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“‘Do we sit at a game of knuckle-bone?’ said Opata at last, ‘or is this a Council of the Elders?’

“‘Game or Council,’ said Taku-Wakin, ‘I sit in my father’s place until I have a Sign from him whom he will have to sit there.'”

“But I don’t understand–” began Oliver, looking about the circle of listening Indians. “His father was dead, wasn’t he?”

“What is ‘dead’?” said the Lenni-Lenape; “Indians do not know. Our friends go out of their bodies; where? Into another–or into a beast? When I was still strapped in my basket my father set me on a bear that he had killed and prayed that the bear’s cunning and strength should pass into me. Taku-Wakin’s people thought that the heart of Long-Hand might have gone into the Mastodon.”

“Why not?” agreed Arrumpa gravely. “I remember that Taku would call me Father at times, and–if he was very fond of me–Grandfather. But all he wanted at that tune was to keep Opata from being elected in his father’s place, and Opata, who understood this perfectly, was very angry.

“‘It is the custom,’ he said, ‘when a chief sleeps in the High Places,’–he meant the hilltops where they left their dead on poles or tied to the tree branches,–‘that we elect another to his place in the Council.’

“‘Also it is a custom,’ said Taku-Wakin, ‘to bring the token of his great exploit into Council and quicken the heart by hearing of it. You have heard, O Chiefs,” he said, “that my people had a plan for the good of the people, and it has come to me in my heart that that plan was stronger in him than death. For he was a man who finished what he had begun, and it may be that he is long-handed enough to reach back from the place where he has gone. And this is a Sign to me, that he has taken his cut stick, which had the secret of his plan, with him.’

“Taku-Wakin fiddled with the arrows, laying them straight, hardly daring to look up at Opata, for if the chief had his father’s cut stick, now would be the time that he would show it. Out of the tail of his eye he could see that the rest of the Council were startled. That was the way with men. Me they would trap, and take the skin of Saber-Tooth to wrap their cubs in, but at the hint of a Sign, or an old custom slighted, they would grow suddenly afraid. Then Taku looked up and saw Opata stroking his face with his hand to hide what he was thinking. He was no fool, and he saw that if the election was pressed, Taku-Wakin, boy as he was, would sit in his father’s place because of the five arrows. Taku-Wakin stood up and stretched out his hand to the Council.

“‘Is it agreed, O Chiefs, that you keep my father’s place until there is a Sign?’–and a deep Hu-huh ran all about the circle. It was sign enough for them that the son of Long-Hand played unhurt with arrows that had been given to the gods. Taku stretched his hand to Opata, ‘Is it agreed, O Chief?’

“‘So long as the tribe comes to no harm,’ said Opata, making the best of a bad business. ‘It shall be kept until Long-Hand or his Talking Rod comes back to us.’

“‘And,’ said Taku-Wakin to me, ‘whether Opata or I first sits in it, depends on which one of us can first produce a Sign.'”

THE SECOND PART OF THE MASTODON STORY CONCERNING THE TRAIL TO THE SEA AND THE TALKING STICK OF TAKU-WAKIN

“It was the Talking Stick of his father that Taku-Wakin wanted,” said Arrumpa. “He still thought Opata might have it, for every now and then Taku would catch him coming back with marsh mud on his moccasins. That was how I began to understand that the Great Plan was really a plan to find a way through the marsh to the sea on the other side of it.