When he awoke, the rising sun, almost level with the low entrance to
the sweat-house, was darting its direct rays into the interior, as
if searching it with fiery spears. He had slept ten hours. He rose
tremblingly to his knees. Everything was quiet without; he might yet
escape. He crawled to the opening. The open space before it was empty,
but the scaffolding was gone. The clear, keen air revived him. As he
sprang out, erect, a shout that nearly stunned him seemed to rise from
the earth on all sides. He glanced around him in a helpless agony of
fear. A dozen concentric circles of squatting Indians, whose heads were
visible above the reeds, encompassed the banks around the sunken base
of the sweat-house with successive dusky rings. Every avenue of escape
seemed closed. Perhaps for that reason the attitude of his surrounding
captors was passive rather than aggressive, and the shrewd, half-Hebraic
profiles nearest him expressed only stoical waiting. There was a strange
similarity of expression in his own immovable apathy of despair. His
only sense of averting his fate was a confused idea of explaining his
intrusion. His desperate memory yielded a few common Indian words. He
pointed automatically to himself and the stream. His white lips moved.

"I come--from--the river!"

A guttural cry, as if the whole assembly were clearing their throats,
went round the different circles. The nearest rocked themselves to
and fro and bent their feathered heads toward him. A hollow-cheeked,
decrepit old man arose and said, simply:--

"It is he! The great chief has come!"

*****