Behind these central figures the firelight fell on a solid semicircle of savages, crowns shaved, feathers aslant on the braided lock, and all oiled and painted for war.

A chief, wrapped in a blue blanket, stepped out into the circle swinging the carcass of a white dog by the hind-legs.  He tied it to a black-birch sapling and left it dangling and turning round and round.

“This for the Keepers of the Fires,” he said, in Tuscarora, and flung the dog’s entrails into the middle fire.

Three young men sprang into the ring; each threw a log onto one of the fires.

“The name of the Holder of the Heavens may now be spoken and heard without offence,” said an old sachem, rising.  “Hark! brothers.  Harken, O you wise men and sachems!  The False-Faces are laughing in the ravine where the water is being painted with firelight.  I acquaint you that the False-Faces are coming up out of the ravine!”

The witch-drums boomed and rattled in the silence that followed his words.  Far off I heard the sound of many voices laughing and talking all together; nearer, nearer, until, torch in hand, a hideously masked figure bounded into the circle, shaking out his bristling cloak of green reeds.  Another followed, another, then three, then six, then a dozen, whirling their blazing torches; all horribly masked and smothered in coarse bunches of long, black hair, or cloaked with rustling river reeds.

     “Ha!  Ah-weh-hot-kwah! 
     Ha!  Ah-weh-hah! 
     Ha!  The crimson flower! 
     Ha!  The flower!”

they chanted, thronging around the central fire; then falling back in a half-circle, torches lifted, while the masked figures banked solidly behind, chanted monotonously: 

     “Red fire burns on the maple! 
     Red fire burns in the pines. 
     The red flower to the maple! 
     The red death to the pines!”

At this two young girls, wearing white feathers and white weasel pelts dangling from shoulders to knees, entered the ring from opposite ends.  Their arms were full of those spectral blossoms called “Ghost-corn,” and they strewed the flowers around the ring in silence.  Then three maidens, glistening in cloaks of green pine-needles, slipped into the fire circle, throwing showers of violets and yellow moccasin flowers over the earth, calling out, amid laughter, “Moccasins for whippoorwills!  Violets for the two heads entangled!” And, their arms empty of blossoms, they danced away, laughing while the False-Faces clattered their wooden masks and swung their torches till the flames whistled.

Then six sachems rose, casting off their black-and-white blankets, and each in turn planted branches of yellow willow, green willow, red osier, samphire, witch-hazel, spice-bush, and silver birch along the edge of the silent throng of savages.

“Until the night-sun comes be these your barriers, O Iroquois!” they chanted.  And all answered: