“I advise going direct to Opechancanough,” said Rolfe.
“Since he’s only a league away, so do I,” I answered.
We left the block house and the clearing around it, and plunged into the depths of the forest. In these virgin woods the trees are set well apart, though linked one to the other by the omnipresent grape, and there is little undergrowth, so that we were able to make good speed. Rolfe and I rode well in front of our men. By now the sun was shining through the lower branches of the trees, and the mist was fast vanishing. The forest—around us, above us, and under the hoofs of the horses where the fallen leaves lay thick—was as yellow as gold and as red as blood.
“Rolfe,” I asked, breaking a long silence, “do you credit what the Indians say of Opechancanough?”
“That he was brother to Powhatan only by adoption?”
“That, fleeing for his life, he came to Virginia, years and years ago, from some mysterious land far to the south and west?”
“I do not know,” he replied thoughtfully. “He is like, and yet not like, the people whom he rules. In his eye there is the authority of mind; his features are of a nobler cast——”
“And his heart is of a darker,” I said. “It is a strange and subtle savage.”
“Strange enough and subtle enough, I admit,” he answered, “though I believe not with you that his friendliness toward us is but a mask.”
“Believe it or not, it is so,” I said. “That dark, cold, still face is a mask, and that simple-seeming amazement at horses and armour, guns and blue beads, is a mask. It is in my mind that some fair day the mask will be dropped. Here’s the village.”