This decision was typical of the man of action. "Prudent only where recklessness was a fault, and hazardous only when hesitation meant defeat." CHAPTER XVIII. AN INDIAN POW-WOW. It was a picturesque council of white men and Indians that was held at dawn in an open glade of the forest. The fragrant odours of the bush mingled with the pungent smoke of the red willow-bark, puffed from a hundred pipes. Conspicuous at this pow-wow was Tecumseh, who across his close-fitting buckskin hunting jacket, which descended to his knees and was trimmed with split leather fringe, wore a belt of wampum, made of the purple enamel of mussel shells--cut into lengths like sections of a small pipe-stem, perforated and strung on sinew. On his head he wore a toque of eagle plumes. "My object," said Brock, addressing the Indians, "is to assist you to drive the 'Long-knives' [Americans] from the frontier, and repel invasion of the King's country." Tecumseh, speaking for his tribesmen, remarked, not without sarcasm, that "their great father, King George, having awakened out of a long sleep, they were now ready to shed their last drop of blood in that father's service." "The pale faces," he continued, after an impressive pause--and the fire of his eloquence and his gestures swayed his hearers like the reeds on the river bank--"the Americans who want to fight the British are our enemies.... They came to us hungry and they cut off the hands of our brothers who gave them corn.... We gave them rivers of fish and they poisoned our fountains.... We gave them forest-clad mountains and valleys full of game, and in return what did they give our warriors and our women? Rum and trinkets and--a grave!... The shades of our fathers slaughtered on the banks of the Tippecanoe can find no rest.... Their eyes can see no herds on the hills of light in the hunting grounds of the dead!... Until our enemies are no more we must be as one man, under one chief, whose name is--Death!... I have spoken." Tecumseh, it should be known, bore a personal grudge against the Americans, especially against the 4th Regiment, then in garrison at Detroit, the "heroes of Tippecanoe." This was a terrible misnomer, for under General Harrison, with 1,000 soldiers, less than a year before, they had taken part in the slaughter of Tecumseh's half-armed band of 600 men and women on the banks of the Tippecanoe River, during that chief's absence with many of his warriors, and had laid waste his village. With a perhaps pardonable spirit of vindictiveness, such as is shared by both redskin and white man, the human-being in him thirsted for revenge.