"You said," Oliver hinted, "that you carried a pipe once. Was that--anything particular?" "It might be peace or war," said the Mound-Builder. "In my case it was an order for Council, from which war came, bloody and terrible. A Pipe-Bearer's life was always safe where he was recognized, though when there is war one is very likely to let fly an arrow at anything moving in the trails. That reminds me..." The Tallega put back his feathered robe carefully as he leaned upon his elbow, and the children snuggled into a little depression at the top of the mound where the fire-hole had been, to listen. "There was a boy in our town," he began, "who was the captain of all our plays from the time we first stole melons and roasting-ears from the town gardens. He got us into no end of trouble, but no matter what came of it, we always stood up for him before the elders. There was nothing _they_ could say which seemed half so important to us as praise or blame from Ongyatasse. I don't know why, unless it was because he could out-run and out-wrestle the best of us; and yet he was never pleased with himself unless the rest of us were satisfied to have it that way. "Ongyatasse was what his mother called him. It means something very pretty about the colored light of evening, but the name that he earned for himself, when he was old enough to be Name-Seeking, was Young-Man-Who-Never-Turns-Back. "He was the arrow laid to the bow, and he could no more take himself back from the adventure he had begun than the shaft can come back to the bowstring. "Before we were old enough to go up to the god-house and hear the sacred Tellings, he had half the boys in our village bound to him in an unbreakable vow never to turn back from anything we had started. It got us into a great many difficulties, some of which were ridiculous, but it had its advantages. The time we chased a young elk we had raised, across the squash and bean vines of Three Towns, we escaped punishment on the ground of our vow. Any Tallega parent would think a long time before he expected his son to break a promise." Oliver kept to the main point of interest. "Did you get the elk?" "_Of course_. You see we were never allowed to carry a man's hunting outfit until we had run down some big game, and brought it in alive to prove ourselves proper sportsmen. So partly for that and partly because Ongyatasse always knew the right words to say to everybody, we were forgiven the damage to the gardens. "That was the year the Lenni-Lenape came to the Grand Council, which was held here at Sandusky, asking permission to cross our territory toward the Sea on the East. They came out of Shinaki, the Fir-Land, as far as Namae-Sippu, and stood crowded between the lakes north of the river. For the last year or two, hunting-parties of theirs had been warned back from trespass, but this was the first time we youngsters had seen anything of them.