended the stream of Time into the great
Lake of Death. The great star sees them as they lie by the water of
the Walkulla, but they see him not. The panther and the wolf howl
unheeded at their feet, and the eagle screams, but they hear them not.
The vulture whets his beak on their bones, the wild-cat rends their
flesh, both are unfelt, for your sons are dead."

When the warrior told these things to our people, they set up their
loud death-howl. The women wept; but the men sprang up and seized
their weapons, to go to meet the Walkullas, the slayers of their sons.
The chief warrior rose again--

"Fathers and warriors," said he, "hear me and believe my words, for I
will tell you the truth. Who ever heard the Head Buffalo lie, and who
ever saw him afraid of his enemies? Never, since the time that he
chewed the bitter root and put on the new moccasins, has he lied or
fled from his foes. He has neither a forked tongue nor a faint heart.
Fathers, the Walkullas are weaker than us. Their arms are not so
strong, their hearts are not so big, as ours. As well might the timid
deer make war upon the hungry wolf, as the Walkullas upon the
Shawanos. We could slay them as easily as a hawk pounces into a dove's
nest and steals away her unfeathered little ones. The Head Buffalo
alone could have taken the scalps of half the nation. But a strange
tribe has come among them--men whose skin is white as the folds of the
cloud, and whose hair shines like the great star of day. They do not
fight as we fight, with bows and arrows and with war-axes, but with
spears which thunder and lighten, and send unseen death. The Shawanos
fall before it as the berries and acorns fall when the forest is
shaken by the wind in the beaver-moon. Look at the arm nearest my
heart. It was stricken by a bolt from the strangers' thunder; but he
fell by the hands of the Head Buffalo, who fears nothing but