CHAPTER III

HAYSTACK FRIENDSHIP

The next morning the little mother and Roger went away. She said she was terribly afraid that she would "see something" on the trail.

"Do not fear," said the hermit. "It is I who ride the white ox, and I will accompany you part of the way, and Father Eliot shall ride the ox."

So they went into the forest trail, and Metacomet followed.

They parted at last on the borders of the green groves of Swansea.

"Little Prince," said timid Susan, "you love the oaks. I see that you do. The squirrels love the oaks, too, and I see that you and the squirrels which live under ground are friends. There are great oaks and green mosses in Swansea. There are white birches there, and green savins, and all around are mossy places where one can rest, and hear the birds sing, and pick berries. The wild geese stop there in their flight--oh, it is a lovely place, and my husband, Joe, he is a good man, a wood-chopper. Won't you come over to our cabin some day, and see Roger, and help him find things in the woods?--you know all about the wonders of the woods, and we are near to them."

The Indian lad turned to Roger and said, "I will come."

"That will be fine!" said Roger clapping his hands at the prospect of a playmate.

"If anything should happen," said timid Susan, "we will not forsake each other. We will always be true to each other, whatever may happen."

So the timid woman and Roger and the Indian prince made a treaty of peace. And they were very sincere.

As they parted Little Metacomet said, "My heart will never forget."

The very next day he came up from the river bend at Sowams to see Roger. Timid Susan made some pancakes for him, and he said--

"Me will never forget; me will come two times mo' (again and again) and will bring you things out of the woods."

He now began to look for things in the woods that would cause Susan to wonder. He liked to see her wonder "two times mo'"--again and again.

There were great open places in the woods then full of tall grasses and berry bushes. The redberry grew in them, the black alders, the wild rose bushes and barberry bushes from whose berries candles were made. The barberries lined the uplands. There lived the meadow birds of windward ways. The snipe hid there, and the bobolink made the air ring in summer when singing to his nesting mate. These meadowy places were all bloom and song, and the little prince roamed among them, the feathers on his head scarcely higher than last year's pussy-willows, and the red-winged blackbirds following him in alarm and wonder.

Susan was a simple woman, with a faithful heart. She lacked strong sense or the expression of it, but she loved everybody. In the old country she had been called "queer," a "little off," "touched in mind." But she tried to make every one happy.

When her husband, the woodman, bought of King Philip a piece of land, he and Susan and Roger went there to live. It was summer, and the air was all fragrance and song. There was a large flat stack of swale meadow grass on the land. The family took shelter under it for a few nights, while the woodman was building his cabin.

Susan used to go out to the stack to rest often during the summer. Many of the early New Englanders used to pray in the woods, and it was thought that Susan used a hollow in the stack for this purpose.

Some Indians frequently saw her sheltered by the stack. They came to call her "The Lady of the Haystack," in Indian words.

She used to give pancakes to the Indians who sat down to rest under the great trees by her door.

The Indians brought her corn husks and meal from the tribal mill, which was near. She would make cornmeal cakes and roast them in the husks, which she would share with the wayfarers under the trees.

Little Metacomet began to come often and loiter about the cabin or stack until he was seen. Susan would go out to invite him in, at first very cautiously.

"You hav'n't got no war-whoop in ye," she would sometimes say.

The little prince would bow his head, as if it dropped from a pivot.

"Then don't let it come out," she would say. "Follow me, now."

Susan every day feared more and more that she would hear the war-whoop notwithstanding that she was so friendly with the little prince. When the loon cried in the night, she would say, "Never mind: I have the little prince's heart. He will always be true to me."

There were three things that Susan was afraid she would see or hear. One was a ghost, after the old New England superstition, another, an Indian conjurer, or medicine man, and the last was the _war-whoop_.

"Why, I would be that scart," she used to say, "if I were to hear it, I would go right out of my head, and never would come back."

"Where would you go?" asked Roger one day, "if you should hear it skittering along the air?"

"I would fly to the old haystack, and hide in the hay, and put my fingers on both ears and pray."

She had a tame blue jay that used to scream after her in the trees as if to frighten her. The roguish bird seemed to know that he could alarm her, and to delight in it. He would make a sound like the turning of a crank, after he had yelled his war-whoop.

Poor Susan, when she was in trouble she resorted to the haystack, in which was a cavern, where she said the Lord "covered her with his wings." The little prince used to find her there when she was not in the cabin, and he would take her surprises there, as wild strawberries, flowers, birds and little animals. He once carried her there the rose of birds, the red bird of the deep woods, whose disposition was as shy as her own.

"I must let him go," she said, while holding it in wonder.

"Why?" asked the little prince.

"Because his heart beats so fast. The Golden Rule was meant for birds, too."

"What is the Golden Rule?"

And Susan let the red bird go, and taught Metacomet the Golden Rule in the shadow of the haystack.

There was one charm of the woods that is little valued to-day. It is almost a lost art among us. It was the odors of the flowers and the trees. The Indian women knew, or thought they knew, the value of all roots and herbs as medicines, but they also found delight in the odors of vegetation, like the nature-loving children of the Eastern world. It was not the pungent rose, the sassafras and pennyroyal that most attracted them, but the violet, the arbutus, the locust, the wild honeysuckle, the spearmint, the bruised checkerberry, the musk plants, and the sweet brier. The last exceeded all other plants in the subtlety of its perfume.

The faculty of scent of the Indian to enjoy all these fragrances was highly developed. Nature to the wild man was more than to the pioneer; the former lived in a fragrance which the man of towns knew but little.

The Indian loved his own world. The rocks bloomed for him, the streams filled their banks with flowers for him, the forests were his parks, and he could see and hear more clearly and smell more keenly than the toilers from over the sea.

The Indian boy brought Susan the nosegays that had not the most showy colors, but the sweetest odors. Among his surprises for her was a "clear horn." There were certain horns that grew white towards the end and were pointed with a clear substance like amber. The point of these horns shone in the sunlight like gold. This clear horn was an emblem of dignity and royalty. Suggestions of the use of the emblem of the clear horn are to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures, and ancient art.

"It shines," said Little Metacomet.

"What shines?" asked Roger, who stood by admiring it.

"The horn--let me hold it up to the sun."

He held the top of the horn in a way that the sun might strike it. It seemed to turn into fire; to burn; to send forth rays as from a flame of gold.

"It is like a king, with a crown on his head," said Susan. "May you wear white robes and a crown of gold that will shine."

The little prince did not quite comprehend this figure of speech.

He stood in the sun for a long time, holding up the clear horn to the sun to see the rays reflected from the top of it. The clear horn was a kind of parable of life to the Indian priests, after the ancient Hebrew thought, and even the prince saw a meaning in it.