The irate grandfather flung the glossy trinket from him down among the ashes of the fire, which glowed in the centre of the floor of the great council-house of the town of Citico, one of the dome-shaped buildings, plastered as usual within and without with richly tinted red clay.  The flicker from the coals revealed the rows of posts that like a colonnade upheld the roof; the cane-wrought divan encircling the apartment between these columns and the windowless walls; the astonished faces and feather-crested heads of the conclave of Cherokee chiefs from half a dozen towns as they clustered around the fire and stared at Tscholens.

The grave emotion in his face dignified its expression despite its savagery.  Paradoxically the grandfather was young, slender, and, rated by any other standard than that of the Cherokees, an unusually tall people, would have been considered of fine height.  His muscular arms were bare except for his heavy silver bracelets; a tuft of feathers quivered high on his head; his leggings were of deerskin, embroidered with parti-colored quills of the porcupine, and his shirt was of fine sable fur.  His voice was sonorously insistent.

“N’petalogalgun!” (I am sent as a messenger) he declared urgently.  “Give me a belt.”

He turned his flaming eyes directly upon Atta-Kulla-Kulla, himself in the prime of life now, in 1745, who it seemed must act definitely under this coercion.  He must either refuse to testify to the truth, which he knew, or involve his people, the Cherokees, in a quarrel which did not concern them, of which a century was tired, between the Lenni Lenape and the Mengwe.

So long ago it had begun!  The Mengwe, hard pressed by other nations and long at war with the Lenape, besought peace of this foe, and that they would use their influence with the others.  Usually women, prompted always by the losing side, protested against the further effusion of blood and went with intercessions from one faction to the other.  This, in view of the number and devious interests of the warring forces, was then impracticable, and therefore the Mengwe besought the Lenape to act as mediator for the occasion.  Only so noted a race of warriors could afford this magnanimity, the Mengwe argued.  It might impair the prestige of a less high-couraged and powerful tribe.  And with these specious wiles the cat was duly belled.

But alas for the Lenape!  Magnanimity is the most dangerous of all the virtues—­to its possessor!  Presently the Mengwe claimed to have conquered the Lenape in battle, and cited the well-known fact that they had inaugurated peace proposals.  As the Mengwe confederation grew more powerful they assumed all the arrogance of a protectorate.  They sold the lands of their dependents.  They resented all action of the Lenape on their own account.  If the Lenape went to war on some quarrel of their making, they had the Mengwe to reckon with as well as the enemy.  As the years rolled by in scores,