“But——”
“Were Wilwiloway other than he is, he would long ago have taken Alagwa to his hut. But he will not. His heart, too, is white. He says Alagwa must come to him willingly or not at all. He will not let us compel her. He——” The old woman broke off with a catch in her voice—“he loves Alagwa truly,” she pleaded, wistfully. “Will not Alagwa make his moccasins and pound his corn!”
The girl, who had slowly straightened up under the assault of the old woman, weakened before the sudden change of tone.
“Oh!” she cried. “I will try. Truly! I will try. Wilwiloway is good and kind and brave. I am proud that he has chosen me. I wish I could love him. But—but I do not, and I must love before I give myself. I am bad! wicked! I know it. Yes! I have a white heart. But I will pray to Mishemanitou, the Great God, to make it red.”
The old woman caught the sobbing girl to her heart. “Do not weep!” she said, gently. “See! the sun burns red through the trees; it is the answer of Manitou, the mighty. He sends it as a message that your heart shall turn from white to red. There! It is changed! Look up, Alagwa, and be glad.”
The girl raised her head and stared at the line of trees that curled away in a great crescent toward the east and the west. The sun did indeed burn red through them. Could it be an omen? As she stared the squaw slipped silently away.
Alagwa’s heart was burning hot within her. The squaw’s accusation that her heart was white had cut deep. All her remembered life she had been taught to hate and fear the white men. White men were the source of all evil that had befallen her. They had driven her and her people back, back, ever back, forcing them to give up one home after another. White men had slain her friends; never did she inquire for some dear one who was missing but to be told that he had been killed by the white men. Again and again in her baby ears had rung the cries of the squaws, weeping for the dead who would return no more. Of the other side of the picture she knew nothing. Of the red rapine the Shawnee braves had wrought for miles and miles to the south she had heard, but it was to her only a name, not the awful fact that it had been to its victims. To her the whites were aggressors, robbers, murderers, who were slowly but surely crushing her Indian friends.
Only the year before they had destroyed her home at Tippecanoe on the banks of the Wabash. Well she remembered their advance, their fair speaking that concealed their implacable purpose to destroy her people. Well she remembered the great Indian council that debated whether to fight or to yield, the promises of the Prophet that his medicine would shield the Indians against the white men’s bullets, the night attack, the repulse, the flight across miles of prairie to the ancestral home at Wapakoneta. She remembered Tecumseh’s return—too late. Here, also, she knew nothing of the other side—of the absolute military necessity that the headquarters from which Tecumseh was preparing to sweep the frontier should be destroyed and its menace ended. It was she and her friends who had suffered and it was she and her friends who had fled, half starved, across those perilous miles of swamp and morass. It was the white men who had triumphed; and she hated them, hated them, hated them. The memory of it all was bitter.
And it was no less bitter because revenge seemed hopeless. Tecumseh was planning revenge, she knew, but he no longer found the support he had gained a year before. His own people, the Shawnees, implacable fighters as they had been, had wearied of war at last. Black Wolf, the chief at Wapakoneta, himself once a great warrior and a bitter foe of the whites, now preached that further resistance was vain—that it meant only death. Many of the tribe sided with him, for the Indian, no more than the white man, unless maddened by long tyranny, cares to engage in a contest where triumph is hopeless. The only hope lay in the redcoats, soldiers of the great king across the water. They were planning war against the Long Knives. If they should make common cause with the red men, revenge might yet be won. If she could do anything to help!
A footstep startled her and she flashed about to find Simon Girty and the tall man in the red coat almost upon her. While she had dreamed of the return of Tecumseh they had crossed the Auglaize river and had come upon her unawares.