Part 50 (1/2)

Listen, John Drogue, This will happen, And it is well, Because I love you.

”Why do I love you?

Because you are a boy-chief, And we are both young, Thou and I.

Why do I love you?

Because you are my elder brother, And you speak to the Oneidas Very gently.

”I am a prophetess; I see events beforehand; This is my Karenna: Though we all die tonight, You shall survive in Scarlet: And this is well, Because I love you.”

[Footnote 16:

_The Karenna of Thiohero_

Yi-ya-thon-dek, _John Drogue_, Da-ed-e-wenh-he-i, Engh-si-tsko-dak-i!

Yi-ya-thon-dek, _John Drogue_, Nenne-a-wenni Yo-ya-neri Kenonwes!]

So, crooning her prophecy, she lay flat in the wild gra.s.ses, cuddling the rifle-stock close to her shoulder; and her song's low cadence was like the burden of some cricket amid the herbage.

”Tharon alone knows all,” I breathed in her ear.

”Neah!” she murmured; and touched her cheek against mine.

”Only G.o.d knows who shall survive tonight,” I insisted.

”Onhteh. Ra-ko-wan-enh,”[17] she murmured. ”But I have seen you, _niare_,[18] through a mist, coming from this place, O-ne-kwen-da-ri-en.[19] And dead bodies lay about. Do you believe me?”

[Footnote 17: Perhaps! He is Chief.]

[Footnote 18: Beforehand.]

[Footnote 19: Literally, in scarlet blood.]

I made no reply but lay motionless, watching the tamaracks, ghostly in their cerements of silver fog. And I heard, through the low rhythm of her song, owls howling far away amid those spectral wastes, and saw the Oneida Dancers,[20] very small and pale above the void.

[Footnote 20: The Pleiades.]

I stared with fierce satisfaction at Howell's house. There was no gleam of light visible behind the closed shutters; but I already had counted nine men who came creeping to that silent rendezvous. And now there arrived the tenth man, running and stooping low; and went in by the east side of the house.

I waited a full minute longer, then whistled the whitethroat's call.

”Now!” said I to Thiohero; and we rose and walked forward through the light mist which lay knee-deep over the ground.

We had not advanced ten paces when three men, whom I had not perceived, rose up on the ridge to our right.

One of these shouted and fired a gun, and all three dropped flat again before we could realize what they had been about.

But already, out of that shadowy house, armed men swarmed like black hornets from their nest, and we ran to cut them from the tamaracks, but could not mark their flight in the so great darkness.

Then Nick Stoner struck flint, and dropped his tinder upon the remnants of a hay-stack, where wisps of last year's marsh gra.s.s still littered the rick.