In the silence of the hut the fire crackled, and the branches of the trees outside, bent by the wind, made a grating sound against the bark roof.
“How die?” I asked at last. “Speak out!”
“Die by the arrow and the tomahawk,” he answered,—“yea, and by the guns you have given the red men. To-morrow's sun, and the next, and the next,—three suns,—and the tribes will fall upon the English. At the same hour, when the men are in the fields and the women and children are in the houses, they will strike,—Kecoughtans, Paspaheghs, Chickahominies, Pamunkeys, Arrowhatocks, Chesapeakes, Nansemonds, Accomacs,—as one man will they strike; and from where the Powhatan falls over the rocks to the salt water beyond Accomac, there will not be one white man left alive.”
He ceased to speak, and for a minute the fire made the only sound in the hut. Then, “All die?” I asked dully. “There are three thousand Englishmen in Virginia.”
“They are scattered and unwarned. The fighting men of the villages of the Powhatan and the Pamunkey and the great bay are many, and they have sharpened their hatchets and filled their quivers with arrows.”
“Scattered,” I said, “strewn broadcast up and down the river,—here a lonely house, there a cluster of two or three; they at Jamestown and Henricus off guard,—the men in the fields or at the wharves, the women and the children busy within doors, all unwarned—O my God!”
Diccon strode over from the doorway to the fire. “We'd best be going, I reckon, sir,” he cried. “Or you wait until morning; then there'll be two chances. Now that I've a knife, I'm thinking I can give account of one of them damned sentries, at least. Once clear of them”—
I shook my head, and the Indian too made a gesture of dissent. “You would only be the first to die.”
I leaned against the side of the hut, for my heart beat like a frightened woman's. “Three days!” I exclaimed. “If we go with all our speed we shall be in time. When did you learn this thing?”
“While you watched the dance,” he answered, “Opechancanough and I sat within his lodge in the darkness. His heart was moved, and he talked to me of his own youth in a strange country, south of the sunset, where he and his people dwelt in stone houses and worshiped a great and fierce god, giving him blood to drink and flesh to eat. To that country, too, white men had come in ships. Then he spoke to me of Powhatan, my father,—of how wise he was and how great a chief before the English came, and how the English made him kneel in sign that he held his lands from their King, and how he hated them; and then he told me that the tribes had called me 'woman,' 'lover no longer of the warpath and the scalp dance,' but that he, who had no son, loved me as his son, knowing my heart to be Indian still; and then I heard what I have told you.”