I knew it was useless to urge on him the desirability of inaction until the army moved.

Be might perhaps have understood me and listened to me, were the warfare he was now engaged in only the red knight-errantry of an Indian seeking glory.

But he had long since won his spurs.
And this feud with Amochol was something far more deadly than mere warfare; it was the clash of a Mohican Sagamore of the Sacred Clan with the dreadful and abhorred priesthood of the Senecas--the hatred and infuriated contempt of a noble and ordained priest for the black-magic of a sorcerer--orthodoxy, militant and terrible, scourging blasphemy and crushing its perverted acolytes at the very feet of their Antichrist.
I began to understand this strange, stealthy slaughter in the dark, which only the eyes of the midnight sky looked down on, while I lay soundly sleeping.

I knew that nothing I could say would now keep this Siwanois at my side at night.

Yet, he had been given me to guard.