It could only have been for a few moments at the end of Moke-icha's story, before the cliff picture split like a thin film before the dancing circles of the watchmen's lanterns, and curled into the shadows between the cases. A thousand echoes broke out in the empty halls and muffled the voices as the rings of light withdrew down the long gallery in glimmering reflections. When they passed to the floor below a very remarkable change had come over the landscape.

The Buffalo Chief and Moke-icha had disappeared. A little way ahead the trail plunged down the leafy tunnel of an ancient wood, along which the children saw the great elk trotting leisurely with his cows behind him, flattening his antlers over his back out of the way of the low-branching maples. The switching of the brush against the elk's dun sides startled the little black bear, who was still riffling his bee tree. The children watched him rise inquiringly to his haunches before he scrambled down the trail out of sight.

"Lots of those fellows about in my day," said the Mound-Builder. "We used to go for them in the fall when they grew fat on the dropping nuts and acorns. Elk, too. I remember a ten-pronged buck that I shot one winter on the Elk's-Eye River..."

"The Muskingum!" exclaimed an Iroquois, who had listened in silence to the puma's story. "Did you call it that too? Elk's-Eye! Clear brown and smooth-flowing. That's the Scioto Trail, isn't it?" he asked of the Mound-Builder.

"You could call it that. There was a cut-off at Beaver Dam to Flint Ridge and the crossing of the Muskingum, and another that led to the mouth of the Kanawha where it meets the River of White-Flashing."

"He means the Ohio," explained the Iroquois to the children. "At flood the whole surface of the river would run to white riffles like the flash of a water-bird's wings. But the French called it La Belle RiviÈre. I'm an Onondaga myself," he added, "and in my time the Five Nations held all the territory, after we had driven out the Talle-gewi, between the Lakes and the O-hey-yo." He stretched the word out, giving it a little different turn. "Indians' names talk little," he laughed, "but they say much."

"Like the trails," agreed the Mound-Builder, who was one of the Tallegewi himself, "every word is the expression of a need. We had a trade route over this one for copper which we fetched from the Land of the Sky-Blue Water and exchanged for sea-shells out of the south. At the mouth of the Scioto it connected with the Kaskaskia Trace to the Missi-Sippu, where we went once a year to shoot buffaloes on the plains."

"When the Five Nations possessed the country, the buffaloes came to us," said the Onondaga.

"Then the Long Knives came on the sea in the East and there was neither buffaloes nor Mengwe," answered the Mound-Builder, who did not like these interruptions. He went on describing the Kaskaskia Trail. "It led along the highlands around the upper waters of the Miami and the drowned lands of the Wabash. It was a wonderful trip in the month of the Moon Halting, when there was a sound of dropping nuts and the woods were all one red and yellow rain. But in summer...I should know," said the Mound-Builder; "I carried a pipe as far as Little Miami once..."

He broke off as though the recollection was not altogether a happy one and began to walk away from the wood, along the trail, which broadened quickly to a graded way, and led up the slope of a high green mound.

The children followed him without a word. They understood that they had come to the place in the Story of the Trails, which is known in the schoolbooks as "History." From the top of the mound they could see strange shapes of earthworks stretching between them and the shore of Erie. Lakeward the sand and the standing grass was the pale color of the moon that floated above it in the midday sky. Between them the blue of the lake melted into the blue horizon; the turf over the mounds was thick and wilted.

"I suppose I must remember it like this," said the Tallega, "because this is the way I saw it when I came back, an old man, after the fall of Cahokia. But when this mound was built there were towns here, busy and crowded. The forest came close up on one side, and along the lake front, field touched field for a day's journey. My town was the middle one of three of the Eagle Clan. Our Town House stood here, on the top of this mound, and on that other, the tallest, stood the god-house, with the Sacred Fire, and the four old men watchers to keep it burning."

"I thought," said Oliver, trying to remember what he had read about it, "that the mounds were for burials. People dig into them, you know."

"They might think that," agreed the Tallega, "if all they know comes from what they find by digging. They were for every purpose that buildings are used for, but we always thought it a good omen if we could start a Town Mound with the bones of some one we had loved and respected. First, we laid a circle of stones and an altar with a burnt offering, then the bones of the chief, or some of our heroes who were killed in battle. Then the women brought earth in baskets. And if a chief had served us well, we sometimes buried him on top and raised the mound higher over him, and the mound would be known by his name until another chief arose who surpassed him.

"Then there were earthworks for forts and signal stations. You'll find those on the high places overlooking the principal trails; there were always heaps of wood piled up for smoke signals. The circles were for meeting-places and for games."

"What sort of games?" demanded Oliver.

"Ball-play and races; all that sort of thing. There was a game we played with racquets between goals. Village played against village. The people would sit on the earthworks and clap and shout when the game pleased them, and gambled everything they had on their home-town players.

"I suppose," he added, looking around on the green tumuli, "I remember it like this, because when I lived here I was so full of what was going on that I had no time for noticing how it looked to me."

"What did go on?" both the children wished immediately to know.

"Something different every time the moon changed. Ice-fishing, corn-husking. We did everything together; that was what made it so interesting. The men let us go to the fur traps to carry home the pelts, and we hung up the birch-bark buckets for our mothers at the sugar-boiling. Maple sugar, you know. Then we would persuade them to ladle out a little of the boiling sap into plates that we patted out of the snow, which could always be found lingering in the hollows, at sugar-makings. When it was still waxy and warm, we rolled up the cooled syrup and ate it out of hand.

"In summer whole families would go to the bottom lands paw-paw gathering. Winter nights there was story-telling in the huts. We had a kind of corn, very small, that burst out white like a flower when it was parched..."

"Pop-corn!" cried both the children at once. It seemed strange that anything they liked so much should have belonged to the Mound-Builders.

"Why, that was whatwecalled it!" he agreed, smiling. "Our mothers used to stir it in the pot with pounded hickory nuts and bears' grease. Good eating! And the trading trips! Some of our men used to go as far as Little River for chert which they liked better for arrow-points than our own flints, being less brittle and more easily worked. That was a canoe trip, down the Scioto, down the O-hey-yo, up the Little Tenasa as far as Little River. There was adventure enough to please everybody.

"That bird-shaped mound," he pointed, "was built the time we won the Eagle-Dancing against all the other villages."

The Mound-Builder drew out from under his feather robe a gorget of pearl shell, beautifully engraved with the figure of a young man dancing in an eagle-beaked mask, with eagles' wings fastened to his shoulders.

"Most of the effigy mounds," he said, taking the gorget from his neck to let the children examine it, "were built that way to celebrate a treaty or a victory. Sometimes," he added, after a pause, looking off across the wide flat mounds between the two taller ones, "they were built like these, to celebrate a defeat. It was there we buried the Tallegewi who fell in our first battle with the Lenni-Lenape."

"Were they Mound-Builders, too?" the children asked respectfully, for though the man's voice was sad, it was not as though he spoke of an enemy.

"People of the North," he said, "hunting-people, good foes and good fighters. But afterward, they joined with the Mengwe and drove us from the country.Thatwas a Mingo,"--he pointed to the Iroquois who had called himself an Onondaga, disappearing down the forest tunnel. They saw him a moment, with arrow laid to bow, the sunlight making tawny splotches on his dark body, as on the trunk of a pine tree, and then they lost him.

"We were planters and builders," said the Tallega, "and they were fighters, so they took our lands from us. But look, now, how time changes all. Of the Lenni-Lenape and the Mengwe there is only a name, and the mounds are still standing."

"You said," Oliver hinted, "that you carried a pipe once. Was that--anything particular?"

"It might be peace or war," said the Mound-Builder. "In my case it was an order for Council, from which war came, bloody and terrible. A Pipe-Bearer's life was always safe where he was recognized, though when there is war one is very likely to let fly an arrow at anything moving in the trails. That reminds me..." The Tallega put back his feathered robe carefully as he leaned upon his elbow, and the children snuggled into a little depression at the top of the mound where the fire-hole had been, to listen.

"There was a boy in our town," he began, "who was the captain of all our plays from the time we first stole melons and roasting-ears from the town gardens. He got us into no end of trouble, but no matter what came of it, we always stood up for him before the elders. There was nothing theycould say which seemed half so important to us as praise or blame from Ongyatasse. I don't know why, unless it was because he could out-run and out-wrestle the best of us; and yet he was never pleased with himself unless the rest of us were satisfied to have it that way.

"Ongyatasse was what his mother called him. It means something very pretty about the colored light of evening, but the name that he earned for himself, when he was old enough to be Name-Seeking, was Young-Man-Who-Never-Turns-Back.

"He was the arrow laid to the bow, and he could no more take himself back from the adventure he had begun than the shaft can come back to the bowstring.

"Before we were old enough to go up to the god-house and hear the sacred Tellings, he had half the boys in our village bound to him in an unbreakable vow never to turn back from anything we had started. It got us into a great many difficulties, some of which were ridiculous, but it had its advantages. The time we chased a young elk we had raised, across the squash and bean vines of Three Towns, we escaped punishment on the ground of our vow. Any Tallega parent would think a long time before he expected his son to break a promise."

Oliver kept to the main point of interest. "Did you get the elk?"

"Of course. You see we were never allowed to carry a man's hunting outfit until we had run down some big game, and brought it in alive to prove ourselves proper sportsmen. So partly for that and partly because Ongyatasse always knew the right words to say to everybody, we were forgiven the damage to the gardens.

"That was the year the Lenni-Lenape came to the Grand Council, which was held here at Sandusky, asking permission to cross our territory toward the Sea on the East. They came out of Shinaki, the Fir-Land, as far as Namae-Sippu, and stood crowded between the lakes north of the river. For the last year or two, hunting-parties of theirs had been warned back from trespass, but this was the first time we youngsters had seen anything of them.

"They were fine-looking fellows, fierce, and tall appearing, with their hair cropped up about their ears, and a long hanging scalp-lock tied with eagle feathers. At the same time they seemed savage to us, for they wore no clothing but twisty skins about their middles, ankle-cut moccasins, and the Peace Mark on their foreheads.

"Because of the Mark they bore no weapons but the short hunting-bow and wolfskin quivers, with the tails hanging down, and painted breastbands. They were chiefs, by their way of walking, and one of them had brought his son with him. He was about Ongyatasse's age, as handsome as a young fir. Probably he had a name in his own tongue, but we called him White Quiver. Few of us had won ours yet, and his was man's size, of white deerskin and colored quill-work.

"Our mothers, to keep us out of the way of the Big Eating which they made ready for the visiting chiefs, had given us some strips of venison. We were toasting them at a fire we had made close to a creek, to stay our appetites. My father, who was Keeper of the Smoke for that occasion,--I was immensely proud of him,--saw the Lenape boy watching us out of the tail of his eye, and motioned to me with his hand that I should make him welcome. My father spoke with his hand so that White Quiver should understand--" The Mound-Builder made with his own thumb and forefinger the round sign of the Sun Father, and then the upturned palm to signify that all things should be as between brothers. "I was perfectly willing to do as my father said, for, except Ongyatasse, I had never seen any one who pleased me so much as the young stranger. But either because he thought the invitation should have come from himself as the leader of the band, or because he was a little jealous of our interest in White Quiver, Ongyatasse tossed me a word over his shoulder, 'We play with no crop-heads.'

"That was not a true word, for the Lenni-Lenape do not crop the head until they go on the war-path, and White Quiver's hair lay along his shoulders, well oiled, with bright bits of shell tied in it, glittering as he walked. Also it is the rule of the Tellings that one must feed the stranger. But me, I was never a Name-Seeker. I was happy to stand fourth from Ongyatasse in the order of our running. For the rest, my brothers used to say that I was the tail and Ongyatasse wagged me.

"Whether he had heard the words or not, the young Lenape saw me stutter in my invitation. There might have been a quiver in his face,--at my father's gesture he had turned toward me,--but there was none in his walking. He came straight on toward our fire andthroughit. Three strides beyond it he drank at the creek as though that had been his only object, and back through the fire to his father. I could see red marks on his ankles where the fire had bitten him, but he never so much as looked at them, nor at us any more than if we had been trail-grass. He stood at his father's side and the drums were beginning. Around the great mound came the Grand Council with their feather robes and the tall headdresses, up the graded way to the Town House, as though all the gay weeds in Big Meadow were walking. It was the great spectacle of the year, but it was spoiled for all our young band by the sight of a slim youth shaking off our fire, as if it had been dew, from his reddened ankles.

"You see," said the Mound-Builder, "it was much worse for us because we admired him immensely, and Ongyatasse, who liked nothing better than being kind to people, couldn't help seeing that he could have made a much better point for himself by doing the honors of the village to this chief's son, instead of their both going around with their chins in the air pretending not to see one another.

"The Lenni-Lenape won the permission they had come to ask for, to pass through the territory of the Tallegewi, under conditions that were made by Well-Praised, our war-chief; a fat man, a wonderful orator, who never took a straight course where he could find a cunning one. What those conditions were you shall hear presently. At the time, we boys were scarcely interested. That very summer we began to meet small parties of strangers drifting through the woods, as silent and as much at home in them as foxes. But the year had come around to the Moon of Sap Beginning before we met White Quiver again.

"A warm spell had rotted the ice on the rivers, followed by two or three days of sharp cold and a tracking snow. We had been out with Ongyatasse to look at our traps, and then the skin-smooth surface of the river beguiled us.

"We came racing home close under the high west bank where the ice was thickest, but as we neared Bent Bar, Young-Man-Who-Never-Turns-Back turned toward the trail that cut down to the ford between the points of Hanging Wood. The ice must have rotted more than we guessed, for halfway across, Ongyatasse dropped through it like a pebble into a pot-hole. Next to him was Tiakens, grandson of Well-Praised, and between me and Tiakens a new boy from Painted Turtle. I heard the splash and shout of Tiakens following Ongyatasse,--of course, he said afterward that he would have gone to the bottom with him rather than turn back, but I doubt if he could have stopped himself,--and the next thing I knew the Painted Turtle boy was hitting me in the nose for stopping him, and Kills Quickly, who had not seen what was happening, had crashed into us from behind. We lay all sprawled in a heap while the others hugged the banks, afraid to add their weight to the creaking ice, and Ongyatasse was beating about in the rotten sludge, trying to find a place firm enough to climb out on.

"We had seen both boys disappear for an instant as the ice gave under them, but even when we saw them come to the surface, with Ongyatasse holding Tiakens by the hair, we hardly grasped what had happened. The edge of the ice-cake had taken Tiakens under the chin and he was unconscious. If Ongyatasse had let go of him he would have been carried under the ice by the current, and that would have been the last any one would have seen of him until the spring thaw. But as fast as Ongyatasse tried to drag their double weight onto the ice, it broke, and before the rest of us had thought of anything to do the cold would have cramped him. I saw Ongyatasse stuffing Tiakens's hair into his mouth so as to leave both his hands free, and then there was a running gasp of astonishment from the rest of the band, as a slim figure shot out of Dark Woods, skimming and circling like a swallow. We had heard of the snowshoes of the Lenni-Lenape, but this was the first time we had seen them. For a moment we were so taken up with the wonder of his darting pace, that it was not until we saw him reaching his long shoeing-pole to Ongyatasse across the ice, that we realized what he was doing. He had circled about until he had found ice that held, and kicking off his snowshoes, he stretched himself flat on it. I knew enough to catch him by the ankles--even then I couldn't help wondering if the scar was still there, for we knew instantly who he was--and somebody caught my feet, spreading our weight as much as possible. Over the bridge we made, Ongyatasse and Tiakens, who had come to himself by this time, crawled out on firm ice. In a very few minutes we had stripped them of their wet clothing and were rubbing the cramp out of their legs.

"Ongyatasse, dripping as he was, pushed us aside and went over to White Quiver, who was stooping over, fastening his snowshoes. It seemed to give him a great deal of trouble, but at last he raised his head.

"'This day I take my life at your hands,' said Ongyatasse.

"'Does Young-Man-Who-Never-Turns-Back take so much from a Crop-Head?' said the Lenni-Lenape in good Tallegewi, which shows how much they knew of us already and how they began to hate us.

"But when he was touched, Ongyatasse had no equal for highness.

"'Along with my life I would take friendship too, if it were offered,' he said, and smiled, shivering as he was, in a way we knew so well who had never resisted it. We could see the smile working on White Quiver like a spell. Ongyatasse put an arm over the Lenape's shoulders.

"'Where the life is, the heart is also,' he said, 'and if the feet of Ongyatasse do not turn back from the trail they have taken, neither does his heart.' From his neck he slipped off his amulet of white deer's horn which brought him his luck in hunting, and threw it around the other's neck.

"'Ongyatasse, you have given away your luck!' cried Tiakens, whose head was a little light with the blow the ice-cake had given him.

"'Both the luck and the life of Young-Man-Who-Never-Turns-Back are safe in the hands of a Lenni-Lenape,' said White Quiver, as high as one of his own fir trees, but he loosed a little smile at the corner of his mouth as he turned to Tiakens, chattering like a squirrel. 'Unless you find a fire soon, Young-Man-Who-Never-Turns-Back will have need of another friend,' he said; and picking up his shoeing-pole, he was off in the wood again like a weasel darting to cover. We heard the swish of the boughs, heavy with new snow, and then silence.

"But if we had not been able to forget him after the first meeting, you can guess how often we talked of him in the little time that was left us. It was not long. Tiakens nearly died of the chill he got, and the elders were stirred up at last to break up our band before it led to more serious folly. Ongyatasse was hurried off with a hunting-party to Maumee, and I was sent to my mother's brother at Flint Ridge to learn stone-working.

"Not that I objected," said the Tallega. "I have the arrow-maker's hand." He showed the children his thumb set close to the wrist, the long fingers and the deep-cupped palm with the callus running down the middle. "All my family were clever craftsmen," said the Tallega. "You could tell my uncle's points anywhere you found them by the fine, even flaking, and my mother was the best feather-worker in Three Towns,"--he ran his hands under the folds of his mantle and held it out for the children to admire the pattern. "Uncle gave me this banner stone as the wage of my summer's work with him, and I thought myself overpaid at the time."

"But what did you do?" asked both children at once.

"Everything, from knocking out the crude flakes with a stone hammer to shaping points with a fire-hardened tip of deer's horn. The ridge was miles long and free to any one who chose to work it, but most people preferred to buy the finished points and blades. There was a good trade, too, in turtle-backs." The Tallega poked about in the loose earth at the top of the mound and brought up a round, flattish flint about the size of a man's hand, that showed disk-shaped flakings arranged like the marking of a turtle-shell. "They were kept workable by being buried in the earth, and made into knives or razors or whatever was needed," he explained.

"That summer we had a tremendous trade in broad arrow-points, such as are used for war or big game. We sold to all the towns along the north from Maumee to the headwaters of the Susquehanna, and we sold to the Lenni-Lenape. They would appear suddenly on the trails with bundles of furs or copper, of which they had a great quantity, and when they were satisfied with what was offered for it, they would melt into the woods again like quail. My uncle used to ask me a great many questions about them which I remembered afterward. But at the time--you see there was a girl, the daughter of my uncle's partner. She was all dusky red like the tall lilies at Big Meadow, and when she ran in the village races with her long hair streaming, they called her Flying Star.

"She used to bring our food to us when we opened up a new working, a wolf's cry from the old,--sizzling hot deer meat and piles of boiled corn on bark platters, and meal cakes dipped in maple syrup. I stayed on till the time of tall weeds as my father had ordered, and then for a while longer for the new working, which interested me tremendously. First we brought hickory wood and built a fire on the exposed surface of the ridge. Then we splintered the hot stone by throwing water on it, and dug out the splinters. In two or three days we had worked clean through the ledge of flint to the limestone underneath. This we also burnt with fire, after we had protected the fresh flint by plastering it with clay. When we had cleared a good piece of the ledge, we could hammer it off with the stone sledges and break it up small for working. It was as good sport to me as moose-hunting or battle.

"We had worked a man's length under the ledge, and one day I looked up with the sun in my eyes, as it reddened toward the west, and saw Ongyatasse standing under a hickory tree. He was dressed for running, and around his mouth and on both his cheeks was the white Peace Mark. I made the proper sign to him as to one carrying orders.

"'You are to come with me,' he said. 'We carry a pipe to Miami.'"