"Ambushed!" cried the child. "Hold up the calumet!"
Wooden pirogues loaded with armed savages swung across the Mississippi in front of them. A startled backward turn showed them another barrage of the same sort cutting off retreat upriver. On both shores painted and feathered men sprang up by dozens to howl like fiends. They leaped into the water to catch the canoes. A kindly eddy swirled the birch barks out of reach. Whoops of rage burst from the warriors. A shower of arrows chased the explorers. Tomahawks whizzed close.
They ducked; ducked promptly.
Not so the little slave. He stood erect and let a tomahawk snip off half his cherished topknot without flinching.
An Indian child baiting warriors caught the attention of the old braves. They scanned him so closely that they saw the calumet at which he pointed. They hastened to throw down their bows and arrows in token of submission to the peace pipe. Magic calumet!
Anthony did not enjoy the visit which followed nor the meetings with other inhabitants of this group of villages. He had a constant desire to look behind him. There was often a queer weakness in his knees. He wanted to keep his curly scalp close to the white eagle feathers. The temper of these observers of the calumet's command was not all he wished it might be.
Yet when one of the Akamsea sachems stood up in formal pow-wow his words were fair. And he was agreeable to look upon. He was tall. He was straight. He shone like a copper candlestick. He had on his best clothes—that is, there was a blue quill in his nose and a red one over his left ear. For the rest he wore a blank expression and he carried his own white calumet.
He told them, "Only once has a white man seen our Great River," then added, with cold significance, "He lies buried here under the water."
He meant the Spaniard, Hernandez De Soto, who had come across the country from the southeast more than a century before, and who had died in 1541 on the banks of the Mississippi, which he was undoubtedly the first to find.
"A few days' paddling to the south will bring your canoes to the mouth of this Father of Waters; for it flows into the southern Gulf," the sachem said.