Broad Stripes and Bright Stars Author:Carolyn Sherwin Bailey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FIRST FIGHT The Indian, Squanto, crept with silent footsteps through the wintry woods of Plymouth and peered in the window of the log building at the foot... more » of the hill. News of the arrival of the Pilgrims with their fearless captain, Miles Standish, had been brought to the nearby tribe by Indian scouts. The tribe had watched their landing, the cutting of logs for this single large house that sheltered the Pilgrims and then tools and stores, the placing of cannon on the hilltop and the enclosing of the settlement by a tall stockade. They had seen the women washing the clothes in the water of some chilly stream, they had watched this doughty leader of the pale faces, Captain Standish, helping to make soup in a large iron pot, tending the sick, and even digging graves during those first hard months in the New World. Whatever came to his hand, he did aswell as he had fought in Flanders and guided the Pilgrims to the shores of Plymouth. It was so with the others of this little company of strangers in the redman's land. Although an occasional glimpse of a painted face looking over the stockade, a swift dart shot from an Indian bow in the forest, or the echo of a savage yell terrified them, they went on hunting and staking off plots for gardens and houses, and cutting logs and stalking game in a fearless way that interested the tribes. The Indians were as much a part of America as were the pine trees and the deer. It was their land on which the Pilgrims were settling and the savages could have surrounded them and killed them at any time that they chose. Instead, they were watching their new neighbors and waiting. As he knelt, unseen, by the window the Indian runner touched the rough logs of which this first house in Plymouth was built. The wigwam to which he would return was ...« less