The girl did not look altogether submissive. Nevertheless she nodded. “Alagwa will remember,” she promised. “Yet surely Tecumseh is deceived. The white man speaks with a straight tongue. He brings Alagwa great tidings. And the redcoats are the friends of the Shawnees.” The Indian shrugged his shoulders. “Tecumseh speaks; Alagwa must obey!” he declared, bluntly. Then he turned away, leaving the girl to wonder--quite as mightily as if she had lived all her life among her civilized sisters. How long she stood and wondered she never knew. Abruptly she was roused by a sound of voices from the direction of the southern outposts. Steadily the sound grew, deepening into a many-throated chant--the chant of welcome to those returning from a journey--the chant of thanksgiving that those arriving have passed safely over all the perils of the way: Greatly startled now have I been today By your voice coming through the woods to this clearing; With a troubled mind have you come Through obstacles of every kind. Great thanks, therefore, we give, that safely You have arrived. Now then, together, Let both of us smoke. For all around indeed Are hostile powers-- Alagwa spun round. She knew what the song meant--Tecumseh was returning. A moment later he passed her, striding onward to his lodge. His face was stern--the face of one who goes to face the great crisis of his life. Behind him came chief after chief, warrior after warrior, members of many tribes. Versed in Indian heraldry as she was, Alagwa could not read half the ensigns there foregathered. CHAPTER IV FOR nearly a month Jack Telfair, with black Cato at his heels, had been riding northward through a country recently reclaimed from the wilderness and reduced to civilization. Day after day he passed over broad well-beaten roads from village to village and from farmstead to farmstead, where clucking hens and lowing cattle had taken the place of Indian, bear, and wildcat. Between, he rode through long stretches of wilderness, where the settlements lay farther and farther apart and the ill-kept way grew more and more rugged and silver-frosted boulders glistened underfoot in the dawn.