"Well," I said dryly as he paused. "I will take his messages. What next?"
"Those are the words of Opechancanough. Now listen to the words of Nantauquas, the son of Wahunsonacock, a war chief of the Powhatans. There are two sharp knives there, hanging beneath the bow and the quiver and the shield. Take them and hide them."
The words were scarcely out of his mouth before Diccon had the two keen English blades. I took the one he offered me, and hid it in my doublet.
"So we go armed, Nantauquas," I said. "Love and peace and goodwill consort not with such toys."
"You may want them," he went on, with no change in his low, measured tones. "If you see aught in the forest that you should not see, if they think you know more than you are meant to know, then those three, who have knives and tomahawks, are to kill you, whom they believe unarmed."
"See aught that we should not see, know more than we are meant to know?" I said. "To the point, friend."
"They will go slowly, too, through the forest to Jamestown, stopping to eat and to sleep. For them there is no need to run like the stag with the hunter behind him."
"Then we should make for Jamestown as for life," I said, "not sleeping or eating or making pause?"
"Yea," he replied, "if you would not die, you and all your people."
In the silence of the hut the fire crackled, and the branches of the trees outside, bent by the wind, made a grating sound against the bark roof.
"How die?" I asked at last. "Speak out!"
"Die by the arrow and the tomahawk," he answered,--"yea, and by the guns you have given the red men. To-morrow's sun, and the next, and the next,--three suns,--and the tribes will fall upon the English. At the same hour, when the men are in the fields and the women and children are in the houses, they will strike,--Kecoughtans, Paspaheghs, Chickahominies, Pamunkeys, Arrowhatocks, Chesapeakes, Nansemonds, Accomacs,--as one man will they strike; and from where the Powhatan falls over the rocks to the salt water beyond Accomac, there will not be one white man left alive."
He ceased to speak, and for a minute the fire made the only sound in the hut. Then, "All die?" I asked dully. "There are three thousand Englishmen in Virginia."
"They are scattered and unwarned. The fighting men of the villages of the Powhatan and the Pamunkey and the great bay are many, and they have sharpened their hatchets and filled their quivers with arrows."