In the meantime the truce was extended until the autumn and the Englishmen were sent back to Jamestown.  Nautauquas and Catanaugh had enjoyed their time on the island among the palefaces, Catanaugh being interested only in the fort and its guns and in the ship, and Nautauquas, not only in these, but in talking as well as he could with the colonists.  He and Pocahontas again went hunting together on the mainland, for the Governor allowed them full liberty to come and go as they pleased, feeling sure that Nautauquas would keep his word not to leave Jamestown until the Powhatan sent back Rolfe and Sparkes.

And the day that these returned the two braves set off to join their father at Orapaks.

[Illustration:  Decorative]

CHAPTER XX

THE WEDDING

Everyone in Jamestown was astir early one April morning in 1614.  The soldiers and the few children of the settlement, impressed with the importance of their errand, had gone into the woods to cut large sprays of wild azalea and magnolia to deck the church.

Sir Thomas Dale, and in truth all the cavaliers of the town, had seen that their best costumes were in order, sighing at the moth holes in precious cloth doublets and the rents in Flemish lace collars and cuffs, yet satisfied on the whole with their holiday appearance.  The few women of the Colony, Mistress Easton, Mistress Horton, Elizabeth Parsons and others, had of course prepared their garments many days before.  It was not often they had an excuse for decking themselves in the finery they had packed with such care and misgivings back in their English homes; and this was an occasion such as no one in the world had ever before participated in.  Here was an English gentleman of old lineage who was to wed the daughter of a great heathen ruler, one in whose power it lay to help or hinder the progress of this first permanent English colony in the New World.  In addition to making themselves as gay as possible, they had prepared a wedding breakfast to be served to the gentry at the Governor’s house, and the Governor had provided that meat and other viands and ale should be distributed from the general store to the soldiers and laborers and the Indians, their guests.

The guard at the fort was kept busy admitting the Indians and bidding them lay aside their bows, hatchets or knives; though in truth no one that day looked for any hostile act, since Powhatan’s consent to his daughter’s marriage had put an end to the enmity between them.

He himself had not come to the ceremony.  He was not minded to set his foot upon any land other than his own, but he had sent as his representative Pocahontas’s uncle, Opechisco, and many messages of affection to “his dearest daughter.”  The elderly werowance wore all the ceremonial robes of his tribe:  a headdress of feathers, leggings and girdle and a long deerskin mantle heavily embroidered in beads of