"It drops down," Wetzel continued, demonstrating with a slow graceful movement of his hand, "lookin' no less than a big shiny stove-lid, an' settles in the clearin' as light an' easy as the feather off'en a duck's back. It stands high as a Pennsylvany school house an' twicet the size around, an' no sound from it at all."
He stood slim and straight as a Shawnee arrow, smooth-faced and solemn, obviously not much past his twentieth birthday, yet by his own account born before the Declaration of Independence was on paper. He went on talking, sounding like a character out of James Fenimore Cooper. His story, boiled down and translated, came out something like this:
The sudden arrival of the strange object had literally paralyzed the Indian encampment. The warriors dropped their weapons and called on the spirits to protect them, while a hole opened in the side of what couldn't be anything else but a spaceship. Then out of the opening came huge steel caricatures of men. There were over a dozen of these robots, each the height of two men, and their eyes were strange round circles of faceted glass. In single file they moved down the ramp and stalked through the ranks of fear-frozen Indians, disappearing into the forest.
Enoch's father ordered his son to crawl up into a tree out of sight, then shouldered his rifle and slipped away through the bushes to get a better look at what was going on. Enoch "allowed" that his Pop was a "moughty" brave man, and none of his audience gave him an argument on that score.
From his place among the leaves, Enoch watched his father melt into the trees. The sun was above the horizon by this time and the young frontiersman discovered that his present position was the equivalent of a box seat on the fifty-yard line.
The next figure to emerge from the spaceship brought an amazed murmur from hundreds of throats. No twelve-foot robot this time, no alien monster beyond description. Very simply, this was an Indian.
Yet what an Indian! He stood on the ramp, wearing only leather breeches and unadorned moccasins, muscles rippling across a powerful sun-tanned chest, his head thrown back in a posture of arrogant dignity. He wore a single crimson feather in his black topknot, and at his belt was a tomahawk only slightly less deadly looking than a howitzer.
Arms folded across his chest, he swept his stunned audience with an eye like an eagle's, then began to speak. His voice, deep and ringing, carried beyond the edges of the crowd, so that Enoch was able to catch a portion of what he was saying.
Wetzel admitted he understood very little of any of the Indian tongues. He thought the one he was hearing had its roots in the Delaware tribe, but admitted this was no more than a guess. However, it appeared that the visitor was summoning the chiefs of the assembled tribes to a meeting within the spaceship.