“My white brother who sits beside me here,” he concluded, “downed the man who struck me, thereby risking not only death for his act, but the terrible torture of the lash. He is an officer in the White Father’s great navy, a flyer of airplanes, a person of importance among his own people; yet he did that for a Seminole he had known less than a day. Without his knowledge of flying, escape from the Great Cypress would have been impossible: and again, when death at the hands of those gangsters stared us in the face aboard the flying ship, he arranged for the safety of this black man and myself while he stayed behind to battle with them. That is why I take him by the hand now and thank him in the name of the once-great Seminole nation!”