"Ware," he said, "I like you and I do not believe that your heart contains hatred towards me. Yet, there cannot be any peace between our races. Peace means that you will push us back, always push us back. Have I not been in the East, where the white men are many and where the mighty confederation of the Six Nations, with their great chief, Thayendanegea, at their head, fight against them in vain? Have I not seen the rich villages of the Indians go up in smoke? The Indians themselves still fight. They strike down many of the Yengees and sometimes they burn a village of the white people, but unless the king prevails in the great war, they will surely lose. Their Aieroski, who is the Manitou of the Wyandots, and your God, merely looks on, and permits the stronger to be the victor."
"Then," said Henry, "why not make peace with us here in the West, lest your tribes meet the same fate?"
The nostrils of Timmendiquas dilated.
"Because in the end we should be eaten up in the same way. Here in the West you are few and your villages are tiny. The seed is not planted so deep that it cannot be uprooted."
Henry sighed.
"I can see the question from your side as well as from mine, White Lightning," he replied. "It seems as you say, that the white men and the red men cannot dwell together. Yet I could wish that we were friends in the field as well as at heart."
Timmendiquas shook his head and replied in a tone tinged with a certain sadness:
"I, too, could wish it, but you were born of one race and I of another. It is our destiny to fight to the end."
He strode away through the camp. Henry watched the tall and splendid figure, with the single small scarlet feather set in the waving scalp lock, and once more he readily acknowledged that he was a forest king, a lofty and mighty spirit, born to rule in the wilderness. Then he took the two blankets which had been left him, enfolded himself between them, and, despite the noises around him, slept soundly all through the night. Early the next morning they began the last stretch of the march to Detroit.
It was with a deep and peculiar interest that they approached Detroit, then a famous British and Indian post, now a great American city. Founded by the French, who lost it to the British, who, in turn, were destined to lose it to the Americans, it has probably sent forth more scalping parties of Indians than any other place on the North American continent. Here the warlike tribes constantly came for rifles, ammunition, blankets and other supplies, and here the agents of the king incited them with every means in their power to fresh raids on the young settlements in the South. Here the renegades, Girty, Blackstaffe and their kind came to confer, and here Boone, Kenton and other famous borderers had been brought as prisoners.