THE WOLF, THE MUSKRAT, THE CROW
285
The blockhouse seemed to him to stand in a little open place
in
the forest.
On one wall of the Ginsberg's cellar room there was an old
peacepipe that one of the members had brought, and there was a
totem-pole that the Wolf had carved out of a pine stick with a razor
blade: it was painted with tubes of color he had found in the five
and ten. The benches of the room were ranged in a circle around
the bricks and stones that made a fireplace that was filled with
sticks of wood for fuel and red paper for flames.
Around the blockhouse now all is in silence for they are
through with supper dishes in the room above the cellar and it
seems quiet as the woods of a midsummer day. Except that a bird
calls very faintly through the underwood. And Uncas, the good
Indian, is lying on his belly in the grass, looking toward the fort.
He sees the bayonet and the red hat of the British sentry passing,
repassing along the upper edge of the stockade. Uncas lies quite
still. As he waits there he chews a little pemmican {or dried Buf–
falo meat) out of a leather pouch tied to his belt. He is naked but
for a loincloth and the teeth of a wildcat he wears around his neck
as a charm. Then suddenly a column of smoke appears on the hill
behind the fort. Then another. A third. The three smokes stand up
straight in the stillness. Uncas creeps back into the brush and
whistles softly almost like the bird, to the thousand braves who
are waiting (they are as many as the leaves on the trees, sire, or the
sands of the shore) and to the Americans who are concealed there.
With a yell they all leap forward. The fort is in arms, but it is
too
late. Uncas and his braves swarm over the stockade with lad–
ders especially prepared of strong vines. The sentries raise their
muskets but the long knives part their throats. In the parade the
redcoat captain falls, grasping at the lace around his neck.
"We have won the day," cried Uncas in broken English,
jumping down from the Sachem's chair and waving over his head
abroomstick.
Seymour struck the broomstick sharply against the concrete
ftoor of the empty room. "I am Uncas, known also as the Wildcat,"
he announced. "And all these men will do my bidding."
He heard the doorbell then, and he went upstairs to let the
Wolf
and the Crow in. And when the Muskrat had joined them,
they
opened the meeting with the singing of a Sioux war song. The
