It was West in the street below, pointing with his sword now to the fort, now to the palisade, and giving directions to the armed men about him. There were many people in the street. Women hurried by to the fort with white, scared faces, their arms filled with household gear; children ran beside them, sturdily bearing their share of the goods, but pressing close to their elders’ skirts; men went to and fro, the most grimly silent, but a few talking loudly. Not all of the faces in the crowd belonged to the town: there were Kingsmell and his wife from the main, and John Ellison from Archer’s Hope, and the Italians Vincencio and Bernardo from the Glass House. The nearer plantations, then, had been warned, and their people had come for refuge to the city. A negro passed, but on that morning, alone of many days, no Indian aired his paint and feathers in the white man’s village.
I could not see the palisade across the neck, but I knew that it was there that the fight—if fight there were—would be made. Should the Indians take the palisade, there would yet be the houses of the town, and, last of all, the fort in which to make a stand. I believed not that they would take it. Long since we had found out their method of warfare. They used ambuscade, surprise, and massacre; when withstood in force and with determination they withdrew to their stronghold, the forest, there to bide their time until, in the blackness of some night, they could again swoop down upon a sleeping foe.
The drum beat again, and a messenger from the palisade came down the street at a run. “They’re in the woods over against us, thicker than ants!” he cried to West as he passed. “A boat has just drifted ashore yonder, with two men in it, dead and scalped!”
I turned to leave the room, and ran against Master Pory coming in on tip-toe, with a red and solemn face. He started when he saw me.
“The roll of the drum brought you to your feet, then!” he cried. “You’ve lain like the dead all night. I came but to see if you were breathing.”
“When I have eaten, I shall be myself again,” I said. “There’s no attack as yet?”
“No,” he answered. “They must know that we are prepared. But they have kindled fires along the river bank, and we can hear them yelling. Whether they’ll be mad enough to come against us remains to be seen.”
“The nearest settlements have been warned?”
“Ay. The Governor offered a thousand pounds of tobacco and the perpetual esteem of the Company to the man or men who would carry the news. Six volunteered, and went off in boats, three up river, three down. How many they reached, or if they still have their scalps, we know not. And a while ago, just before daybreak, comes with frantic haste Richard Pace, who had rowed up from Pace’s Pains to tell the news which you had already brought. Chanco the Christian had betrayed the plot to him, and he managed to give warning at Powel’s and one or two other places as he came up the river.”
He broke off, but when I would have spoken interrupted me with: “And so you were on the Pamunkey all this while! Then the Paspaheghs fooled us with the simple truth, for they swore so stoutly that their absent chief men were but gone on a hunt toward the Pamunkey that we had no choice but to believe them gone in quite another direction. And one and all of every tribe we questioned swore that Opechancanough was at Orapax. So Master Rolfe puts off up river to find, if not you, then the Emperor, and make him give up your murderers; and the Governor sends a party along the bay, and West another up the Chickahominy. And there you were, all the time, mewed up in the village above the marshes! And Nantauquas, after saving our lives like one of us, is turned Indian again! And your man is killed! Alackaday! there’s naught but trouble in the world. ‘As the sparks fly upwards,’ you know. But a brave man draws his breath and sets his teeth.”