“Oh!” she cried. “I will try. Truly! I will try. Wilwiloway is good and kind and brave. I am proud that he has chosen me. I wish I could love him. But--but I do not, and I must love before I give myself. I am bad! wicked! I know it. Yes! I have a white heart. But I will pray to Mishemanitou, the Great God, to make it red.” The old woman caught the sobbing girl to her heart. “Do not weep!” she said, gently. “See! the sun burns red through the trees; it is the answer of Manitou, the mighty. He sends it as a message that your heart shall turn from white to red. There! It is changed! Look up, Alagwa, and be glad.” The girl raised her head and stared at the line of trees that curled away in a great crescent toward the east and the west. The sun did indeed burn red through them. Could it be an omen? As she stared the squaw slipped silently away. Alagwa’s heart was burning hot within her. The squaw’s accusation that her heart was white had cut deep. All her remembered life she had been taught to hate and fear the white men. White men were the source of all evil that had befallen her. They had driven her and her people back, back, ever back, forcing them to give up one home after another. White men had slain her friends; never did she inquire for some dear one who was missing but to be told that he had been killed by the white men. Again and again in her baby ears had rung the cries of the squaws, weeping for the dead who would return no more. Of the other side of the picture she knew nothing. Of the red rapine the Shawnee braves had wrought for miles and miles to the south she had heard, but it was to her only a name, not the awful fact that it had been to its victims. To her the whites were aggressors, robbers, murderers, who were slowly but surely crushing her Indian friends. Only the year before they had destroyed her home at Tippecanoe on the banks of the Wabash. Well she remembered their advance, their fair speaking that concealed their implacable purpose to destroy her people. Well she remembered the great Indian council that debated whether to fight or to yield, the promises of the Prophet that his medicine would shield the Indians against the white men’s bullets, the night attack, the repulse, the flight across miles of prairie to the ancestral home at Wapakoneta. She remembered Tecumseh’s return--too late. Here, also, she knew nothing of the other side--of the absolute military necessity that the headquarters from which Tecumseh was preparing to sweep the frontier should be destroyed and its menace ended. It was she and her friends who had suffered and it was she and her friends who had fled, half starved, across those perilous miles of swamp and morass. It was the white men who had triumphed; and she hated them, hated them, hated them. The memory of it all was bitter.