"Your guards will take you slowly through the forest, stopping to eat and sleep. For them there is no need to run like the stag with the hunter behind it." "Then we should make for Jamestown as for life," I said, "not sleeping or eating or making pause?" "Yes," he replied, "if you would not die, you and all your people." In the silence of the hut the fire crackled, and the branches of the trees outside, bent by the wind, made a grating sound against the bark roof. "How die?" I asked at last. "Speak out!" "Die by the arrow and the tomahawk," he answered,--"yea, and by the guns you have given the red men. To-morrow's sun, and the next, and the next--three suns--and the tribes will fall upon the English. At the same hour, when the men are in the fields and the women and children are in the houses, they will strike--all the tribes, as one man; and from where the Powhatan falls over the rocks to the salt water beyond Accomac, there will not be one white man left alive." He ceased to speak, and for a minute the fire made the only sound in the hut. Then I asked, "All die? There are three thousand Englishmen in Virginia." "They are scattered and unwarned. The fighting men of the villages of the Powhatan and the Pamunkey and the great bay are many, and they have sharpened their hatchets and filled their quivers with arrows." "Scattered!" I cried. "Strewn broadcast up and down the river--here a lonely house, there a cluster of two or three--the men in the fields or at the wharves, the women and children busy within doors, all unwarned!" I leaned against the side of the hut, for my heart beat like a frightened woman's. "Three days!" I exclaimed. "If we go with all our speed, we shall be in time. When did you learn this thing?" "While you watched the dance," the Indian answered, "Opechancanough and I sat within his lodge in the darkness. His heart was moved, and he talked to me of his own youth in a strange country, south of the sunset. Also he spoke to me of Powhatan, my father--of how wise he was and how great a chief before the English came, and how he hated them. And then--then I heard what I have told you!" "How long has this been planned?" "For many moons. I have been a child, fooled and turned aside from the trail; not wise enough to see it beneath the flowers, through the smoke of the peace pipes." "Why does Opechancanough send us back to the settlements?" I demanded. "It is his fancy. Every hunter and trader and learner of our tongues, living in the villages or straying in the woods, has been sent back to Jamestown or his home with presents and fair words. You will lull the English in Jamestown into a faith in the smiling sky just before the storm bursts on them in fullest fury." There was a pause. "Nantaquas," I said, "you are not the first child of Powhatan who has loved and shielded the white men."