"Brother, tell us where are our sons!" exclaimed the head chief, louder than before. "Our women ask us for their sons--they want their sons. Where are they?" "Where are the snows of the last year?" asked the head warrior. "Have they not gone down the swelling river into the Great Lake? They have, and even so have your sons descended the stream of Time into the lake of Death. The great star sees them as they lie by the water of the Walkulla, but they see him not. The panther and the wolf howl unheeded at their feet, and the eagle screams, but they hear him not. The vulture whets his beak on their bones; the wild cat rends their flesh: both are unfelt--because they are dead." When the head warrior had told these things to our people, they set up their loud death-howl. The women cried; but the men sprung up, and took down their war-spears, and their bows and arrows(2), and filled their skins with parched corn, and prepared to dry meat for their journey, intending to go to war with the Walkullas and their allies, the slayers of their sons. But the chief warrior rose again, and said-- "Fathers and warriors, hear me, and believe my words, for I will tell you the truth. Who ever heard the Mad Buffalo lie, and who ever saw him afraid of his enemies? Never, since the time that he chewed the bitter root, and put on the new mocassins(3), has he lied, or fled from his foes. He has neither a forked tongue nor a faint heart. Fathers, the Walkullas are weaker than we; their arms are not so strong, their hearts are not so big, as ours. As well might the timid deer make war upon a hungry wolf, as the Walkullas upon the Shawanos. We could slay them as easily as a hawk pounces into a dove's nest and steals away her unfeathered little ones; the Mad Buffalo alone could have taken the scalps of half the nation. But a strange tribe has come among them--men whose skin is as white as the folds of the cloud, and whose hair shines like the great star of day. They do not fight, as we fight, with bows and arrows and with war-axes, but with spears[A], which thunder and lighten and send unseen death. The Shawanos fall before it, as the grapes and acorns fall when the forest is shaken by the wind in the Beaver-Moon(4). Look at the arm nearest ray heart; it was stricken by a bolt from the stranger's thunder. But he fell by the hand of the Mad Buffalo, who fears nothing but shame, and his scalp lies at the feet of the head chief. [Footnote A: Muskets, which were termed "spears" by the Indians in the earlier part of their intercourse with the Europeans.]