When we took to the water again, they were a gaudy company. In place of the black faces they had affected when they captured us, their chins and lower ears were vermilion, and white stripes ran upward from their black noses and over the tops of their heads, parallel to their bright red crests. Thus they had the look of enormous red-headed woodpeckers. The similarity, Verrieul learned, was only partly intentional. The white paint was used solely because they belonged to the White Party. Every male in the entire Sac nation, he discovered, was made either a White or a Black at birth. Thus the nation was evenly divided into ready-made factions, who were forever striving against each other, in hunting and war and games; even in dancing or the singing of war songs. In this way the spirit of patriotic competition was not only instilled in every boy as soon as he was able to walk, but kept alive in every man until his dying day.

After our endless journey, this country to which we had come seemed even more beautiful than New England. The stream itself was clear as glass, so that when we passed deep pools, we saw the black and white edging to the fins of the trout far below: the white and red spots on them: the backward movement of their eyes as they rolled them calculatingly at the shadow of the canoe.

The valley through which this river flowed was broad enough for ten rivers, and was laid out to natural terraces, rising and rising until they terminated, in the far distance, in a long chain of hills, pearly blue in the warm November haze.

The terraces, and the hills too, were wooded with maples, elms and birches in small clumps and groves, separated by rich meadows, so that both sides of the river had the look of a cultivated estate.

The chief town of the Saukies was built at a fork in the river. The houses stood on the second and third terraces above the river; and on the terraces above and below the houses were plantations of corn, beans, melons and pumpkins.

The houses were the size and shape of a New England barn built by a carpenter who had forgot the proper proportions for a barn.

They were too long, too low and too narrow; but they were built of hewn plank, covered with overlapping bark; and in front of the door of each house was a sort of porch where the occupants could sit in good weather, smoking their pipes and looking down on their fields and the river. All along the fronts of these houses were spears and poles, thrust upright in the ground, so that the place had a queer, bristly look.

When we came in sight of the settlement the whole town erupted Indians—pigeon-toed squaws, befeathered braves, stark-naked copper-skinned boys and girls, all joining in a discordant chorus of welcome underlain by the yapping of innumerable wolf-like dogs that gamboled among them.