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"Enter," invited Pocahontas, "and behold how I live." "I see enough," he answered, turning his head from side to side; "but where dwelleth the white man's Okee?" "The God of the Christians?" she asked, puzzled at his question; "in the sky above." "But where do the shamans call to him?" he continued. "Yonder in the church, that building with the peak to it," she pointed out.
Crouched behind some sumac bushes still bearing aloft their crimson torches, the girls looked on in wonderment, themselves unseen. The sun was sinking behind them, behind the backs too of the colonists who all faced the east. Then Pocahontas whispered to her sister: "See, Cleopatra, they must be worshiping their Okee. Yon man all in white before them must be a shaman."
"Perhaps," suggested another, "it was not a real bear cub but some evil manitou." The maidens shuddered deliciously at this possibility. "Nonsense," called back Pocahontas, "he was real enough; here is the mark of one claw on my foot. Besides, I do not believe the evil manitou can have such power on such a beautiful day as this. Okee must have bid them fly away."
An Indian rowing in the second canoe commenced a chant or prayer to Okee. The notes were low and broken, unutterably wild and melancholy. One by one his fellows took up the strain; it swelled higher, louder, and sterner, became a deafening cry, then ceased abruptly, making the stillness that followed like death itself. Both canoes swung round from the middle stream and made for the bank.
The three Indians pressed their faces against the ground; they dreamed not of harm from us, but Okee was in the merciless hail and the first thunder of the year, now pealing through the wood. Suddenly Diccon raised himself upon his elbow, and looked across at me. Our eyes had no sooner met than his hand was at his bosom.
"But," asked Nautauquas slowly and gravely, as if weighing the matter, "why should we wish to destroy these white men? I once had different thoughts, and I have gone alone into the forest and fasted and prayed to Okee that I might know whether to greet them as foe or friend. In some way the white tribes that live across the great waters have found their way westward.
When the boats had slipped from the stripe of gold into the inky shadow of the pines, the Paspaheghs began to divest themselves of this or that which they conceived Okee might desire to possess. One flung into the stream a handful of copper links, another the chaplet of feathers from his head, a third a bracelet of blue beads.
The omnipotent okee fell to the earth, and with him several of his worshippers. The rest fled to the woods, and, finding resistance vain, they brought quantities of corn, venison, turkeys, and wild-fowl, and received in exchange beads, copper, hatchets, and their discomfited deity.
Here in the deep brazen voice of the marriage bells ringing out in the belfry above him he thought he heard the answer his incantation had forced from the white man's Okee.
"Okee is perhaps angry with his Monacans, and sent it." "Was it Audrey?" Haward laughed. "No, it was not Audrey. And so, Monacan, you have yourself fallen into the pit which you digged." From the fireplace came the schoolmaster's slow voice: "Dear sir, can you show the pit? Why should this youth desire to harm you? Where is the storm bird?
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