True Son, Half Arrow, and Little Crane discuss the odd behaviors of the white soldiers: talking too loud, getting too close to a speaker's face, and talking all at once, like rude children. Little Crane also criticizes how whites are overly possessive of their things.
True Son dreads the eventual separation from his friends. The trio spends the night on the western bank of the river that flows past Fort Pitt. The next morning, Half Arrow and Little Crane discover the corpse of a Mohawk, who has been murdered and scalped.
Ready now to cross the river, Del informs Half Arrow and the other Indian followers that they must turn around and go back to their village. When Del unties True Son's arms for the river crossing, True Son lunges at Del, who again ties him with ropes. Half Arrow reminds his friend that Cuyloga wanted True Son to avoid trouble with whites and to act like a stoic warrior. True Son crosses the river with the expedition, leaving his two friends behind.
Analysis
Chapter 4 illustrates the skewed logic of racist thinking. Ignoring the fact that True Son was born white, Little Crane says that white people are weak because they have mixed blood. Unlike the Lenni Lenape, an "original people," whites are an impure race, made "foolish and troublesome" by conflicting traits of their ancestors. It doesn't occur to Little Crane that the Lenni Lenape custom of adopting white captives adds the same impurities to the Lenni Lenape gene pool.
To further prove white inferiority, Half Arrow derides the Bible as proof that whites have no instinctive morality; they must learn right from wrong by "the cumbersome labor of reading." To Half Arrow, the idea of writing God's word is unthinkable. He boasts that Indians know what is good and what is bad without having to rely on anything but themselves.