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“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. That was 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 they could 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?”