The Old Dominion

by Mary Johnston

Great trees, drooping from the banks of the Pamunkey, shadowed into inky blackness the water below them; but between the lines of darkness slept a charmed sheet, glassy, fiery red from the sunken sun. Three boats moved silently and swiftly up the crimson stream, until, rounding a low point, they came upon an Indian village, nestling amidst vines and mulberries, and girt with a green ribbon of late maize, when they swung round from the middle stream and made for the bank. They were rowed by stalwart servants, and in the foremost sat the master of Verney Manor and Sir Charles Carew. In the second boat was the Surveyor-General and Dr. Anthony Nash, and in the third the overseer, and among the rowers of this last was Godfrey Landless.

As they neared the bank their occupants saw that the usual sleepy evening stillness was not upon the village above them. A shrill sound of wailing from women and children rose and fell through the gathering dusk, and in the open space round which the bark wigwams were built, dark figures moved to and fro in a kind of measured dance, slow and solemn, and marked at intervals by dismal cries. As the boats touched the shore and the white men sprang out, a boy, stationed as scarecrow upon the usual scaffold in the midst of the maize fields, raised a shrill whoop of warning which brought the lamentation of the women and the dance of the men to a dead stop. The latter rushed down to the river side, brandishing their weapons, and yelling; but there seemed little strength in the arms that flourished the tomahawk; the voices sounded cracked and shrill, and the weak fury and noise died away when a nearer approach showed the newcomers to be white. A very aged man, with a face all wrinkles and a chest all scars, stepped from out the throng which was now augmented by the women and children.

"My white fathers are far from the salt water. Seldom do the Pamunkeys see their faces coming up the narrowing stream or through the forest. They are welcome. Let my fathers tarry and my women shall bring them chinquepin cakes and tuckahoe, pohickory and succotash, and my young men—"

He paused, and a low wailing murmur like the sound of the wind in the forest rose from the women.

"Where are your young men, your braves?" demanded the Surveyor-General. "Here are only the very old and the very young—they who have not seen a Huskanawing."

The Indian pointed to the crimson flood below. "There are my young men; there are my braves. Among them were a werowance and a sagamore. They two have strings of pearl thicker than the stem of the grape vine; they are painted with puccoon, and the feathers of the bluebird and the redbird are upon them. They have hills of hatchets and of arrow heads, sharp and clean, and very much tobacco, and they sing and dance in the great wigwam of Okee, in the home of Kiwassa, in the land beyond the setting sun. But the rest—they lie deep in the slime of the river; it is red with their blood: their wives wail for them; their village is left desolate.... When the time of the full sun power was past the smoking of three pipes, came up the Pamunkey, swift as the swallow that skims its waters, the Ricahecrian dogs who, passing down towards the salt water twelve suns ago, slew the young men of a village that lieth below us. My young men went out against them, but a cloud came up and Kiwassa hid his face behind it. They came not back, their boats were sunk, the Ricahecrians laughed and went their way, swift as swallows."'

"Ask him," said the Colonel huskily.

"Had they a captive with them—a woman, a paleface woman?" demanded Carrington.

"With hair like the sunshine and a white robe. And a man, the color of the falling sycamore leaf, one of those who work in the fields of the white fathers. The arms of the woman were bound, but his were not—he fought with the Ricahecrian dogs."

"Luiz Sebastian!" said the overseer with a muttered oath. "I thought as much when we found that he was not with the drunken scoundrels whom we took before they reached the Point. And we had better have killed him than all the rest put together, for he is the devil incarnate."