She ceased for a moment, then as if she were reading the words in the flames, she sang more slowly: 

“I am old, saith old Wansutis, yet I’ll live for many harvests.  I will seek another son now; I will bring him to my wigwam.  He shall watch me and protect me; he will cheer me in the winters.”

Pocahontas interrupted her: 

“That then is the reason thou didst steal my child.  Thou shalt not keep him; he is not for thy lodge.  He goeth with his father and with me to be brought up in the houses of the English.”

There came a cry from the forest, the same cry she had heard in her dreams.  Without an instant’s doubt, Pocahontas sprang into the blackness and in a few moments came back with the baby in her arms.  She squatted down by the fire, and felt it over feverishly until she had convinced herself that it was unharmed.

Wansutis now rose.

“Farewell, Princess,” she said.  “Wansutis will now be returning to her lodge.”

Now that she had her child safe again, Pocahontas’s kind heart began to speak: 

“Wansutis, thou knowest I cannot let thee have my son; but if thou wilt I will pray my father to give thee the next young brave he captures that thou mayst no longer be lonely.”

“I will seek no more sons,” answered the old woman; “perchance he might set off for a far land and leave me even as thy father’s daughter leaveth him.”

“But I will return to him,” protested Pocahontas.

“Dost thou know that?” the old woman asked, leaning down and peering directly into Pocahontas’s face.  Her gaze was so full of hatred that Pocahontas drew back in terror.

“I see a ship”—­Wansutis began to chant again—­“a ship that sails for many days towards the rising sun; but I never see a ship that sails to the sunset.  I see a deer from the free forests and it is fettered and its neck is hung with wampum and flowers; but the deer seeks in vain to escape to its bed of ferns in the woodland.  I see a bird that is caught where the lodges are closer together than the pebbles on the seashore; but I never see the bird fly free above their lodge tops.  I hear the crying of an orphan child; but the mother lieth where she cannot still it.”

Pocahontas gazed in horrible fascination at the old woman who, with another harsh laugh, vanished into the darkness.

[Illustration:  Decorative]

CHAPTER XXII

POCAHONTAS IN ENGLAND

It was an eager, happy Pocahontas that set sail with her husband.  Master Rolfe, her child and last—­but not in his own estimation—­Sir Thomas Dale.  With them, too, went Uttamatomakkin, a chief whom Powhatan sent expressly to observe the English and their ways in their own land.

Everything interested Pocahontas on the voyage:  the ship herself, the hoisting and furling of sails in calms and tempests, the chanteys of the sailors as they worked, the sight of spouting whales and, as they neared the English coast, the magnificence of a large ship-of-war, a veteran, so declared the captain, of the fleet which went so bravely forth to meet the Spanish Armada.  During the long evenings on deck Rolfe told her stories of real deeds of English history and fancied romances of poets; and all were equally wonderful to her.