s head held high and his
back against the wall. Many of us could remember him, a proud, shy lad,
coming for the first time from the forest with his sister to see the
English village and its wonders. For idleness we had set him in our
midst that summer day, long ago, on the green by the fort, and had
called him "your royal highness," laughing at the quickness of our wit,
and admiring the spirit and bearing of the lad and the promise he gave
of a splendid manhood. And all knew the tale I had brought the night
before.

Slowly, as one man, and with no spoken word, we fell back, the half
circle straightening into a line and leaving a clear pathway to the open
gates. The wind had ceased to blow, I remember, and a sunny stillness
lay upon the sand, and the rough-hewn wooden stakes, and a little patch
of tender grass across which stretched a dead man's arm. The church
bells began to ring.

The Indian out of whose path to life and freedom we had stepped glanced
from the line of lowered steel to the open gates and the forest beyond,
and understood. For a full minute he waited, moving not a muscle, still
and stately as some noble masterpiece in bronze. Then he stepped from
the shadow of the wall and moved past us through the sunshine that
turned the eagle feather in his scalp lock to gold. His eyes were fixed
upon the forest; there was no change in the superb calm of his face. He
went by the huddled dead and the long line of the living that spoke no
word, and out of the gates and across the neck, walking slowly that we
might yet shoot him down if we saw fit to repent ourselves, and proudly
like a king's son. There was no sound save the church bells ringing for
our deliverance. He reached the shadow of the trees: a moment, and the
forest had back her own.

We sheathed our swords and listened to the Governor's few earnest words
of thankfulness and of recognition of this or that man's service, and
then we set to work to clear the ground of the dead, to place sentinels,
to bring the town into order, to determine what policy we should pursue,
to search for ways by which we might reach and aid those who might be
yet alive in the plantations above and below us.

We could not go through the forest where every tree might hide a foe,
but there was the river. For the most part, the houses of the English
had been built, like mine at Weyanoke, very near to the water. I
volunteered to lead a party up river, and Wynne to go with another
tow