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Here, however, with their flanks protected, they were solid as a wall of granite. Upon this narrow wall the yelling wave of the attack surged and recoiled, and surged again, and made no impression. The clumsy weapons of the enemy were no match for the pounding swing of the stone clubs, the long, lightning thrust of the flint-headed spears.
At the other end lay a draughtsman's board, a Gunter's scale, a pair of dividers and other materials, where he had been trying to reduce to paper and topographical decorum for transference to an official report a map of the region which Rayetaeh, a chief from Toquoe, who had visited the fort that afternoon, had drawn on the sand of the parade ground with a flint-headed arrow.
In the customary order of their going, Grôm went first, peering ahead, ever studying, pondering, observing, with his bow and his club swung from his shoulder, his heavy, flint-headed spear always in readiness for use at close quarters.
He loved his animal friends, and was grieved that they should combine against him. Besides, he was naked and unarmed. But his Elder Brother armed him with a bow and flint-headed arrows, a stone war-club and a spear. He likewise tossed a pebble four times into the air, and each time it became a cliff or wall of rock about the teepee.
There were heaps of earth also, which, being dug open, proved to be Indian graves, containing bows and flint-headed spears and arrows; for the Indians buried the dead warrior’s weapons along with him. In some spots, there were skulls and other human bones, lying unburied.
A few stately savages, in all the pomp and dignity of the primeval Indian, stood gazing at the spectacle. Their flint-headed arrows were but childish weapons compared with the matchlocks of the Puritans, and would have rattled harmlessly against the steel caps and hammered iron breastplates which inclosed each soldier in an individual fortress.
Long after they obtained better weapons they used flint-headed arrows for slaying the only two beasts which it was lawful to sacrifice, the deer and the buffalo. They have long been a hunting and also an agricultural people.
The weapons he carried were his war-club, two light, flint-headed hunting-spears and a flint knife hung from his wolf-skin girdle. All that day, till mid-afternoon, he journeyed swiftly, straight ahead, taking no precaution save to keep always a vigilant watch and to avoid dark coverts whence tiger or leopard might spring upon him.
The foremost, a plumed and cinctured warrior, depicted as addressing the Onondaga chief, holds in his right hand, as a staff, his flint-headed spear, the ensign, it may be supposed, which marks him as the representative of the Caniengas, or "People of the Flint." Behind him another plumed figure bears in his hand a bow with arrows, and at his shoulder a quiver.
They had iron weapons and tools, and the short dark people could not keep them at bay with their bone- tipped spears and flint-headed arrows. We know nothing about the struggle between them. But it may be that the fairy stories we were told when children come from those far-off times. If a fairy maiden came from lake or mound to live among men, she vanished at once if touched with iron.
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