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over the rooftops and drifted in troubled tones through the glass of the windows. Some important ship had come into the docks on the Delaware. Then a rooster shrieked in the stableyard behind the house, again and again.
    “That is a fighting cock,” said Rivers, the accountant. “That boy.
    He was warned he would be fired.” “I would imagine,” said Simons.
    “He fights them down there with the Irish in Southwark.” “Well, he is young and Irish himself,” said Kane.
    “What ship would that be?” said Samuel. “That they are ringing the bell for?”
    Dr. Reed waved away the ship and the fighting cock and the Irish boy butler.
    “Samuel, our confidence in thee is very strong. I have prayed about this. I have taken it to the Lord.”
    “Confident in what way?” said Samuel.
    “Thou hast not wavered in thy beliefs in this past year?”
    “No.” Samuel said it without hesitation. His beliefs remained true and perfect in an icy, remote way. And he, Samuel, had ob- served with interest as his own former personality contracted and then realigned itself and changed. After a while he became a skilled and fearless ambulance driver who had no idea who he was. His beliefs turned, suspended in the air, lit by another light in crystal- line majesty, and in quiet moments of exhaustion or sleep and the dreams that came to him then, he saw them shining beyond his reach. There was always a sort of grieving in his mind.
    “We know, first of all, that you would be that person which you would ask another to be. That you would help the red man to ques- tion his distance from God and point out that the distance might be closed. Only after the Indian people confess to their Creator, I have used violence in my life to carry off what was not mine, would they come to see that violence keeps mankind from God’s own light and His presence, and that light, and that presence, is far beyond anything we might value here below. Far beyond.”
    “I understand that,” said Samuel.
    “Thou art needed,” said Dr. Reed. “These people have need of thee.”
    Lewis Morgan watched Samuel while Dr. Reed spoke in that ancient, thready voice. Everyone nodded. After a long pause Mor- gan turned to Samuel and said, “These are unsettled tribes you would have to deal with. I believe they only came onto the plains when they got horses from the Spaniards. Before that they were ap-
    parently on foot and unable to penetrate the Great Plains where the buffalo lived. Now they have become rich and strong. They have a tight, and I would say almost impenetrable, network of kinship. Their lives are lives of action.”
    Samuel nodded with a polite expression. He was the youngest man at the table, and the less he said the better. He lowered his head and gazed up at Morgan. “But I have not said I would deal with it at all, yet.”
    Morgan nodded. “I understand.”
    Joseph Kane raised a finger. His hands were speckled brown with age. “By kindness. By reasoned argument.”
    “Of course,” said Samuel.
    The shipowner said, “So much violence has been used against the red man. The Texans will be coming home from the war, in- ured, accustomed to scenes of slaughter and violence we still have trouble comprehending. They have driven the red man from his own hunting grounds before the war, and they will continue to do so after it. An enormous reservation has been set aside for our red men, the—” He paused.
    “The Comanche, the Kiowa, and the Kiowa-Apache,” said Mor- gan, patiently. “And I believe some Wichitas.”
    “Who has the Wichita?” The elderly doctor leaned forward.
    “I think they are more or less tossed in with the others,” said Morgan.
    Joseph Kane still had his finger in the air. “As I said, an enormous reservation set aside for these tribes. The Texans are to leave them alone, and not to encroach on their hunting grounds. Now, there will be a military presence.” His hand fell to his side and touched the ticking watch. “But