"'The Tallegewi send a Pipe to the Three Clans. Will you swear that the message that went with it had nothing to do with the Lenni-Lenape?'
"'What should two boys know of a call to Council?' said Ongyatasse, and showed him the birch-bark scroll, to which White Quiver paid no attention.
"'There is peace between us, and a treaty, the terms of which were made by the Tallegewi, all of which we have kept. We have entered no town without invitation. When one of our young men stole a maiden of yours we returned her to her village.' He went on telling many things, new to us, of the highness of the Lenni-Lenape. 'All this was agreed at the Three Towns by Cool Waters,' said he. 'Now comes a new order. We may not enter the towns at all. The treaty was for camping privileges in any one place for the space of one moon. Now, if we are three days in one place, we are told that we must move on. The Lenni-Lenape are not Two-Talkers. If we wear peace on our mouths we wear it in our hearts also.'
"'There is peace between your people and mine, and among the Tallegewi, peace.'
"'So,' said White Quiver. 'Then why do they rebuild their stockades and fetch arrow-stone from far quarries? And why do they call a Council in the Moon of the Harvest?'
"I remembered the good trade my uncle, the arrow-maker, had had that summer, and was amazed at his knowledge of it, so I answered as I had been taught. 'If I were a Lenape,' said I, 'and thought that the Councils of the Tallegewi threatened my people, I would know what those Councils were if I made myself a worm in the roof-tree to overhear it.'
"'Aye,' he said, 'but you are only a Tallega.'
"He was like that with us, proud and humble by turns. Though he was a naked savage, traveling through our land on sufferance, he could make us crawl in our hearts for the Tallegewi. He suspected us of much evil, most of which was true as it turned out; yet all the time we lay at the bottom of the ravine, for the most part helpless, he killed every day for us, and gathered dry grass to make a bed for Ongyatasse.
"We talked no more of the Council or of our errand, but as youths will, we talked of highness, and of big game in Shinaki, and of the ways of the Tallegewi, of which for the most part he was scornful.
"Corn he allowed us as a great advantage, but of our towns he doubted whether they did not make us fat and Two-Talkers.