“You vouch for them?”

“With my honour, General.”

“Very well, sir....  And your Mohican Loup —­ he can perform what he has promised?  Guide us straight to Catharines-town, I mean?”

“He has said it.”

“Aye—­ but what is your opinion of that promise?”

“A Siwanois Sagamore never lies.”

“You trust him?”

“Perfectly.  We are blood-brothers, he and I.”

“Oho!” said the General, nodding.  “That was cunningly done, sir.”

“No, sir.  The idea was his own.”

General Sullivan laughed again, playing with the polished gorget at his throat.

“Do you never take any credit for your accomplishments, Mr. Loskiel?” he inquired.

“How can I claim credit for that which was not of my own and proper plotting, sir?”

“Oh, it can be done,” said the General, laughing more heartily.  “Ask some of our brigadiers and colonels, Mr. Loskiel, who desire advancement every time that heaven interposes to save them from their own stupidities!  Well, well, let it go, sir!  It is on a different matter that I have summoned you here—­ a very different business, Mr. Loskiel—­ one which I do not thoroughly comprehend.

“All I know is this:  that we Continentals are warring with Britain and her allies of the Long House, that our few Oneida and Stockbridge Indians are fighting with us.  But it seems that between the Indians of King George and those who espouse our cause there is a deeper and bloodier and more mysterious feud.”

“Yes, General.”

“What is it?” he asked bluntly.

“A religious feud—­ terrible, implacable.  But this is only between the degraded and perverted priesthood of the Senecas and our Oneidas and Mohicans, whose Sachems and Sagamores have been outraged and affronted by the blasphemous mockeries of Amochol.”

“I have heard something of this.”

“No doubt, sir.  And it is true.  The Senecas are different.  They belong not in the Long House.  They are an alien people at heart, and seem more nearly akin to the Western Indians, save that they share with the Confederacy its common Huron-Iroquois speech.  For although their ensigns sit at the most sacred rite of the Confederacy, perhaps not daring in Federal Council to reveal what they truly are, I am convinced, sir, that of the Seneca Sachems the majority are at heart pagans.  I do not mean non-Christians, of course; they are that anyway; but I mean they are degenerated from the more noble faith of the Iroquois, who, after all, acknowledge one God as we do, and have become the brutally superstitious slaves of their vile and perverted priests.

“It is the spawn of Frontenac that has done this.  What the Wyoming Witch did at Wyoming her demons will do hereafter.  Witchcraft, the frenzied worship of goblins, ghouls, and devils, the sacrifice to Biskoonah, all these have little by little taken the place of the grotesque but harmless rites practiced at the Onon-hou-aroria.  Amochol has made it sinister and terrible beyond words; and it is making of the Senecas a swarm of fiends from hell itself.