The Princess Pocahontas Part 18

Then, their work over, the Indians began to deck themselves out in the beads and cloths. While they were thus occupied a man came running and dropped down exhausted before Powhatan, able to gasp out a couple of words only. Though the messenger had not breath enough to cry them out, they were heard by the Indians standing nearby and shouted aloud.

Immediately the crowd jumped to their feet and uttering loud shrieks, danced up and down and around in circles, to the sound of rattles and drums.

"What is the meaning of all this, Smith?" asked Russell, who with the other white men stood watching the strange performance.

"Tell them, my son," said Powhatan, understanding from the tone of the Englishman's voice that his words were a question, "that two score of my braves, among them Nautauquas and Claw-of-the-Eagle, have won a great victory over one hundred of our enemies, and that this is our song of triumph."

The old chief's eye shone more brightly than ever, and his back was as firm and straight as that of one of his sons.

"I shall soon have witnessed all their different dances," John Smith confided to Russell, when he had repeated Powhatan's explanation. "There lacks now only the war dance."

There was a pause in the dance; then Powhatan gave a signal. Drums and rattles started up once more. The rhythm was a different one, even the white men could tell this; and they noticed that the savages moved more swiftly as if animated by the greatest excitement. Fresh dancers, their faces and bodies painted in red and black, took the places of those who fell from fatigue, and the woods resounded with their loud song.

"It must have been a great victory," suggested Ratcliffe, "to have excited them in this manner."

But Pocahontas's heart beat as if it were the war drum itself, for she knew what the white men did not know, that this last was a war dance; but she was not yet certain against whom her tribe was to take the war-path. She must wait and see.

At last the dancing ceased and the feasting began, and the Englishmen still watched with interest the "queer antics" of the savages, as they called them. All was now so peaceful that they laid aside their weapons, setting a guard to watch them, and sitting about the great fire they had built in the lodge, waited for the morning's high tide to lift their boat out of the half-frozen ooze in which the ebb had left it. Powhatan and the Indians had withdrawn, but the werowance had sent a messenger with a necklace and bracelet of freshwater pearls with words of affection for "his son" and to say that he would shortly send them supper from his own pots, that they might want for nothing that night.

The darkness had come quickly and the woods that stretched between the lodge and the centre of Werowocomoco were thick and sombre. Through them Pocahontas sped more swiftly than she had ever run a race with her brothers. She did not trip over the roots slippery with frost nor, though she had not taken time to put a mantle over her bare shoulders, did she feel the cold. For she knew now that the war dance had been danced against the English.

She was all but breathless when she reached the lodge near the river's edge, but rus.h.i.+ng inside, she seized a musket from the pile on the ground, to the astonishment of the guard, who recognized her in time not to hurt her, and thrust it into Smith's hands, crying:

"Arm yourselves, my friends. Make ready quickly," and as Smith would have questioned, she panted: "When your weapons are in readiness then will I speak."

Smith gave hurried orders, reproaching himself for his false confidence.

The men sprang up from the fire, seized their long-barrelled muskets and their halberts; and a few who had laid aside their steel corselets hastily fastened them on again, and threw their bandoliers, filled with charges, over their shoulders. The merry, careless party was now quickly converted into a troop of cautious soldiers. Then Smith turned to Pocahontas, whose breath was coming more quietly as she beheld the precautions taken for defence. She answered his unspoken query:

"I overheard the words of the treacherous Dutchmen to my father even now. I feared when I heard the war song and saw them dancing the war dance. Woe is me! my Brother, that I should speak against my own father, but I listened to the plans he hath made to take you here unawares, your weapons out of your hands. For this moment he hath waited all day and he hath sought to deceive you with fair words. They are now on their way with the supper he promised thee; then when you are all eating he hath given orders to his men that they fall upon you and slay all, that none may escape. And so as soon as I learned this, that thou to whom he had sworn friends.h.i.+p and thine were in dire peril, I hastened through the dark forest to warn thee."

Smith was deeply touched by this manifestation of her loyalty. He knew the danger she ran if Powhatan should learn of what she had done.

"Matoaka," he cried, clasping her hand, "thou hast this night put all England in thy debt. As long as this Virginia is a name men remember, so long will men recall how thou didst save her from destruction. In truth, thy father had lulled my suspicions to sleep, and hadst thou not come to warn us we had surely perished. The thanks of all of us to thee.

Princess," he continued, when he had turned and told his astonished men the gist of her words, "and to my little Sister my own deep grat.i.tude again."

He loosened a thick gold chain from about his neck, one that he had brought back from the country of the Turks, and put it about her bare neck.

"Take this chain in remembrance," he said. Then his comrades pressed forward, each with some gift they emptied into the maiden's hands.

She gazed at them all lovingly, but she shook her head slowly, the tears falling as she said:

"I dare not, my friends; if my father should behold these gifts he would kill me, since he would know that it was I who had brought ye warning."

Slowly she took off the chain and reluctantly placed in it Smith's hand, and let gently fall the other treasures she longed to keep. Smith bent and kissed her hand as reverently as he had once kissed that of Good Queen Bess.

Pocahontas started. "I hear them coming," she cried, and with one bound she had sprung forth again into the night, skirting the river until she was sure of reaching her lodge without running into the troop of Indians advancing with dishes and baskets of food, who, however, were not slaves but braves and armed.

When these reached the stranger-lodge they brought in the supper and laid it down with apparent great heartiness that is the few who actually bore the baskets. The others found themselves somehow halted by Smith at the entrance and engaged in ceremonious conversation. When they suggested that the white men lay aside their weapons and seat themselves the better to enjoy their food, Smith replied that it was the custom of the English at night always to eat standing, food in one hand and musket in the other. For a long time this parleying went on; Smith would not show that he had discovered their perfidy.

Then the baffled Indians retired to the forest, to await the moment when they could catch the white men off guard. But though all night they spied about the lodge, not once did they find the sentinels away from their posts, and they had too much fear of the "death tubes" to attempt an onslaught on men so well defended.

So, thanks to Pocahontas, the morning dawned on an undiminished number of English, and at high tide they embarked in their boat and returned to Jamestown with their provisions so precariously won.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Decorative]

CHAPTER XV

A FAREWELL

The late summer sun was beating down pitilessly upon the lodges and open s.p.a.ces of Werowocomoco. Even the children were quiet in the shade, covering their heads with the long green blades of the maize, plaiting the ta.s.sels idly and humming the chant of the Green Corn Festival they had celebrated some weeks before. The old braves smoked or dozed in their wigwams, and the squaws left their pounding of corn and their cooking until a cooler hour. The young braves only, too proud to appear affected by any condition of the weather, made parade of their industry and sat fas.h.i.+oning arrow-heads or ran races in the full suns.h.i.+ne, till a wise old chief called out to them that they were young fools with no more sense than blue jays.

Off in the woods, near a hollow in a little stream where the trout and crawfish disported themselves over a bright sandy bottom, Pocahontas lay at full length, her brown arms stretched out, the color of the pine needles beneath them. The leaf.a.ge of a gigantic red oak shaded her; through its greenery she could see the heavy white clouds, and once an eagle flying as it seemed straight up into the sun. Away from its direct rays, cooled by her bath in the stream and clad in an Indian maiden's light garb, she was rejoicing in the summer heat. She enjoyed the sleepy feeling that dulled the woodland sights and sounds: the tapping of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r on a distant tree, the occasional call of a catbird, the soft scurrying of a rabbit or a squirrel, the buzzing of a laden bee--all mingled into one melody of summer of which she did not consciously distinguish the individual notes. Just as pleasantly confused were her thoughts, pictures of which her drowsiness blurred the outlines, so that she pa.s.sed with no effort from the flecked stream she had just left to the moonlit field she and her maidens had encircled a few nights before, chanting harvest songs. She saw, too, the supple bend of Claw-of-the-Eagle's body as he had waited for the signal to bound forward in the race at Powhata when he outran the others; and then she seemed again to see him run the day Wansutis saved him from being clubbed to death.

As if the many deeds of violence done that day called up others of their kind, she saw, and did not shrink from seeing, the fate of the Dutchmen at Werowocomoco who had sought to betray Smith to Powhatan. Her father, angered at them, had had them brained upon the threshold of the house they had built for him.

Then the thoughts of Pocahontas found themselves at Jamestown, whither they now often wandered. She smiled as she remembered her own amazement at the sight of the two Englishwomen who had lately arrived there: Mistress Forrest and her maid, Anne Burroughs. With what curiosity the white women and the Indian girl had measured each other, their hair, their eyes, their curious garments! Then she beheld in her fancy her friend, her "brother," so earnest, so brave, who out of opposition always captured victory. She had witnessed how he forced the colonists to labor, had seen the punishment he meted out to those who disobeyed his commands against swearing--that strange offence she could not comprehend--the pouring of cold water in the sleeve of those who uttered oaths, amid the jeers and laughter of their companions. Her lips continued to smile while she thought of Smith, of the gentle words he had ever ready for her, of the interest he ever manifested at all she had to tell him. He had talked to her as she knew he talked to few, of his hopes for this little handful of men who must live and grow, and how, if they two, he and his "little Sister," could bring it about, the English and the Powhatans should forget any grievances against one another and be friends as long as the sky and earth should last.

Perhaps, he had said one day, marriages between the English and the Indians might cement this friends.h.i.+p. "Perhaps thou thyself, Matoaka,"

he had begun, and then had ceased. Now she wondered again, as she had wondered then, if he had perhaps meant himself.

Such a possibility was an exciting one, and she would have been glad to let her mind explore it fully; but her eyes were heavy and the pine needles soft and fragrant, and soon the beaver, who from a hollow beneath the exposed roots of the oak over the stream had been watching her bright eyes, seeing them closed, slipped forth to begin again his work on the dam her feet had flattened out.

Though Nautauquas, returning an hour later from a peaceful mission to a confederated tribe, made scarcely more noise than the beaver, Pocahontas awoke and raised her head and loosening the needles from her hair, sprang up.

"Greetings, Matoaka!" called out her brother. "Thou wert as snugly hidden here as a deer."

"What news, my Brother?" she asked as he sat down and, taking off his moccasins, let his heated feet hang into the stream.

"Evil news it is," he answered gravely, "for the friends of the great Captain."

"What hath befallen my white Brother?" she cried out; "tell me speedily."

"He was sleeping in his boat, I heard, far off from their island. A big bag of the powder they put into their guns lay in the bottom of his canoe, and when by chance a spark from his pipe fell upon it it grew angry and began to spit and burned his flesh till it waked him, and in his agony, he sprang into the river to quench the blaze."

Pocahontas, who had not winced at the thought of the brained Dutchmen, s.h.i.+vered.

"Where is he now?" she asked. "I wish to go to him."

Nautauquas looked at her earnestly as if he would question her, but did not. "They say he is on his way to Jamestown and should reach there on the morrow."

As Pocahontas and Nautauquas returned at sunset to Werowocomoco, the girl stopped at Wansutis's lodge.

"Thou comest for healing herbs for thy white man," exclaimed the old woman before Pocahontas had spoken a word. "I have them here ready for thee," and she thrust a bundle into the astonished maiden's hands.

"But," continued the hag, "though they would cure any of our people, they will not have power with the white man's malady save he have faith in them."