"Stay you here before our temple with me," commanded the princess, whose vivid pose and brilliant eyes suggested a crisis of some sort. "A white man shall witness our submission and play our song upon his pipes."
He felt helpless, worn, and old, a victim in her power.
She abandoned French and took up Natchez words. "The war between us has only begun. No one but the sun above can see how it will end."
Confused by her distraught manner, Anthony looked helplessly at the one reed in his hand.
"Every Natchez tribe had such a bundle," she went on. "This morning, when there was one reed left, each warrior ran to the nearest white man's post around Fort Rosalie with his newly made stone tomahawk hidden under a present. Every Frenchman is massacred. Every lodge-pole is hung with scalps—your hair, not ours. So do the fashions change."
Anthony could not believe her. She pointed in the direction of Fort Rosalie. Smoke, heavy and ominous, was rising above the trees. The stockade, the settlers' houses, were on fire! To be able to kindle the buildings the Indians must have destroyed first the defenders and then have dragged out the women and children.
With one blow they had killed or captured five hundred French and avenged themselves upon the white race.
The many battles of the Natchez war which followed ended, after several years, in the destruction of that tribe. But Anthony, almost the sole survivor of Fort Rosalie, felt that the French had lost, in breaking with the semi-barbarous and skilled Natchez, more than any ultimate victory could have given them.
The princess took the pipe from his nerveless fingers and played some wild pagan strain. All aglow with triumph, she put her hands beneath the hereditary fire on the altar, gathered it up as though it had been a flower, drove her vestals before her, and went down a forest path out of sight forever, clasping to her breast the undying flame.