“Look!” I cried, quivering with excitement; “look, their leggings and moccasins are wet!”

“There’s no devil if they beant!” said Tom, and there was a murmur of approval from the other men.

“The boy is right,” said the Colonel, and turned to Tom.  “Sergeant, have the chiefs put in irons.”  He swung on his heel, and without more ado went back to his house to bed.  The North Wind and two others were easily singled out as the leaders, and were straightway escorted to the garrison house, their air of injured innocence availing them not a whit.  The militia was dismissed, and the village was hushed once more.

But all night long the chiefs went to and fro, taking counsel among themselves.  What would the Chief of the Pale Faces do?

The morning came with a cloudy, damp dawning.  Within a decent time (for the Indian is decorous) blanketed deputations filled the archways under the trees and waited there as the minutes ran into hours.  The Chief of the Long Knives surveyed the morning from his door-step, and his eyes rested on a solemn figure at the gate.  It was the Hungry Wolf.  Sorrow was in his voice, and he bore messages from the twenty great chiefs who stood beyond.  They were come to express their abhorrence of the night’s doings, of which they were as innocent as the deer of the forest.

“Let the Hungry Wolf tell the chiefs,” said Colonel Clark, briefly, “that the council is the place for talk.”

And he went back into the house again.

Then he bade me run to Captain Bowman with an order to bring the North
Wind and his confederates to the council field in irons.

The day followed the promise of the dawn.  The clouds hung low, and now and again great drops struck the faces of the people in the field.  And like the heavens, the assembly itself was charged with we knew not what.  Was it peace or war?  As before, a white man sat with supreme indifference at a table, and in front of him three most unhappy chiefs squatted in the grass, the shame of their irons hidden under the blanket folds.  Audacity is truly a part of the equipment of genius.  To have rescued the North Wind and his friends would have been child’s play; to have retired from the council with threats of war, as easy.

And yet they craved pardon.

One chief after another rose with dignity in the ring and came to the table to plead.  An argument deserving mention was that the North Wind had desired to test the friendship of the French for the Big Knives,—­set forth without a smile.  To all pleaders Colonel Clark shook his head.  He, being a warrior, cared little whether such people were friends or foes.  He held them in the hollow of his hand.  And at length they came no more.

The very clouds seemed to hang motionless when he rose to speak, and you who will may read in his memoir what he said.  The Hungry Wolf caught the spirit of it, and was eloquent in his own tongue, and no word of it was lost.  First he told them of the causes of war, of the thirteen council fires with the English, and in terms that the Indian mind might grasp, and how their old father, the French King, had joined the Big Knives in this righteous fight.