stakes while its companion was being used for cooking purposes.
Around both camp-fires were fully thirty Indians; all more than ordinarily hideous in their daubs of red, blue, and yellow war paint, and their crowns of colored feathers and strings of animals' teeth and human scalps. The redmen had been marching around the camp-fires but now they halted and all sank cross-legged upon the soil.
Suddenly, after a second of silence, one Indian, tall and straight, leaped to his feet and holding his arms out at full length before him began to rock his body from side to side, Then he ran for one of the fires, and pulling a sharp stick from its place in the ground smote the burning end on his breast.
"This is the fear Spotted Wolf has for the English," he cried, in his native tongue. "Even as he has pulled this stake from the ground so will he pull the English from their cabins and burn them at the stake. The English shall flee at the sound of his war whoop, and the children of the English shall die of fright when he draws near. The French are our friends but the English will be our enemies so long as one of them is allowed to live. I will go forward to kill! Spotted Wolf has spoken."
He sat down, and immediately another warrior Jeaped up and with another burning stick went
