The Mohawk smiled.  “That is because few tomahawks content themselves with times of peace.  While war lives, you will never see a silver chain worn by an Iroquois, nor will you see it on anything he possesses,” he answered.

“Then it is the badge of peace?” questioned the boy.

“The badge of peace—­yes,” replied Queetah.

It was a unique weapon which the boy fingered so curiously.  The tomahawk itself was shaped like a slender axe, and wrought of beaten copper, with a half-inch edge of gleaming steel cleverly welded on, forming a deadly blade.  At the butt end of the axe was a delicately shaped pipe bowl, carved and chased with heads of animals, coiling serpents and odd conventional figures, totems of the once mighty owner, whose war cry had echoed through the lake lands and forests more than a century ago.  The handle was but eighteen inches long, a smooth polished stem of curled maple, the beauty of the natural wood heightened by a dark strip of color that wound with measured, even sweeps from tip to base like a ribbon.  Queetah had long ago told the boy how that rich spiral decoration was made—­how the old Indians wound the wood with strips of wet buckskin, then burnt the exposed wood sufficiently to color it.  The beautiful white coils were the portions protected by the hide from the flame and smoke.

Inlaid in this handle were strange designs of dull-beaten silver, cubes and circles and innumerable hearts, the national symbol of the Mohawks.  At the extreme end was a small, flat metal mouthpiece, for this strange weapon was a combination of sun and shadow; it held within itself the unique capabilities of being a tomahawk, the most savage instrument in Indian warfare, and also a peace pipe, that most beautiful of all Indian treasures.

“It is so strange,” said the boy, fingering the weapon lovingly.  “Your people are the most terrible on the warpath of all the nations in the world, yet they seem to think more of that word ‘peace,’ and to honor it more, than all of us put together.  Why, you even make silver chains for emblems of peace, like this,” and he tangled his slim fingers in the links that looped from the lower angle of the steel edge to the handle.

“Yes,” replied Queetah, “we value peace; it is a holy word to the red man, perhaps because it is so little with us, because we know its face so slightly.  The face of peace has no fiery stripes of color, no streaks of the deadly black and red, the war paints of the fighting Mohawks.  It is a face of silver, like this chain, and when it smiles upon us, we wash the black and red from off our cheeks, and smoke this pipe as a sign of brotherhood with all men.”

“Brotherhood with all men,” mused the boy, aloud.  “We palefaces have no such times, Queetah.  Some of us are always at war.  If we are not fighting here, we are fighting beyond the great salt seas.  I wish we had more of your ways, Queetah—­your Indian ways.  I wish we could link a silver chain around the world; we think we are the ones to teach, but I believe you could teach us much.  Will you not teach me now?  Tell me the story of this tomahawk.  I may learn something from it—­something of Indian war, peace and brotherhood.”