And then, he continued, the Lenni Lenape, after years of futile war, combined with the Mengwe,[12] and before their united force the Cherokee retired into the impregnable stronghold of their mountains, their beautiful country, the pride of the world!

He waved his hand toward the landscape—­lying out there in the lustre of its exquisite coloring, in the clarified air and the enhancing sunset; in the ideality of the contour of its majestic lofty mountains; in the splendor of its silver rivers, its phenomenally lush forests, its rich soil—­pitying the rest of the world who must needs dwell elsewhere.

“And here,” he went on, “the European found me two centuries ago.”

He proceeded to narrate the advent of De Soto and his followers into the country of the Cherokees, embellishing his account with unrecorded particulars of their stay, especially in their digging for gold and silver, in which enterprise he himself seemed to have actively participated—­only some two centuries previous!

Tscholens, listening, looked about absently at the “beloved square,” which was vacant, with its open piazza-like building on each of the four sides.  Two or three men were talking in the “war cabin,” painted a vivid red.  On the western side of the square the roof of the “holy cabin” showed dark against a lustrous reach of the shimmering river; despite the shadows within the broad entrance, the “sacred white seat” and the red clay transverse wall that partitioned off the sanctum sanctorum were plainly visible, but all was empty, deserted—­the cheera-taghe had departed for the night.

As Tsiskwa paused to cough, the Delaware, suddenly taking heart of grace, observed that it had always been the boast of the Lenni Lenape that they were the first tribe to welcome the European, the Dutch, to the land that they now called New York.

Whereupon Tsiskwa retorted in a tempest of racking coughs that, whoever welcomed the Europeans here or there, it was no credit that the Lenape should be so forward to appropriate it!  The white people were not the friends of the red man.  They wanted the whole country.  Finally they would have it.

“Mattapewiwak nik, schwannakwak!” (The white people are a deceiving lot!) said Tscholens, seeking some common ground on which they could meet with a mutual sentiment.

And at once Tsiskwa was all animation and as aggressive as at twenty.  Well, indeed, might the Lenape say that!  They were forever an easy prey—­not only of the astute Europeans, but of the simple Indian as well.  For a hundred years they had been the dupe of the Mengwe!  As the mind of Tsiskwa dwelt on the various subtleties of the diplomatic attitude of the Mengwe toward the Lenape, its craft so appealed to him that his lips curved with relish; a smile irradiated his blurred eyes and intensified his wrinkles; his cough, shaking the folds of his outer fur garments above his wasted chest, mingled with his gay chuckle of merriment, as young as a boy’s, while he cried, “Iroquois!  Iroquois!”—­the characteristic exclamation of the Mengwe confederation, whence they take their modern and popular name, and signifying, “I have spoken!  I have spoken!”