"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 Powhatan and the Indians had withdrawn, but the werowance had sent a messenger with a necklace and bracelet of freshwater pearls with words of affection for "his son" and to say that he would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 rushing 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: