“You, too, seem to take an interest in him, Dave.”

“I like him,” said Willet briefly.  Then he shrugged his shoulders, and changed the subject.

The great festival went on, and the agents of Corlear and Onontio were still kept waiting.  The sachems would not hear a word from either.  As Robert understood it, they felt that the Maple Dance might not be celebrated again for years.  These old men, warriors and statesmen both, saw the huge black clouds rolling up and they knew they portended a storm, tremendous beyond any that North America had known.  France and England, and that meant their colonies, too, would soon be locked fast in deadly combat, and the Hodenosaunee, who were the third power, must look with all their eyes and think with all their strength.

While the young warriors and the maidens sang and danced without ceasing, the sachems and the chiefs sat far into the night, and as gravely as the Roman Senate, considered the times and their needs.  Runners, long of limb, powerful of chest, and bare to the waist, came from all points of the compass and reported secretly.  One from Albany said that Corlear and the people there and at New York were talking of war, but were not preparing for it.  Another, a Mohawk who came out of the far east, said that Shirley, the Governor of Massachusetts, was thinking of war and preparing for it too.  A third, a Tuscarora, who had traveled many days from the south, said that Dinwiddie, the Governor of Virginia, was already acting.  He was sending men, led by a tall youth named Washington, into the Ohio country, where the French had already gone to build forts.  An Onondaga out of the north said that Quebec and Montreal were alive with military preparations.  Onontio was giving to the French Indians muskets, powder, bullets and blankets in a profusion never known before.

The red fagots were rapidly displacing the white, and the secret councils of the fifty sachems were filled with anxiety, but they hid all their disquietude from the people, and much of it from the chiefs.  But, to their eyes, all the heavens were scarlet and the world was about to be in upheaval.  It was a time for every sachem to walk with cautious steps and use his last ounce of wisdom.

On the fourth night a powerful ally of St. Luc’s arrived, although the chevalier had not called him, and did not know until the next day that he had come.  He was a tall, thin man of middle years, wrapped in a black robe with a cross upon his breast, and he had traveled alone through the wilderness from Quebec to the vale of Onondaga.  He carried no weapon but under the black robe beat a heart as dauntless as that of Robert, or of Willet, or of Tayoga, and an invincible faith that had already moved mountains.