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Now a dream among the Indians was of hardly less significance than among the Hebrews of old. It was sufficient justification for the undertaking of any enterprise or for any change of intention. Thus the departure of the Delaware delegation was shorn of all surprise or imputation of discourtesy. The head-men among the Cherokees felt it very definitely a relief to be freed from the importunities of their “grandfather.”

“Good speed to the journey of the illau Tscholens!” Atta-Kulla-Kulla said that evening after the departure, as the head-men of several towns sat discussing the matter around the council-fire in the great state-house of Citico.

“A turbulent ‘grandfather’ has a stormy voice and makes the heart of a young man like me very poor for fear!” the aged Tsiskwa coughed out, and they all greeted the great man’s jest with a laugh of appreciation, and felt it was well that one so old could at once be so sage and so merry. But there came a time when they were of a different mind.

A most important crisis had supervened in the policy of the Cherokee Indians toward the British government when their attention was diverted from their projected demonstration against the South Carolina colonists by a sudden attack from their ancient enemy, the Mengwe (the Iroquois, as the colonists called them). It was an altogether unprovoked attack, it seemed. The martial Cherokees, however, always eager to fight, demanded no explanations, but at once took the war-path with a great array of their brisk young braves, and because of this interruption, it was said, the war of the Cherokees against the British was long delayed.

When at last the casus belli of the Iroquois was disclosed it struck the Cherokees of Citico Town like a thunderbolt. The Cherokee nation, said the Mengwe, had presumed to recognize the independence of the Lenni Lenape, whom they knew to have been conquered by the Mengwe more than a century earlier.

This, of course, elicited from the Cherokees a denial of any such recognition. Whereupon the Lenni Lenape themselves produced in counter-asseveration the official belt of the Cherokees, given in exchange for their own, and brought to the hand of their chief sachem by their young illau Tscholens, from Citico Town, the residence of the Chief Tsiskwa.

A deep amazement fell upon the Cherokees of Citico–the sort of superstitious consternation that a somnambulist might feel in contemplating in broad daylight the deeds he had wrought in sleep-walking. As to the rest of the nation, it was in vain that Tsiskwa denied; for there were many confirmatory details in support of the incontestable fact of the official belt openly shown in the possession of the Lenni Lenape. The gossips recapitulated the long and solitary audience with Tsiskwa to which Tscholens had been admitted–that strange wild cry with which it had terminated seeming now a cry of joy, not pain; and this interpretation was borne out by the obvious affectation of illness by which he had sought to hide the true import of the interview. More than all, the matter was put beyond reasonable doubt by the discovery of the official belt of the Delawares in the sanctum sanctorum of the “holy cabin” in the “beloved square” among the treasures of the blended religion and statecraft which pertained to the government of the Cherokees. That Tscholens could have surreptitiously exchanged the belts, as Tsiskwa of Citico, dismayed, overwhelmed, yet blusteringly contended, was held to be preposterous; for there was not a moment, sleeping or waking, when the Delawares were not in the company and close charge of the Cherokees, who must needs have been cognizant of any such demonstration.

Only one explanation was deemed plausible: the old man, doubtless in his dotage despite his seeming mental poise, had lost sight of the political significance of the bauble; he had bestowed it after the manner of the presents that all were unofficially heaping upon the “grandfather,” and had mechanically, unthinkingly, received in exchange the Delaware belt.