"It's a young fiend," replied the renegade. "Wyatt has told me all about him. Boy as he is, he's worth a whole band of warriors to the people behind those walls."
"There is more that you should remember, Red Eagle and Yellow Panther," continued Henry, wishing to impress them. "It was I and my comrades who carried the message to the wagon train that you fought at the ford, where you were beaten, where you lost many warriors. I see that you remember. Tell your warriors that Manitou favors my friends and me, that we have never yet failed. We were present when the Indians of the south and many renegades like Girty and Wyatt here, men with black hearts who told lies to their red friends, were beaten in a great battle. As they failed in the south, so will you fail here. A mighty fleet is coming, and it will scatter you as the winter wind scatters the dead leaves."
Henry paused. He had calculated his effects carefully. He wished to create feeling between red man and renegade, and he wished to plant in the red mind the belief that he was really protected by Manitou. The tribes, at least, might hesitate and delay, and meanwhile the fleet was coming.
"I'll see that you're burned at the stake when we take this place," shouted Girty, "and I'll see that it's the slowest fire a man ever died over."
"I've said what I had to say," called back the youth.
He stepped down from the wall. The renegades and the chiefs retired to the woods.
"What were you saying to them?" asked Major Braithwaite.
"I was telling them of their former failures," replied Henry. "I was trying to discourage them and to make them hate the renegades."