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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Frontiersmen, by Charles Egbert Craddock


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Title: The Frontiersmen

Author: Charles Egbert Craddock

Release Date: October 12, 2004  [eBook #13724]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRONTIERSMEN***


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THE FRONTIERSMEN

by

CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK

Author of _A Spectre of Power_, _The Prophet of the Great Smoky
Mountains_, _In the Tennessee Mountains_, etc.

1904







CONTENTS


THE LINGUISTER

A VICTOR AT CHUNGKE

THE CAPTIVE OF THE ADA-WEHI

THE FATE OF THE CHEERA-TAGHE

THE BEWITCHED BALL-STICKS

THE VISIT OF THE TURBULENT GRANDFATHER

NOTES




THE LINGUISTER


The mental image of the world is of individual and varying compass. It
may be likened to one of those curious Chinese balls of quaintly carved
ivory, containing other balls, one within another, the proportions ever
dwindling with each successive inclosure, yet each a more minute
duplicate of the external sphere. This might seem the least world of
all,--the restricted limits of the quadrangle of this primitive
stockade,--but Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane had known no other than
such as this. It was large enough for her, for a fairy-like face, very
fair, with golden brown hair, that seemed to have entangled the
sunshine, and lustrous brown eyes, looked out of an embrasure (locally
called "port-hole") of the blockhouse, more formidable than the swivel
gun once mounted there, commanding the entrance to the stockade gate.
Her aspect might have suggested that Titania herself had resorted to
military methods and was ensconced in primitive defenses. It was even
large enough for her name, which must have been conferred upon her, as
the wits of the Blue Lick Station jocularly averred, in the hope of
adding some size to her. It was large enough also for the drama of
battle and the tragedy of bloody death--both had befallen within its
limits.

There had been a night, glooming very dark in the past, an unwary night
when the row of log houses, all connected by the palisades from one to
the other, presenting a blank wall without, broken only by loopholes for
musketry, had been scaled by the crafty Cherokees, swarming over the
roofs, and attacking the English settlers through the easy access of the
unglazed windows and flimsy batten doors that opened upon the
quadrangle. Although finally beaten off, the Indians had inflicted great
loss. Her father had been one of the slain settlers who thus paid
penalty for the false sense of security, fostered by long immunity. Even
more troublous times came later,--the tumult of open war was rife in all
the land; the station was repeatedly attacked, and although it held out
stanchly, fear and suspense and grief filled the stockade,--yet still
there was space for Cupid to go swaggering hither and thither within the
guarded gates, and aim his arrows with his old-time dainty skill, albeit
his bow and quiver might seem somewhat archaic in these days of powder
and lead. For Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane spent much of her time in
the moulding of bullets. Perhaps it was appropriate, since both she and
her young pioneer lover dealt so largely in missiles, that it was thus
the sentimental dart was sped. Lead was precious in those days, but
sundry bullets, that she had moulded, Ralph Emsden never rammed down
into the long barrel of his flintlock rifle. Some question as to whether
the balls had cooled, or perhaps some mere meditative pause, had carried
the bits of lead in her fingers to her lips, as they sat together on the
hearth and talked and worked in the fire-lit dusk for their common
defense. He was wont to watch, lynx-eyed, the spot where these
consecrated bullets were placed, and afterward carried them in a
separate buckskin bag over his heart, and mentally called them his
"kisses;" for the youths of those days were even such fools as now,
although in the lapse of time they have come to pose successfully in the
dignified guise of the "wise patriots of the pioneer period." More than
once when the station was attacked and the women loaded the guns of the
men to expedite the shooting, she kept stanchly at his elbow throughout
the thunderous conflict, and charged and primed the alternate rifles
which he fired.[1] Over the trigger, in fact, the fateful word was
spoken.

"Oh, Nan," he exclaimed, looking down at her while taking the weapon
from her hand in the vague dusk where she knelt beside him,--he stood on
the shelf that served as banquette to bring him within reach of the
loophole, placed so high in the hope that a chance shot entering might
range only among the rafters,--"How quick you are! How you help me!"

The thunderous crash of the double volley of the settlers firing twice,
by the aid of their feminine auxiliaries, to every volley of the
Indians, overwhelmed for the moment the tumult of the fiendish whoops in
the wild darkness outside, and then the fusillade of the return fire,
like leaden hail, rattled against the tough log walls of the station.

"Are you afraid, Nan?" he asked, as he received again the loaded weapon
from her hand.

"_Afraid?_--No!" exclaimed Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane--hardly taller
than the ramrod with which she was once more driving the charge home.

He saw her face, delicate and blonde, in the vivid white flare from the
rifle as he thrust it through the loophole and fired. "You think I can
take care of you?" he demanded, while the echo died away, and a lull
ensued.

"I know you can," she replied, adjusting with the steady hand of an
expert the patching over the muzzle of the discharged weapon in the
semi-obscurity.

A blood-curdling shout came from the Cherokees in the woods with a
deeper roar of musketry at closer quarters; and a hollow groan within
the blockhouse, where there was a sudden commotion in the dim light,
told that some bullet had found its billet.

"They are coming to the attack again--Hand me the
rifle--quick--quick--Oh, Nan, how you help me! How brave you are--I love
you! I love you!"

"Look out now for a flash in the pan!" Peninnah Penelope Anne merely
admonished him.

Being susceptible to superstition and a ponderer on omens, Ralph Emsden
often thought fretfully afterward on the double meaning of these words,
and sought to displace them in their possible evil influence on his
future by some assurance more cheerful and confident. With this view he
often earnestly beset her, but could secure nothing more pleasing than a
reference to the will of her grandfather and a protestation to abide by
his decision in the matter.

Now Peninnah Penelope Anne's grandfather was deaf. His was that hopeless
variety of the infirmity which heard no more than he desired. His
memory, however, was unimpaired, and it may be that certain
recollections of his own experiences in the past remained with him,
making him a fine judge of the signs of the present. Emsden, appalled by
the necessity of shrieking out his love within the acute and
well-applied hearing facilities of the families of some ten
"stationers," to use the phrase of the day, diligently sought to decoy,
on successive occasions, Richard Mivane out to the comparative solitudes
of the hunting, the fishing, the cropping. In vain. Richard Mivane
displayed sudden extreme prudential care against surprise and capture by
Indians, when this was possible, and when impossible he developed
unexpected and unexampled resources of protective rheumatism. The young
lover was equally precluded from setting forth the state of his
affections and the prospects of his future in writing. Apart from the
absurdity of thus approaching a man whom he saw twenty times a day, old
Mivane would permit no such intimation of the extent of his
affliction,--it being a point of pride with him that he was merely
slightly hard of hearing, and suffered only from the indistinctness of
the enunciation of people in general. And indeed, it was variously
contended that he was so deaf that he could not hear a gun fired at his
elbow; and yet that he heard all manner of secrets which chanced to be
detailed in his presence, in inadvertent reliance on his incapacity, and
had not the smallest hesitation afterward in their disclosure, being
entitled to them by right of discovery, as it were.

Emsden, in keen anxiety, doubtful if his suit were seriously
disapproved, or if these demonstrations were only prompted by old
Mivane's selfish aversion to give away his granddaughter, finally
summoned all his courage, and in a stentorian roar proclaimed to the old
gentleman his sentiments.

Richard Mivane was a man of many punctilious habitudes, who wore cloth
instead of buckskin, however hard it might be to come by, and silver
knee-buckles and well-knit hose on his still shapely calves, and a
peruke carefully powdered and tended. He had a keen, wrinkled, bloodless
face, discerning, clever, gray eyes, heavy, overhanging, grizzled
eyebrows, and a gentlemanly mouth of a diplomatic, well-bred,
conservative expression.

It was said at Blue Lick Station that he had fled from his own country,
the north of England, on account of an affair of honor,--a duel in early
life,--and that however distasteful the hardships and comparative
poverty of this new home, it was far safer for him than the land of his
birth. His worldly position there gave him sundry claims of superiority,
for all of which his hardy pioneer son had had scant sympathy; and Ralph
Emsden, in the difficult crisis of the disclosure of the state of his
affections, heaved many a sigh for this simple manly soul's untimely
fate.

The elder Mivane, with his head bent forward, his hand behind his ear,
sat in his arm-chair while he hearkened blandly to the sentimental
statements which Emsden was obliged to shout forth twice. Then Richard
Mivane cleared his throat with a sort of preliminary gentlemanly
embarrassment, and went fluently on with that suave low voice so common
to the very deaf. "Command me, sir, command me! It will give me much
pleasure to use my influence on your behalf to obtain an ensigncy. I
will myself write at the first opportunity, the first express, to
Lieutenant-Governor Bull, who is acquainted with my family connections
in England. It is very praiseworthy, very laudable indeed, that you
should aspire to a commission in the military service,--the provincial
forces. I honor you for your readiness to fight--although, to be sure,
being Irish, you can't help it. Still, it is to your credit that you are
Irish. I am very partial to the Irish traits of character--was once in
Ireland myself--visited an uncle there"--and so forth and so forth.

And thus poor Ralph Emsden, who was only Irish by descent, and could not
have found Ireland on the map were he to hang for his ignorance, and had
been born and bred in the Royal province of South Carolina,--which
country he considered the crown and glory of the world,--was constrained
to listen to all the doings and sayings of Richard Mivane in Ireland
from the time that he embarked on the wild Irish Sea, which scrupled not
to take unprecedented liberties with so untried a sailor, till the
entrance of other pioneers cut short a beguiling account of his first
meeting with potheen in its native haunts, and the bewildering pranks
that he and that tricksy sprite played together in those the
irresponsible days of his youth.

Emsden told no one, not even Peninnah Penelope Anne, of his
discomfiture; but alack, there were youngsters in the family of
unaffected minds and unimpaired hearing. This was made amply manifest a
day or so afterward, when he chanced to pause at the door of the log
cabin and glance in, hoping that, perhaps, the queen of his dreams might
materialize in this humble domicile.

The old gentleman slept in his chair, with dreams of his own, perchance,
for his early life might have furnished a myriad gay fancies for his
later years. The glare of noonday lay on the unshaded spaces of the
quadrangle without; for all trees had been felled, even far around the
inclosure, lest thence they might afford vantage and ambush for musketry
fire or a flight of arrows into the stockade. Through rifts in the
foliage at considerable distance one could see the dark mountain looming
high above, and catch glimpses of the further reaches of the Great Smoky
Range, blue and shimmering far away, and even distinguish the crest of
"Big Injun Mountain" on the skyline. The several cabins, all connected
by that row of protective palisades from one to another like a visible
expression of the chord of sympathy and mutual helpful neighborliness,
were quiet, their denizens dining within. At the blockhouse a guard was
mounted--doubtless a watchful and stanch lookout, but unconforming to
military methods, for he sang, to speed the time, a metrical psalm of
David's; the awkward collocation of the words of this version would
forever distort the royal poet's meaning if he had no other vehicle of
his inspiration. There were long waits between the drowsy lines, and in
the intervals certain callow voices, with the penetrating timbre of
youth, came to Emsden's ear. His eyes followed the sound quickly.

The little sisters of Peninnah Penelope Anne were on the floor before a
playhouse, outlined by stones and sticks, and with rapt faces and
competent fancies, saw whatsoever they would. In these riches of
imagination a little brother also partook. A stick, accoutred in such
wise with scraps of buckskin as to imitate a gallant of the place and
period, was bowing respectfully before another stick, vested in the
affabilities of age and the simulacrum of a dressing-gown.

"I love your granddaughter, sir, and wish to make her my wife," said the
bowing stick.

"Command me, sir; command me!" suavely replied the stick stricken in
years.

The scene had been an eye-opener to the tender youth of the little
Mivanes; the pomp and circumstance of a sentimental disclosure they
would never forget.

Emsden, as hardy a pioneer as ever drew a bead on a panther or an
Indian, passed on, quaking at the thought of the wits of the Station as
he had never yet feared man, and his respected Irish blood ran cold. And
when it waxed warm with wrath once more it came to pass that to utter
the simple phrase "Command me" was as much as a man's life was worth at
Blue Lick Station.

Emsden thought ruefully of the girl's mother and wondered if her
intercession would avail aught with the old autocrat. But he had not yet
ventured upon this. There was nothing certain about Mrs. Mivane but her
uncertainty. She never gave a positive opinion. Her attitude of mind was
only to be divined by inference. She never gave a categorical answer.
And indeed he would not have been encouraged to learn that Richard
Mivane himself had already consulted his daughter-in-law, as in this
highhanded evasion of any decision he felt the need of support. For once
the old gentleman was not displeased with her reply, comprehensive,
although glancing aside from the point. Since there were so many young
men in the country, said Mrs. Mivane, she saw no reason for despair!
With this approval of his temporizing policy Richard Mivane left the
matter to the development of the future.

Emsden's depression would have been more serious had he not fortunately
sundry tokens of the old man's favor to cherish in his memory, which
seemed to intimate that this elusiveness was only a shrewd scheme to
delay and thwart him rather than a positive and reasonable disposition
to deny his suit. In short, Emsden began to realize that instead of a
damsel of eighteen he had to court a coquette rising sixty, of the
sterner sex, and deafer than an adder when he chose. His artful quirks
were destined to try the young lover's diplomacy to the utmost, and
Emsden appreciated this, but he reassured himself with the reflection
that it was better thus than if it were the girl who vacillated and
delighted to torture him with all the arts of a first-class jilt. He was
constantly in and out of the house almost as familiarly as if he were
already betrothed, for in the troublous period that seemed now closing,
with its sudden flights, its panics, its desperate conflicts with the
Indians, he had been able to give an almost filial aid to Richard Mivane
in the stead of the son whom the old man had lost.

Richard Mivane had always felt himself an alien, a sojourner in this new
land, and perchance he might not have been able even partially to
reconcile himself to the ruder conditions of his later life if the
bursting of a financial bubble had not swept away all hope of returning
to the status of his earlier home in England when the tragedy of the
duel had been sunk in oblivion. The frontier was a fine place to hide
one's poverty and fading graces, he had once remarked, and thereafter
had seemed to resign himself to its hardships,--indeed, sometimes he
consigned his negro body-servant, Caesar, to other duties than his
exclusive attendance. He had even been known to breakfast with his head
tied up in a handkerchief when some domestic crisis had supervened, such
as the escape of all the horses from the pinfold, to call away his
barber. As this functionary was of an active temperament and not at all
averse to the labor in the fields, he proved of more value thus utilized
than in merely furnishing covert amusement to the stationers by his
pompous duplication of his master's attitude of being too cultured,
traveled, and polished for his surroundings. He was a trained valet,
however, expert in all the details of dressing hair, powdering, curling,
pomatuming, and other intricacies of the toilet of a man of fashion of
that day. Caesar had many arts at command touching the burnishing of
buckles and buttons, and even in clear-starching steinkirks and the
cambric ruffles of shirts. As he ploughed he was wont to tell of his
wonderful experiences while in his master's service in London (although
he had never crossed the seas); and these being accepted with seeming
seriousness, he carried his travels a step farther and described the
life he remembered in the interior of Guinea (although he had never seen
the shores of Africa). This life so closely resembled that of London
that it was often difficult to distinguish the locality of the
incidents, an incongruity that enchanted the wags of the settlement, who
continually incited him to prodigies of narration. The hairbreadth
escapes that he and his fellow-servants, as well as the white people,
had had from the wrath of the Indians, whom the negroes feared beyond
measure, and their swift flights from one stockade to another in those
sudden panics during the troubled period preceding the Cherokee War,
might have seemed more exciting material for romancing for a venturesome
Munchausen, but perhaps these realities were too stern to afford any
interest in the present or glamour in the past.

It was somewhat as a prelude to the siege of Fort Loudon by the
Cherokees in 1760 that they stormed and triumphantly carried several
minor stations to the southeast. Although Blue Lick sustained the
attack, still, in view of the loss of a number of its gallant defenders,
the settlers retreated at the first opportunity to the more sheltered
frontier beyond Fort Prince George, living from hand to mouth, some at
Long Cane and some at Ninety-Six, through those years when first
Montgomerie and then Grant made their furious forays through the
Cherokee country. Emsden, having served in the provincial regiment,
eagerly coveted a commission, of which Richard Mivane had feigned to
speak. Now that the Cherokees were ostensibly pacified,--that is,
exhausted, decimated, their towns burned, their best and bravest slain,
their hearts broken,--the fugitives from this settlement on the
Eupharsee River, as the Hiwassee was then called, gathered their
household gods and journeyed back to Blue Lick, to cry out in the
wilderness that they were "home" once more, and clasp each other's hands
in joyful gratulation to witness the roofs and stockade rise again,
rebuilt as of yore. Strangely enough, there were old Cherokee friends to
greet them anew and to be welcomed into the stockade; for even the rigid
rule of war and hate must needs be proved by its exceptions. And there
were one or two pensive philosophers among the English settlers vaguely
sad to see all the Cherokee traditions and prestige, and remnants of
prehistoric pseudo-civilization, shattered in the dust, and the
tremulous, foreign, unaccustomed effort--half-hearted, half-believing,
half-understanding--to put on the habitude of a new civilization.

"The white man's religion permits poverty, but the Indian divides his
store with the needy, and there are none suffered to be poor," said
Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the famous chief. "The white men wrangle and quarrel
together, even brother with brother; with us the inner tribal peace is
ever unbroken. The white men slay and rob and oppress the poor, and with
many cunning treaties take now our lands and now our lives; then they
offer us their religion;--why does it seem so like an empty bowl?"

"Atta-Kulla-Kulla, you know that I am deaf," said Richard Mivane, "and
you ask me such hard questions that I am not able to hear them."

It is more than probable that these stationers in the vanguard of the
irrepressible march of western emigration had been trespassers, and thus
earned their misfortunes, in some sort, by their encroachment on Indian
territory; although since the war the Cherokee boundaries had become
more vague than heretofore, it being considered that Grant's operations
had extended the frontier by some seventy miles. It may be, too, that
the Blue Lick settlers held their own by right of private purchase; for
the inhibition to the acquisition of land in this way from the Indians
was not enacted till the following year, 1763, after the events to be
herein detailed, and, indeed, such purchases even further west and of an
earlier date are of record, albeit of doubtful legality.

Now that peace in whatever maimed sort had come to this stricken land
and these adventurous settlers, who held their lives, their all, by such
precarious tenure, internecine strife must needs arise among them; not
the hand of brother against brother,--they were spared that grief,--but
one tender, struggling community against another.

And it came about in this wise.

One day Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane, watching from the "port-hole" of
the blockhouse, where the muzzle of that dog of war the little swivel
gun had once been wont to look forth, beheld Ralph Emsden ride out from
the stockade gate for a week's absence with a party of hunters; with
bluff but tender assurance he waved his hat and hand to her in farewell.

"Before all the men!" she said to herself, half in prudish dismay at his
effrontery, and yet pleased that he did not sheepishly seek to conceal
his preference. And although the men (there were but two or three and
not half the province, as her horror of this publicity would seem to
imply) said with a grin "Command me!" they said it _sotto voce_ and only
to each other.

Spring was once more afoot in the land. They daily marked her advance as
they went. Halfway up the mountains she had climbed: for the maples were
blooming in rich dark reds that made the nearer slopes even more
splendid of garb than the velvet azure of the distant ranges, the elms
had put forth delicate sprays of emerald tint, and the pines all bore
great wax-like tapers amidst their evergreen boughs, as if ready for
kindling for some great festival. It is a wonderful thing to hear a wind
singing in myriads of their branches at once. The surging tones of this
oratorio of nature resounded for miles along the deep indented ravines
and the rocky slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains. Now and again the
flow of a torrent or the dash of a cataract added fugue-like effects.
The men were constantly impressed by these paeans of the forests; the
tuft of violets abloom beneath a horse's hoofs might be crushed
unnoticed, but the acoustic conditions of the air and the high floating
of the tenuous white clouds against a dense blue sky, promising rain in
due season, evoked a throb of satisfaction in the farmer's heart not
less sincere because unaesthetic. The farmer's toil had hardly yet
begun, the winter's hunt being just concluded, and each of the
stationers with a string of led horses was bound for his camps and
caches to bring in the skins that made the profit of the season.

One of this group of three was the psalm-singer of the blockhouse. His
name was Xerxes Alexander Anxley, and he was unceremoniously called by
the community "X," and by Mivane "the unknown quantity," for he was
something of an enigma, and his predilections provoked much speculation.
He was a religionist of ascetic, extreme views,--a type rare in this
region,--coming originally from the colony of the Salzburgers
established in Georgia.

We are less disposed to be tolerant of individual persuasions which
imply a personal and unpleasant reflection. Xerxes Alexander Anxley
disapproved of dancing, and the community questioned his sanity; for
these early pioneers in the region of the Great Smoky Range carried the
rifle over one shoulder and the fiddle over the other. He disapproved of
secular songs and idle stories, and the settlement questioned his taste;
for it was the delight of the stationers, old and young, to gather
around the hearth, and, while the chestnuts roasted in the fire for the
juniors, and the jovial horn, as it was called, circulated among the
elders, the oft-told story was rehearsed and the old song sung anew. He
even disapproved of the jovial horn--and the settlement questioned his
sincerity.

This man Anxley looked his ascetic character. He had a hard pragmatic
countenance, and one of those noses which though large and bony come
suddenly short and blunted. His eyes, small, gray, and inscrutable,
seemed unfriendly, so baffling, introspective, unnoting was their
inattentiveness. His hair was of a sort of carrot tint, which color was
reproduced in paler guise in his fringed buckskin shirt and leggings,
worn on a sturdy and powerful frame. His mouth was shut hard and fast
upon his convictions, as if to denote that he could not be argued out of
them, and when the lips parted its lines were scarcely more mobile, and
his words were usually framed to doubt one's state of grace and to
contravene one's tenets as to final salvation. He rode much of the time
with the reins loose on his horse's neck, and perhaps no man in the
saddle had ever been so addicted to psalmody since the days of
Cromwell's troopers. His theological disputations grated peculiarly upon
Emsden's mood, and he always laid at his door the disaster that
followed.

"If I hadn't been so traveled that day,--dragged through hell and
skirting of purgatory and knocking at the gates of heaven,--I wouldn't
have lost my wits so suddenly when I came back to earth with a bounce,"
Emsden afterward declared.

For as the hunters were coming at a brisk trot in single file along the
"old trading path," as it was called even then, the fleecy white clouds
racing above in the dense blue of the sky, their violet shadows fleeting
as swift along the slopes of the velvet-soft azure mountains, and the
wind far outstripping them in the vernal budding woods, a sudden stir
near at hand caused Emsden to turn his head. Just above him, on a rugged
slope where no trees grew save a scraggy cedar here and there amidst the
shelving ledges of rock outcropping through the soft verdant turf, he
saw a stealthy, furtive shape; he was aware of a hasty cowed glance over
the shoulder, and then a stretching of supple limbs in flight. Before he
himself hardly knew it the sharp crack of his rifle rang out,--the aim
was almost instinctive.

And it was as true as instinct,--a large black wolf, his pelt glossy and
fresh with the renewal of the season, lay stretched dead in an instant
upon the slope. Emsden sprang from his horse, tossed the reins to "X,"
and, drawing his knife, ran up the steep ascent to secure the animal's
skin.

Only vaguely, as in a dream, he heard a sudden deep roar, beheld a
horned creature leaping heavily upon its fore quarters, tossing its hind
legs and tail into the air. Then an infuriated bull, breaking from the
bushes, charged fiercely down upon him. Emsden threw himself into a
posture of defense as instantly as if he had been a trained bullfighter
and the arena his wonted sphere, holding the knife close in front of
him, presenting the blade with a quick keen calculation for the animal's
jugular. The knife was Emsden's only weapon, for his pistols were in the
holster on the saddle, and his discharged rifle lay where he had flung
it on the ground after firing. He had only time to wonder that his
comrades vouchsafed him no assistance in his extremity. Men of such
accurate aim and constant practice could easily risk sending a
rifle-ball past him to stop that furious career. He could see the pupil
of the bull's wild dilated eyes, fiery as with a spark of actual flame.
He could even feel the hot puffs of the creature's breath upon his
cheeks, when all at once the horned head so close above his own swerved
aside with a snort from the dead body of the wolf at his feet. The bull
passed him like a thunderbolt, and he heard the infuriated stamping
which fairly shook the ground in the thicket below, where this king of
the herds paused to bellow and paw the earth, throwing clods high above
the environing copse.

The woods seemed full of maddened, frightened cattle, and Emsden's horse
was frantically galloping after the cavalcade of hunters and their
pack-train, all the animals more or less beyond the control of the men.
He felt it an ill chance that left him thus alone and afoot in this
dense wilderness, several days' travel from the station. He was hardly
sure that he would be missed by his comrades, themselves scattered, the
pack-horses having broken from the path which they had traveled in
single file, and now with their burdens of value all foolishly careering
wildly through the woods. The first prudential care of the hunters he
knew would be to recover them and re-align the train, lest some
miscreant, encountering the animals, plunder the estrays of their loads
of hard-won deerskins and furs.

The presence of cattle suggested to Emsden the proximity of human
dwellings, and yet this was problematic, for beyond branding and
occasional saltings the herds ranged within large bounds on lands
selected for their suitability as pasturage. The dwellings of these
pioneer herdsmen might be far away indeed, and in what direction he
could not guess. Since the Cherokee War, and the obliteration of all
previous marks of white settlements in this remote region, Emsden was
unfamiliar with the more recent location of "cow-pens," as the ranches
were called, and was only approximately acquainted with the new site of
the settlers' stations. Nothing so alters the face of a country as the
moral and physical convulsion of war. Even many of the Indian towns were
deserted and half charred,--burned by the orders of the British
commanders. One such stood in a valley through which he passed on his
homeward way; the tender vernal aspect of this green cove, held in the
solemn quiet of the encircling mountains, might typify peace itself. Yet
here the blue sky could be seen through the black skeleton rafters of
the once pleasant homes; and there were other significant skeletons in
the absolute solitude,--the great ribs of dead chargers, together with
broken bits and bridles, and remnants of exploded hand-grenades, and a
burst gun-barrel, all lying on the bank of a lovely mountain stream at
the point where he crossed it, as it flowed, crystal clear, through this
sequestered bosky nook.

Something of a job this transit was, for with the spring freshets the
water was high and the current strong, and he was compelled to use only
one hand for swimming, the other holding high out of the water's reach
his powder horn. For, despite any treaties of peace, this was no country
for a man to traverse unarmed, and an encounter with an inimical
wandering Indian might serve to make for his comrades' curiosity
concerning his fate, when they should chance to have leisure to feel it,
a perpetual conundrum.

He had never, however, made so lonely a journey. Not one human being did
he meet--neither red man nor white--in all the long miles of the endless
wilderness; naught astir save the sparse vernal shadows in the budding
woods and the gentle spring zephyr swinging past and singing as it went.
Now and again he noted how the sun slowly dropped down the skies that
were so fine, so fair, so blue that it seemed loath to go and leave the
majestic peace of the zenith. The stars scintillated in the dark night
as if a thousand bivouac fires were kindled in those far spaces of the
heavens responsive to the fire which he kept aglow to cook the supper
that his rifle fetched him and to ward off the approach of wolf or
panther while he slept. He was doubtless in jeopardy often enough, but
chance befriended him and he encountered naught inimical till the fourth
day when he came in at the gate of the station and met the partners of
the hunt, themselves not long since arrived.

They waited for no reproaches for their desertion. They were quick to
upbraid. As they hailed him in chorus he was bewildered for a moment,
and stood in the gateway leaning on his rifle, his coonskin cap thrust
back on his brown hair, his bright, steady gray eyes concentrated as he
listened. His tall, lithe figure in his buckskin hunting shirt and
leggings, the habitual garb of the frontiersmen, grew tense and gave an
intimation of gathering all its forces for the defensive as he noted how
the aspect of the station differed from its wonted guise. Every house of
the assemblage of little log cabins stood open; here and there in the
misty air, for there had been a swift, short spring shower, fires could
be seen aglow on the hearths within; the long slant of the red sunset
rays fell athwart the gleaming wet roofs and barbed the pointed tops of
the palisades with sharp glints of light, and a rainbow showed all the
colors of the prism high against the azure mountain beyond, while a
second arch below, a dim duplication, spanned the depths of a valley.
The frontiersmen were all in the open spaces of the square excitedly
wrangling--and suddenly he became conscious of a girlish face at the
embrasure for the cannon at the blockhouse, a face with golden brown
hair above it, and a red hood that had evidently been in the rain.
"Looking out for me, I wonder?" he asked himself, and as this glow of
agitated speculation swept over him the men who plied him with questions
angrily admonished his silence.

"He has seen a wolf! He has seen a wolf! 'Tis plain!" cried old Mivane,
as he stood in his metropolitan costume among the buckskin-clad
pioneers. "One would know that without being told!"

"You shot the wolf and stampeded the cattle, and the herders at the
cow-pens on the Keowee River can't round them up again!" cried one of
the settlers.

"The cattle have run to the Congarees by this time!" declared another
pessimistically.

"And it was _you_ that shot the wolf!" cried "X" rancorously.

"The herders are holding _us_ responsible and have sent an ambassador,"
explained John Ronackstone, anxiously knitting his brows, "to inform us
that not a horse of the pack-train from Blue Lick Station shall pass
down to Charlestown till we indemnify them for the loss of the cattle."

"Gadso! they can't _all_ be lost!" exclaimed old Mivane floutingly.

"No, no! the herders go too far for damages--too far! They are putting
their coulter _too_ deep!" said a farmer fresh from the field. He had
still a bag of seed-grain around his neck, and now and again he thrust
in his hand and fingered the kernels.

"They declare they'll seize our skins," cried another
ambiguously,--then, conscious of this, he sought to amend the
matter,--"Not the hides we wear,"--this was no better, for they were all
arrayed in hides, save Richard Mivane. "Not the hides that we were born
in, but our deerhides, our peltry,--they'll seize the pack-train from
Blue Lick, and they declare they'll call on the commandant of Fort
Prince George to oppose its passing with the king's troops."

An appalled silence fell on the quadrangle,--save for the fresh notes of
a mockingbird, perching in jaunty guise on the tower of the blockhouse,
above which the rainbow glowed in the radiant splendors of a misty amber
sky.

"The king's troops? Would the commandant respond?" anxiously speculated
one of the settlers.

The little handful of pioneers, with their main possessions in the fate
of the pack-train, looked at one another in dismay.

"And tell me, friend Feather-pate, why did it seem good to you to shoot
a wolf in the midst of a herd of cattle?" demanded Richard Mivane.

Ralph Emsden, bewildered by the results of this untoward chance, and the
further catastrophe shadowed forth in the threatened seizure of the
train, rallied with all his faculties at the note of scorn from this
quarter.

"Sir, I did not shoot the wolf among the cattle. There was not a horn
nor a hoof to be seen when I fired."

Mivane turned to "X" with both hands outstretched as much as to say,
"Take _that_ for your quietus!" and shouldering his stick, which had an
ivory head and a sword within, strode off after his jaunty fashion as if
there were no more to be said.

It was now Alexander Anxley's turn to sustain the questioning clamor. "I
will not deny"--"That is, I said"--"I meant to say,"--but these
qualifications were lost in the stress of Emsden's voice, once more
rising stridently.

"Not a horn nor a hoof to be seen till after I had fired. I didn't know
there were any cow-pens about--didn't use to be till after you had
crossed the Keowee. But if there _had_ been, is a man to see a wolf pull
down a yearling, say, and not fire a rifle because Madam Cow will take
the high-strikes or Cap'n Bull will go on the rampage? Must I wait till
I can make a leg,"--he paused to execute an exaggerated obeisance,
graceful enough despite its mockery,--"'Under your favor, Cap'n Bull,'
and 'With your ladyship's permission,' before I kill the ravening brute,
big enough to pull down a yearling? Don't talk to me! Don't talk to me!"
He held out the palms of his hands toward them in interdiction, and made
as if to go--yet went not!

For a reactionary sentiment toward him had set in, and there were those
fair-minded enough, although with their little all at stake, to admit
that he had acted with reasonable prudence, and that it was only an
unlucky chance which had sent the panic through the herds with such
disastrous effect.

"The herders should not stop the pack-train, if I had my will," declared
one of the settlers with a belligerent note.

"No, no," proclaimed another; "not if it takes all the men at Blue Lick
Station to escort it!"

"Those blistered redcoats at Fort Prince George are a deal too handy to
be called on by such make-bates as the herders on the Keowee River."

"Fudge! The commandant would never let a bayonet stir."

"Gad! I'd send an ambassador for an ambassador. Tit for tat," declared
Emsden. "I'd ask 'em what's gone with all our horses,--last seen in
those desolated cow-pens,--that the voice of mourning is now lifted
about!"

There was a chuckle of sheer joy, so abrupt and unexpected that it rose
with a clatter and a cackle of delight, and culminated in a yell of
pleasurable derision.

Now everybody knew that the horses bought in that wild country would,
unless restrained, return every spring to "their old grass," as it was
called,--to the places where they had formerly lived. When this annual
hegira took place in large numbers, some permanent losses were sure to
ensue. The settlers at Blue Lick had experienced this disaster, and had
accepted it as partly the result of their own lack of precaution during
the homing fancy of the horses. But since the herders manifested so
little of the suavity that graces commercial intercourse, and as some of
the horses had been seen in their cow-pens, it was a happy thought to
feather the arrow with this taunt.

"And who do you suppose will promise to carry such a message to those
desperate, misguided men, riding hither an' thither, searching this wild
and woeful wilderness for hundreds o' head o' cattle lost like needles
in a hayrick, and eat by wolves an' painters by this time?" demanded "X"
derisively.

"I promise, I promise!--and with hearty good will, too!" declared
Emsden. "And I'll tell 'em that we are coming down soon armed to the
teeth to guard our pack-train, and fight our way through any resistance
to its passage through the country on the open trading-path. And I'll
acquaint the commandant of Fort Prince George of the threats of the
herders against the Blue Lick Stationers, and warn him how he attempts
to interfere with the liberties of the king's loyal subjects in their
peaceful vocations."

Thus Emsden gayly volunteered for the mission.

The next morning old Richard Mivane, thinking of it, shook his head over
the fire,--and not only once, but shook it again, which was a great deal
of trouble for him to take. Having thus exerted his altruistic interest
to the utmost, Richard Mivane relapsed into his normal placidity. He
leaned back in his arm-chair, the only one at the station, fingering his
gold-lined silver snuffbox, with its chain and ladle, his eyes dwelling
calmly on the fire, and his thoughts busy with far away and long ago.

He was old enough now to enter into the past as a sort of heritage, a
promised land which memory had glozed with a glamour that can never
shine upon the uncertain aspects of the future. The burning sense of
regret, the anguish of nostalgia, the relinquishment of an accustomed
sphere, its prospects and ideals, the revolt against the uncouth and
rude conditions of the new status, the gradual reluctant naturalization
to a new world,--these were forgotten save as the picturesque elements
of sorrow and despair that balanced the joys, the interest, the
devil-may-care joviality, the adventure, the strange wild
companionship,--all that made the tale worth rehearsing in the flare and
the flicker of the fireside glow.

The rains had come. The dark slate-tinted clouds hung low over the
station, but every log house, freshly dight with whitewash of the marly
clay, after the Indian method, still shone in the shadow as if the sun
were upon it. The turf was green, despite the passing of many feet, and
where a slight depression held water, a few ducks, Carolina bred, were
quacking and paddling about; now and then these were counted with great
interest, for they had a trick of taking to the woods with others of
their kind, and relapsing to savagery,--truly distressing to the
domestic poultry prospects of the station. The doors of the Mivane cabin
were all ajar,--the one at the rear opening into a shed-room, unfloored,
which gave a vista into more sheds, merely roofed spaces, inclosed at
either end. A loom was in the shed-room, and at it was seated on the
bench in front, as a lady sits at an organ, the mistress of the house,
fair but faded, in a cap and a short gown and red quilted petticoat,
giving some instruction, touching an intricate weave, to a negro woman,
neatly arrayed in homespun, with a gayly turbaned head, evidently an
expert herself, from the bland and smiling manner and many
self-sufficient and capable nods with which she perceived and
appropriated the knotty points of the discourse.

In the outer shed, Caesar, clad like the Indians and the pioneers in
buckskin, was mending the plough-gear, and talking with great loquacity
to another negro, of the type known then and later as "the new nigger,"
the target of the plantation jokes, because of his "greenness," being of
a fresh importation. He possibly remembered much of Africa, but he
accepted without demur and with admiring and submissive meekness stories
of the great sights that Caesar protested he had seen there,--Vauxhall
Gardens and Temple Bar (which last Caesar thought in his simplicity was
a bar for the refreshment of the inner man) and a certain resort
indisputably for that purpose called White's Chocolate House,--all
represented as pleasantly and salubriously situated in the interior of
Guinea. But after all, if a story is well told, why carp at slight
anachorisms?

Richard Mivane's attention had been diverted from the thread of his own
reminiscences by the fact that the little flax-wheel of Peninnah
Penelope Anne had ceased to whirl, and the low musical monody of its
whir that was wont to bear a pleasant accompaniment to the burden of his
thoughts was suddenly silent. He lifted his eyes and saw that she was
gazing dreamily into the flare of the great fire, the spinning-wheel
still, the end of the thread motionless in her hand. The burnished waves
of her golden brown hair were pushed a bit awry, and her face was so wan
and thoughtful that even her dress of crimson wool did not lessen its
pallor. The voices of the three children on the floor grated on the old
man's mood as they were busied in defending a settler's fort, insecurely
constructed of stones and sticks, and altogether roofless, garrisoned by
a number of pebbles, while a poke full of wily Indian kernels of corn
swarmed to the attack.

"Why is my pretty pet so idle?" he asked, for while the wheel should
whirl he could dream.

She made no answer, only turned her troubled, soft hazel eyes upon him.

"And have you seen a wolf, too, that you have lost your tongue?"

At the word "wolf" she burst into tears. And then, discarding all
caution in the breaking down of her reserve, she sprang up, overturning
the wheel and rushing to his chair.

Now Richard Mivane had never encouraged his grandchildren to clamber
over his chair. He protested great fear of the sticky fingers of the
more youthful in contact with his preternaturally fine clothes; he
declared they reminded him of squirrels, which he detested; he was not
sure they did not look like rats. All this was of great effect; for his
many contemptuous whimsical prejudices were earnestly respected.

For instance, whenever 'possum was served at the pioneer board they who
partook carried their plates for the purpose to a side table. "The look
of the animal's tail is enough for me--it curls," he would say.

"So does a pig's tail curl," his son used to remonstrate sensibly.

"Not having kept a straight course so long,--then twirling up
deceitfully like a second thought. This fellow is a monstrosity,--and
his wife has a pocket for a cradle,--and I don't know who they are nor
where they came from,--they were left over from before the Flood,
perhaps,--they look somehow prehistoric to me. I am not acquainted with
the family."

And turning his head aside he would wave away the dainty, the delight of
the pioneer epicure time out of mind.

The diplomatic reason, however, that Richard Mivane was wont to shove
off his grandchildren from the arm of that stately chair was that here
they got on his blind side,--his simple, grandfatherly, affectionate
predilection. The touch of them, their scrambling, floundering, little
bodies, their soft pink cheeks laid against his, their golden hair in
his clever eyes, their bright glances at close range,--he was then like
other men and could deny them nothing! His selfishness, his vanity, his
idleness, his frippery were annulled in the instant. He was resolved
into the simple constituent elements of a grandfather, one part doting
folly, one part loving pride, and the rest leniency, and he was as wax
in their hands.

None of them had so definitely realized this, accurately discriminating
cause and effect, as Peninnah Penelope Anne. She felt safe the moment
that she was perched on the arm of her grandfather's chair, her soft
clasp about his stiff old neck, her tears flowing over her cheeks, all
pink anew, escaping upon his wrinkled, bloodless, pale visage and taking
all the starch out of his old-fashioned steinkirk. He struggled futilely
once or twice, but she only hugged him the closer.

"Oh, don't let him go! Oh, don't let him go!" she cried.

"The wolf that we were talking about? By no means! Lovely creature that
he is! We'll preserve, if you like, wolves instead of pheasants! I
remember a gentleman's estate in Northumberland--a little beyond the
river"--

"Oh, grandfather, don't let him go!" she sobbingly interrupted. "It was
he who shot the wolf and stampeded the herds, and the cow-drivers will
quarrel with him when they would not have angry words with another
ambassador. They will kill him! They will kill him!"

"What for? Poaching?--shooting their wolf?"

"Any one else would be safe, grandfather--except poor Ralph!"

"Go yourself then. May-day!"

"I would, grandfather! I would not be afraid!" She put her soft little
hand on his cheek to turn his head to look into her confident eyes.

"An able and worshipful ambassador!" he said banteringly.

"Oh, grandfather, this is no time to risk quarrels among the settlers,
and bloodshed. Oh, the herders would kill him! And the Injuns all so
unfriendly--they might take the chance to get on the war-path again when
the settlers are busy killing each other--and oh, the cow-drivers will
kill Ralph Emsden!"

All this persuasion was of necessity in a distinct loud voice;
unnoticed, however, for a crisis had supervened in the play of the
children by the chimney-place settle, and the sanguinary struggles and
scalping in the storming of the fort were blood-curdling to behold to
any one with enough imagination to discern a full-armed and fierce
savage in a kernel of corn, and a stanch and patriotic Carolinian in a
pebble. But when Peninnah Penelope Anne, all attuned to this high key,
burst out weeping with commensurate resonance, all the vocations of the
household came to a standstill, and her mother appeared, surprised and
reproving, in the doorway.

"Peninnah Penelope Anne," she said with her peculiar exact deliberation
and gift of circumlocution, "it is better to go and sew your sampler
than to tease your grandfather."

"She does not tease me--I have not shed a tear! That was not the sound
of my weeping!" he declared facetiously, one arm protectingly about the
little sobbing figure.

"He does not like his grandchildren to climb about him like squirrels
and wild cattle," the lady continued. Then irrelevantly, "Long stitches
were always avoided in our family. The work you last did in your sampler
has been taken out, child, and you can sew it again and to better
advantage."

"And earn your name of Penelope," said Richard Mivane.

But he was putting on his hat and evidently had some effort in prospect,
for how could he resist,--she looked so childish and appealing as she
sat before the fire, weeping those large tears, and absently preparing
to sew her sampler anew.

While Richard Mivane, by virtue of his early culture, the scanty remains
of his property, his fine-gentleman habits and traditions, and the
anomaly of his situation, was the figure of most mark at the station,
its ruling spirit was of far alien character. This was John Ronackstone,
a stanch Indian fighter; a far-seeing frontier politician; a man of
excellent native faculties, all sharpened by active use and frequent
emergencies; skilled and experienced in devious pioneer craft; and
withal infinitely stubborn, glorying in the fact of the unchangeableness
of his opinions and his immutable abiding by his first statements. After
one glance at his square countenance, his steady noncommittal black
eyes, the upward bulldog cant of a somewhat massive nose, the firm
compression of his long thin lips, one would no more expect him to
depart from the conditions of a conclusion than that a signpost would
enter into argument and in view of the fatigue of a traveler mitigate
and recant its announcement.

Nevertheless Richard Mivane expected "some sense," as he phrased it,
from this adamantine pioneer. Such a man naturally arrogated and
obtained great weight among his fellows, and perhaps his lack of
vacillation furthered this preeminence. He was a good man in the main as
well as forceful, but an early and a very apt expression of the
demagogue. And as he tolerated amongst his mental furniture no illusions
and fostered no follies, his home life harbored no fripperies. His
domicile was a contrast to the better ordered homes of the station, but
here one might have meat and shelter, and what more should mortal ask of
a house! He often boasted that not an atom of iron entered into its
structure more than into an Indian's wigwam. Even the clapboards were
fastened on to the rafters with wooden pegs in lieu of nails, although
nails were not difficult to procure. He had that antagonism to the mere
conventions of civilization often manifested by those who have been
irked by such fetters before finally casting them off. It was a
wholesome life and a free, and if the inmates of the house did not mind
the scent of the drying deerskins hanging from the beams, which made the
nose of Richard Mivane very coy, the visitor saw no reason why they
should not please themselves. The stone-flagged hearth extended half
across the room, and sprawling upon it in frowsy disorder was a bevy of
children of all ages, as fat as pigs and as happy-go-lucky. He had
hardly seated himself, having stepped about carefully among their chubby
fingers and toes lest a crushing disaster supervene, than he regretted
his choice of a confidant. He had his own, unsuspected sensitiveness,
which was suddenly jarred when the wife in the corner, rocking the
cradle with one foot while she turned a hoe-cake baking on the hearth
with a dextrous flip of a knife, and feeling secure in his deafness,
cast a witty fling at his fastidious apparel. With that frequent yet
unexplained phenomenon of acoustics, her voice was so strung that its
vibrations reached his numb perceptions as duly as if intended for his
ears. He made no sign, in his pride and politeness, both indigenous. But
he said to himself, "I don't laugh at her gown,--it is what she likes
and what she is accustomed to wear. And why can't she let me dress in
peace as I was early trained to do? God knows I feel myself better than
nobody."

And he was sensible of his age, his infirmity, his isolation, and his
jauntiness was eclipsed.

Thus he entered the race with a handicap, and John Ronackstone would
hear none of his reasons with grace. He could not and he would not
consent to the nomination of an ambassador in the stead of Emsden, who
had volunteered for the service, which was the more appropriate since it
was he who had shot the wolf and brought the stampede and its attendant
difficulties upon the herders of the Keowee River, and this threat of
retaliation upon the Blue Lick Stationers. If there were danger at hand,
let a volunteer encounter it! In vain Mivane argued that there was
danger to no one else. John Ronackstone, who found an added liberty of
disputation in the emphasis imposed by the necessity of roaring out his
immutable opinions in an exceeding loud voice, retorted that so far as
he was informed the "cow-drivers" on the Keowee were not certain who it
was that had committed this atrocity, unless perhaps their messenger
during his sojourn at Blue Lick Station had learned the name from "X."
But this uncertainty, Mivane argued, was the very point of difficulty.
It was the maddest folly to dispatch to angry men, smarting under a
grievous injury, messages of taunt and defiance by the one person who in
their opinion, perhaps, had carelessly or willfully wrought this wrong.
His life would pay the forfeit of the folly of his fellow-stationers.

Mivane noted suddenly that the woman rocking the cradle was laughing
with an ostentatious affectation of covert slyness, and a responsive
twinkle gleamed in the eyes of John Ronackstone. As he caught the grave
and surprised glance of his visitor he made a point of dropping the air
of a comment aside, which he, as well as she, had insistently brought to
notice, and Mivane was aware that here was something which sought an
opportunity of being revealed as if by necessity.

"Well, sir," Ronackstone began in a tone of a quasi-apology, "we were
just saying--that is, I sez to X, who was in here a while ago,--I sez,
'I'll tell you what is goin' to happen,'--I sez, 'old Gentleman
Rick,'--excuse the freedom, sir,--'he'll be wantin' to send somebody
else in Ralph Emsden's place.' X, he see the p'int, just as you see it.
He sez, 'Somebody that won't be missed--somebody not genteel enough to
play loo with him after supper,' sez X. 'Or too religious,' sez I. 'Or
can't sing a good song or tell a rousing tale,' sez X. 'Or listen an'
laugh in the right places at the gentleman's old cracks about the great
world,' sez I. 'He'll never let Ralph Emsden go,' sez X. 'Jus' some poor
body will do,' sez I. 'Jus' man enough to be scalped by the Injuns if
the red sticks take after him,' sez X. 'Or have his throat cut if the
cow-drivers feel rough yet,' sez I. 'Jus' such a one ez me,' sez X. 'Or
me,' sez I."

"Sir," said old Mivane, rising, and the impressive dignity of his port
was such that the cradle stopped rocking as if a spell were upon it, and
every child paused in its play, sprawling where it lay, "I am obliged to
you for your polite expression of opinion of me, which I have never done
aught to justify. I have nothing more to urge upon the question of the
details which brought me hither, but of one thing be certain,--if Emsden
does not go upon this mission _I_ shall be the ambassador. I apprehend
no danger whatever to myself, and I wish you a very good day."

And he stepped forth with his wonted jaunty alacrity, leaving the man
and his wife staring at each other with as much surprise as if the roof
had fallen in.

A greater surprise awaited Mivane without. The rain was falling anew. In
vast transparent tissues it swept with the gusty wind over the nearest
mountains of the Great Smoky Range, whose farther reaches were lost in
fog. The slanting lines, vaguely discerned in the downpour, almost
obliterated the presence of the encompassing forests about the stockade.
He noted how wildly the great trees were yet swaying, and he realized,
for he could not have heard the blast, that a sudden severe wind-storm
had passed over the settlement while he was within doors. The
blockhouse, the tallest of the buildings, loomed up darkly amidst the
gathering gray vapor, and through the great gates of the stockade, which
opened on the blank cloud, were coming at the moment several men bearing
a rude litter, evidently hastily constructed. On this was stretched the
insensible form of Ralph Emsden, who had been stricken down in the woods
with a dislocated shoulder and a broken arm by the falling of a branch
of a great tree uprooted by the violence of the gusts. He had almost
miraculously escaped being crushed, and was not fatally hurt, but
examination disclosed that he was absolutely and hopelessly disabled for
the time being, and Richard Mivane realized that he himself was the duly
accredited ambassador to the herders on the Keowee River.

He went home in a pettish fume. No sooner was he within and the door
fast shut, that none might behold save only those of his own household,
who were accustomed to the aberrations of his temper and who regarded
them with blended awe and respect, than he reft his cocked hat from his
head and flung it upon the floor. Peninnah Penelope Anne sprang up so
precipitately at the dread sight that she overturned her stool and drew
a stitch awry in her sampler, longer than the women of her family were
accustomed to take. The children gazed spellbound. The weavers at the
loom were petrified; even the creak of the treadle and the noisy
thumping of the batten--those perennial sounds of a pioneer home--sunk
into silence. The two negroes at the end of the vista beyond the
shed-room, with the ox-yoke and plough-gear which they were mending
between them, opened wide mouths and became immovable save for the
whites of astonished rolling eyes. Then, and this exceeded all
precedent, Richard Mivane clutched his valued peruke and, with an inward
plaintive deprecation of the extremity of this act of desperation, he
cast it upon the hat, and looked around, bald, despairing, furious, and
piteous.

It was, however, past the fortitude of woman to behold without protest
this desecration of decoration. Peninnah Penelope Anne sprang forward,
snatched the glossy locks from the puncheons, and with a tender hand
righted the structure, while the powder flew about in light puffs at her
touch, readjusting a curl here and a cleverly wrought wave there. The
valet's pious aspiration from the doorway, "Bress de Lord!" betokened
the acuteness of the danger over-past.

"Why, grandfather!" the girl admonished Mivane; "your beautiful
peruke!--sure, sir, the loveliest curls in the world! And sets you like
your own hair,--only that nobody _could really_ have such very genteel
curls to grow--Oh--oh--grandfather!"

She did not offer to return it, but stood with it poised on one hand,
well out of harm's way, while she surveyed Mivane reproachfully yet with
expectant sympathy.

Perhaps he himself was glad that he could wreak no further damage which
he would later regret, and contented himself with furiously pounding his
cane upon the puncheon floor, a sturdy structure and well calculated to
bear the brunt of such expressions of pettish rage.

"Dolt, ass, fool, that I am!" he cried. "That I should so far forget
myself as to offer to go as an ambassador to the herders on the Keowee!"
And once more he banged the floor after a fashion that discounted the
thumping of the batten, and the room resounded with the thwacks.

An old dog, a favorite of yore, lying asleep on the hearth, only opened
his eyes and wrinkled his brows to make sure, it would seem, who had the
stick; then closing his lids peacefully snoozed away again, presently
snoring in the fullness of his sense of security. But a late
acquisition, a gaunt deerhound, after an earnest observation of his
comrade's attitude, as if referring the crisis to his longer experience,
scrutinized severally the faces of the members of the family, and,
wincing at each resounding whack, finally gathered himself together
apprehensively, as doubtful whose turn might come next, and discreetly
slunk out unobserved by the back door.

Peninnah Penelope Anne rushed to the rescue.

"And why should you not be an ambassador, sir?" she demanded.

"Why--why--because, girl, I am deafer than the devil's dam! I cannot
fetch and carry messages of import. I could only give occasion for
ridicule and scorn in even offering to assume such an office."

Peninnah Penelope Anne had flushed with the keen sensitiveness of her
pride. She instantly appreciated the irking of the dilemma into which he
had thrust himself forgetting his infirmity, and she could have smitten
with hearty enmity and a heavy stick any lips which had dared to smile.
She responded, however, with something of her mother's indirection.

"Under your favor, sir, you don't know how deaf the devil's dam may
be--and it is not your wont to speak in that strain. I'm sure it reminds
me of that man they call 'X,'--a sort of churl person,--who talks of the
devil and blue blazes and brimstone and hell as if--as if he were a
native."

This was a turning of the sword of the pious "X" upon himself with a
vengeance, for he was prone in his spiritual disquisitions to detail
much of the discomfort of the future state that awaited his careless
friends.

The allusion so far pleased old Mivane, who resented a suspected
relegation of himself to a warm station in the schemes of "X," that,
although his head was still bald and shining like a billiard ball, he
suffered himself to drop into his chair, his stick resting motionless on
the long-suffering puncheon floor.

"If I could only hear for a day I'd forgive twenty soundless years!" he
declared piteously, for he so deprecated the enforced withdrawal from
the enterprise that he had heedlessly undertaken, and felt so keenly the
reflections upon his sentiments and sincerity surreptitiously canvassed
between Ronackstone and "X," and then cavalierly rehearsed in his
presence.

"You are only deaf to certain whanging voices in queer keys," his
granddaughter declared.

"And how do I know in what sort of key the herders on the Keowee talk?
They may 'moo' like the cow, or 'mew' like the cat! I should be in
danger of losing half that was said. And that is what these varlets here
in the station know right well. It must seem but a mere bit of bombast
on my part. It could never be seriously countenanced--unless I had an
interpreter. Stop me! but if you were a grandson instead of a
granddaughter, I would not mind taking you with me to interpret for me,
though, Gadzooks, I'd be like a heathen red Injun with a linguister!"

"And why am I not as good as any grandson?" demanded Peninnah Penelope
Anne, with a spirited flash of her bright hazel eyes and great temerity
of speculation; for be it remembered the days of the theories of woman's
equality with man had not yet dawned. "Sure, sir, I can speak when I am
spoken to. I understand the English language; and"--her voice rising
into a liquid crescendo of delight--"I can wear my gray sergedusoy sack
made over my carnation taffeta bodice and cashmere petticoat, all
pranked out with bows of black velvet, most genteel, and my hat of
quilled primrose sarcenet, grandfather. I'd take them in a bundle, for
if we should have rain I would rather be in my old red hood and blue
serge riding-coat on the way, grandfather."

And thus it was settled before she had fairly readjusted the peruke on
his head as he sat in his great chair and she clambered on its arm.

She had not heard of the disaster that had befallen Ralph Emsden, and
she turned rather pale and wistful when the news was communicated to
her. Then realizing how opportune was the accident, how slight was its
ultimate danger in comparison with the jeopardy of the mission from
which he was rescued, she fairly gloated upon the chance which had
conferred it upon her grandfather, and made her an instrument in its
execution.

It was a queerly assorted embassy that rode out of the gates of the
stockade, the ambassador and his linguister. Richard Mivane was mounted
upon a strong, sprightly horse, with Peninnah Penelope Anne behind him
upon a pillion. Following them at a little distance came his
body-servant, Caesar, more fitted by temperament than either to enjoy
the change, the spirit of adventure, and reveling in a sense of
importance which was scarcely diminished by the fact that it was
vicarious. He rode a sturdy nag and had charge of a led horse, that bore
a pack-saddle with a store of changes of raiment, of edible provisions,
and tents to fend off the chances of inclement weather. They were to
travel under the protection of a trader's pack-train, from a
reestablished trading-house in the Overhill Towns of the Cherokees on
the Tennessee River; and so accurately did they time their departure and
the stages of their journey that they met this caravan just at the hour
and place designated, and risked naught from the unsettled state of the
country or an encounter with some ignorant or inimical savage, prone to
wreak upon inoffensive units vengeance for wrongs, real or fancied,
wrought by a nation.

The trader, being a man habituated by frequent sojourns in Charlestown
to metropolitan customs and a worldly trend of thought, instantly
recognized the quality of Mivane and his granddaughter, despite the old
red hood and blue serge riding-coat and their residence here so far from
all the graces that appertain to civilization; though, to be sure,
Richard Mivane, in his trim "Joseph," his head cowled in an appropriate
"trotcozy," and his jaunty self-possession quite restored by the cutting
of the Gordian knot of his dilemma, demonstrating his capacity to duly
perform all his undertakings, bore himself in a manner calculated to
enhance even the high estimation of his fellow-traveler. After the
custom of a gentleman, however, he was most augustly free from
unwarrantable self-assertion, but he could not have failed to be
flattered by the phrase of the trader, could he have heard it, in
delivering over his charge to the herders on the Keowee River.
"Gadzooks, neighbors, but I shouldn't be a whit surprised if that old
party is a duke in disguise!"

But the cow-drivers heard him not! They hardly heeded the coming and the
going of the pack-train and their gossips the packmen! They cared naught
for the news the caravan brought of the country-side far above, nor the
commissions they were wont to give for the various settlements and the
metropolis far below! For so featly came riding in to the humble prosaic
precincts of the cow-pens and into their hearts the vernal beauty of
Spring herself, the living Bloom of charm and love, all arrayed in
delicate gray sergedusoy opening upon carnation taffeta, and crowned
with sheer quillings of primrose sarcenet, with a cheek that repeated
these roseate tints and a glint of golden brown tresses curling softly
against a nape of pearl, that the ranchmen were bewitched and dazed, and
knew no more of good common-sense. Their equilibrium thus shaken, some
busied themselves in what might be called "housewifely cares," that the
dainty visitant might be acceptably lodged and fed, and afterward they
cursed their industry and hospitality that thus left her conversation
and charming aspect to the shirks and drones, who languished about her,
and affected to seek her comfort and minister to her entertainment. For
the cow-drivers, like the other pioneer settlers of that region and day,
represented various states of society and degrees of refinement, and to
those to whom she was not as a blissful reminiscence of long ago, she
appeared as a revelation, new and straight from heaven, a fancy, a
dream! It seemed meet to them that she arrived in the illusory sunset of
a sweet spring day, like some lovely forecast of the visions of the
night.

With their artless bucolic ideals of entertainment they invited her out
to show her the new calves. One of these little creatures, being
exquisitely white and eminently pleasing to look upon, was straightway
named, with her gracious permission, "Peninnah Penelope Anne," and she
was assured that because of this name its owner, a slim, sentimental,
red-haired youth, would never part from it. And it may be presumed that
he was sincere, and that at the time of this fervent asseveration he had
not realized the incongruity of living his life out in the constant heed
of the well-being and companionship of a large white cow of the name of
"Peninnah Penelope Anne." A more interesting denizen of the pen was a
fawn, a waif found there one morning, having prudently adopted as a
mother a large red cow, and a heavy brindled calf as a foster-brother.
The instant Peninnah admired this incongruous estray, bleating its queer
alien note in resonant duet with the calf in the plea for supper, a cord
was slipped about its neck and it was presented in due form. In order
that she might not be harassed by its tendance, a gigantic Scotch
herder, six feet six inches high and twenty-five years of age, showed
how far involuntary inanity can coexist with presumptive sanity as he
led it about, the creature holding back heavily at every step and now
and again tangling itself, its cord, and its disconcerted bleats about
its conductor's long and stalwart legs. Another of the herders,--all of
whom were hunters and explorers as well,--whose mind was of a
topographical cast, introduced her to much fine and high company in the
various mountain peaks, gathered in solemn symposium dark and purple in
the faintly tinted and opaline twilight. He repeated their Cherokee
names and gave an English translation, and called her attention to marks
of difference in their configuration which rendered them distinguishable
at a distance; and when she lent some heed to this and noted on the
horizon contours of the mountains about her home, faint and far in an
elusive amethystine apotheosis against the red and flaming west, and
called out her glad recognition in a voice as sweet as a thrush, his
comrades waxed jealous, and contravened his statements and argued and
wrangled upon landmarks to which they had never before given a second
thought in all their mountaineering experience, so keenly they competed
for her favor. It was her little day of triumph, and right royally she
reigned in it and was wont to tell of it for forty years thereafter!

At last the dusk was slipping down; the mountains grew a shadowy gray
far away and a looming black close at hand; a star palpitated in the
colorless crystal-clear concave of the fading skies; the vernal stretch
of the savannas, whose intense green was somehow asserted till the
latest glimmer of light, ceased to resound with the voices of the herds;
only here and there a keen metallic note of a bell clanked forth and was
silent, and again the sound came from a farther pen like a belated echo;
the fire flaring out from the open door of the nearest hut of the
ranchmen's little hamlet gave a pleasant sense of hospitality and homely
hearth-side cheer, for it requires only a few nights under a tent or the
open canopy of heaven to make a woman, always the most artificially
disposed of all creatures, exceedingly respectful to a roof.

To be sure the interior of this roof was well garnished with cobwebs,
and Peninnah Penelope Anne's mother was so notable a housekeeper and had
inculcated such horror of these untoward drapings and festoons that the
girl was compelled to look sedulously away from them to avoid staring in
amazement at their morbid development and proportions. The
superintendent of the ranch--being an establishment of magnitude it had
several sub-agents also--was so occupied in putting the best foot of his
menage foremost, not being prepared for such company that, like many a
modern housekeeper, he let the opportunity for pleasure slip. When he
proffered tea--he had sent a negro servant all the way to Fort Prince
George for the luxury, where it could be found among the hospital
stores, for tea was too mild a tipple for the pioneer cow-drivers--he
suffered the egregious mortification of pouring out plain hot water,
having forgotten to put in the tea leaves to steep. He looked very hot
and ruefully distressed as he repaired his error, and would not, could
not meet the laughing eyes of his comrades, nor yet the polite glances
of his guests resolutely seeing naught amiss. He was oppressed with a
sense of the number and prominence of his dogs about the wide hearth of
his cabin; when the animals were therefore vigorously kicked out to make
more space, instead of retiring with the usual plaintive yelp of protest
appropriate to such occasions they took advantage of the presence of
guests of distinction and made the rafters ring and resound with their
ear-splitting shrieks, and it was even necessary to chase them about the
room before they could be ejected. Indeed, several with super-canine
strategy succeeded in countermarching their tormentors and remained in
the group about the fire, wearing that curiously attentive look peculiar
to an intelligent animal when animated conversation is in progress.

The blazing fire in the great chimney-place, that stretched almost half
across one end of the herder's cabin, illumined the walls and showed the
medley of articles suspended upon them,--horns, whips, branding-irons,
skins, cattle-bells, lariats, and such-like appurtenances of the ranch.
The little lady was seated in the centre of the group of ranchmen ranged
in a wide semicircle about the hearth of flagstones; the ethereal tints
of her shimmering attire showed all their highlights; her face and
golden brown hair seemed particularly soft and delicate in contrast with
the rough tousled heads and bearded countenances about her; here and
there the muzzle of a great animal, the flash of fangs and red glow of
formidable jaws, were half discriminated amidst the alternate flare of
the flames and flicker of the shadows,--all might have suggested the
"mystick Crew of Comus" to Richard Mivane, being the only person present
who had ever heard of that motley company, had not his thoughts been
otherwise engrossed. He meditatively cleared his throat, took a sip of
brandy and water, for he had long ago lost his genteel affiliations with
tea, and hopefully opened the subject of his mission.

A change fell upon the scene, instant, definite, complete. In the mere
broaching of business it might seem that beauty and charm are but
tenuous at best, and powerless to subdue the fiercer nature of man when
his acquisitive and aggressive commercial instincts are aroused. One of
the most devout admirers of Peninnah Penelope Anne tossed his head with
a very bellicose and bovine obduracy when he intimated an incredulity of
the statement that the herd had been stampeded without an ulterior
motive of malice or nefarious profit. The gentle soul who had assumed
the tendance and protection of the fawn held down as he listened a
shaggy intent head, like that of a bull about to charge, at the mere
mention of the shooting of the wolf. In fact, the suggestion of shadowy
monsters which the dusky flicker and evanescent flare of the fire
fostered and which was intensified by the proximity of open jaws, sharp
fangs, heavy muzzles, and standing bristles amongst them, owed much of
its effect to the unanimous expression of truculent challenge and averse
disfavor. There were frequent confirmatory emphatic nods of great
disheveled heads, the scarlet flushing of angry faces, already florid,
and now and again a violent descriptive gesture of a long brawny arm
with a clenched fist at its extremity. Richard Mivane's well-rounded
periods and gentlemanly phrasings were like the educated thrusts and
feints of an expert fencer who opposes his single rapier to the
bludgeons and missiles of a furious mob. He saw in less than five
minutes that the scheme of extenuation and conciliation was futile, that
retort and retaliation would be returned in kind, that the stoppage of
the pack-train from Blue Lick on the way to Charlestown was inevitable,
and that the redcoats, invoked by both parties, would doubtless become
embroiled with one or the other,--in short, bloodshed was a foregone
conclusion.

Much as this was to be deprecated in any event, it was suicidal amongst
these infant settlements by reason of the vicinage and antagonism of the
fierce and only half-subdued Cherokees, sullenly nourishing schemes of
revenge for their recent defeat and many woes. But when he urged this
upon the attention of the herders, the retort came quick and pointed:
"We ain't talkin' 'bout no Injuns!--the Cherokees never meddled with our
cattle! We'll settle about the stampede first, an' 'tend to the
Cherokees in good time--all in good time!"

Richard Mivane was not possessed of much affinity with the ruder
primitive qualities, the stalwart candor and uncultured forces of the
natural man; and never had these inherent elements appeared to less
advantage in his mind than when he was brought into disastrous conflict
with them. He only held his ground for form's sake, and often his voice
was overborne by the clamors of many responsive tones, all blaring and
arguing together. Much that was said he could not hear, and refrained
from speaking when he perceived from the loud contending faces that he
was denied for the nonce a rejoinder. But ever and anon the silver
vibrations of the little linguister's voice rose into the big bass
tumult as she rehearsed what had been said for her grandfather's
benefit, and the angry rush of sound stopped with an abrupt recoil for a
moment, then surged on as before.

She looked very mild and petite among them, quite like a sedate child,
her cheeks pinker than any of the rose tints of her apparel that were
her pride, her lips red and breathlessly parted, her eyes bright and
very watchful, her golden brown hair all red gold in the flicker of the
fire. There was one wild taunting threat that she did not repeat, as if
she thought it of no consequence,--the threat of personal violence
against Ralph Emsden. They had found out his name patly enough from
their own messenger to Blue Lick Station. They would take out their
grudge against him on his hide, they averred,--if they had to go all the
way to Blue Lick to get it!

Now and again they sufficiently remembered that indeterminate quantum of
courtesy which they called their "manners" to interpolate "No offense to
_you_, sir," or "Begging the lady's pardon." Throughout she preserved a
cool, almost uncomprehending, passive manner; and it was in one of the
moments of a heady tumult of words, in which they sometimes involved
themselves beyond all interpretation or distinguishment, that she
observed with a sort of childish inconsequence that they could get Ralph
Emsden easily enough if they would go to Blue Lick Station,--he was
there now, and his arm and shoulder were so hurt that he would not be
able to make off,--they could get him easily enough, that is, if the
French did not raze Blue Lick Station before the herders could reach
there.

If a bomb had exploded in the midst of the hearthstone, the astonishment
that ensued upon this simple statement could not have been greater. A
sudden blank silence supervened. A dozen excited infuriated faces, the
angry contortions of the previous moment still stark upon their
features, were bent upon her while their eyes stared only limitless
amazement.

"The French!" the herders cried at last in chorus. "Blue Lick Station!"

"It was razed once," she said statistically, "to the ground. The
Cherokees did it that time!"

Her grandfather, always averse to admit that he did not hear, noted the
influx of excitement, and was fain to lean forward. He even placed his
hand behind his ear.

"The French!" bellowed out one of the cow-drivers in a voice that might
have graced the king of the herds. "The French! Threatening Blue Lick
Station!"

The elderly gentleman drew back from, the painful surcharged vibrations
of sound and the unseemly aspect of this interpreter, who was in good
sooth like a bull in disguise. "To be sure--the French," Richard Mivane
said in response, repeating the only words which he had heard. "Our
nearest white neighbors--the dangerous Alabama garrison!"

A tumult of questions assailed the little linguister.

"Be they mightily troubled at Blue Lick Station?" asked one
sympathetically.

The little flower-like head was nodded with meaning, deep and serious.
"Oh, sure!" she cried. "And having the Cow-pens against them too--'tis
sad!"

"Zooks!" cried the bull in disguise, with a snort. "The Cow-pens ain't
against 'em--when the French are coming!"

"Why haven't they sent word to the soldiers?" demanded another of the
cow-drivers suspiciously.

"The soldiers?" she exclaimed incredulously. "Why--the Cow-pens sent
word that the soldiers were against Blue Lick too, and were going to
stop the station's pack-train. Maybe the stationers were afraid of the
soldiers."

To a torrent of questions as to how the news had first come, how the
menace lowered, what disposition for defense the stationers could make,
the little girl seemed bewildered. She only answered definitely and very
indifferently that they could easily get Ralph Emsden if they would go
now to Blue Lick, and take his hide,--that is, if the French and their
Choctaw Indians had not already possessed themselves of that valuable
integument,--as if this were their primal object.

"Why, God-a-mercy, child," cried the superintendent of the ranch, "this
news settles all scores; when it comes to a foreign foe the colonists
are brothers."

"And besides," admitted one of the most truculent of the cow-drivers,
"the cattle are all pretty well rounded in again; I doubt if more are
lost than the wolves would have pulled down anyhow."

"And the Blue Lick Stationers' horses can be herded easy enough,--they
are all on their old grass,--and be driven up to the settlement."

A courier had been sent off full tilt to the commandant at Fort Prince
George, and night though it was, a detail of mounted soldiers appeared
presently with orders to escort the ambassador and his linguister into
the presence of that officer.

For this intelligence was esteemed serious indeed. Although hostilities
had now practically ceased in America, the Seven Years' War being near
its end, and peace negotiations actually in progress, still the treaty
had not been concluded. So far on the frontier were such isolated
garrisons as this of Fort Prince George, so imperfect and infrequent
were their means of communicating with the outside world, that they were
necessarily in ignorance of much that took place elsewhere, and a
renewal of the conflict might have supervened long before their regular
advices from headquarters could reach them. Even a chance rumor might
bring them their first intimation of a matter of such great import to
them. Therefore the commandant attached much significance to this
account of an alarm at Blue Lick Station, because of a menace from the
nearest French at Fort Toulouse, often called in that day, by reason of
this propinquity, "the dangerous Alabama garrison."

For this reason, also, the hospitable hosts made no protest against the
removal of the guests to Fort Prince George, although it might seem that
the age of the one and the tender youth of the other ill fitted them to
encounter this sudden transition from the cosy fireside to the raw
vernal air on a misty midnight jaunt of a dozen miles through a primeval
wilderness. And in truth the little lady seemed loath to leave the
hearth; she visibly hesitated as she stood beside her chair with her
hand on its back, and looked out at the black night, and the vague vista
which the ruddy flare, from the wide door, revealed amidst the dense
darkness; at the vanishing point of this perspective stood a group of
mounted soldiers, "in column of twos" with two led horses, the scarlet
uniforms and burnished accoutrements appearing and disappearing
elusively as the flames rose and fell. The sounds of the champing of
bits and the pawing of hoofs and the jingle of spurs were keenly clear
on the chill rare air and seemed somehow consonant with the frosty
glitter of the stars, very high in the black concave of the moonless
sky. The smell of the rich mould, permeated with its vernal growths; the
cool, distinct, rarefied perfume of some early flower already abloom;
the antiphonal chant of frogs roused in the marsh or stream hard by, so
imbued her senses with the realization of the hour and season that she
never afterward thought of the spring without a vivid renewal of these
impressions.

Her grandfather also seemed vaguely to hold back, even while he slowly
mounted his horse; yet aware that naught is so imperative as military
authority, it was only his inner consciousness that protested. Outwardly
he professed alacrity, although in great surprise declaring that he
could not imagine what the commandant could want with him. The little
linguister, for her part, had no doubts. She was well aware indeed of
the cause of the summons, and so dismayed by the prospect was even her
doughty heart that the swift ride through the black forest was less
terrible to her than the thought of the ordeal of the arrival. But the
march was not without its peculiar trials. She shrank in instinctive
affright from the unaccustomed escort of a dragoon on either side of
her, looming up in the darkness like some phantom of the midnight. Even
her volition seemed wrested from her by reason of the military training
of the troop-horse which she rode;--he whirled about at the command
"right-wheel!" ringing out in the darkness in the crisp peremptory tones
of the non-commissioned officer, and plunged forward at the words "trot,
march!" and adjusted his muscles instantaneously to the acceleration
implied in "gallop!" and came to an abrupt and immovable pause at
"halt!"--all with no more regard to her grasp on the reins than if she
had been a fly on the saddle. As they went the wind beset her with cool,
damp buffets on chin and cheek; the overhanging budding boughs, all
unseen, drenched her with perfumed dew as she was whisked through their
midst; the pace was adopted rather with reference to military custom and
the expectation of the waiting commandant than her convenience; at every
sudden whirl responsive to the word of command she was in momentary fear
of being flung beneath the swiftly trampling hoofs of the horses on
either side of her, and despite her recoil from the bigness and
bluffness and presumable bloody-mindedness of the two troopers beside
her she was sensible of their sympathy as they took heed of the
instability with which she bounced about, perched up side-wise on a
military saddle. Indeed, one was moved to ask her if she would not
prefer to be strapped on with a girth, and to offer his belt for the
purpose; and the other took the opportunity to gird at the forgetfulness
of the cow-drivers to furnish her with her own pillion.

Nevertheless she dreaded the journey's end; and as they came out of the
forests on the banks of the Keowee River, and beheld the vague glimmers
of the gray day slowly dawning, albeit night was yet in the woods, and
the outline of the military works of Fort Prince George taking symmetry
and wonted proportions against the dappled eastern sky, all of blended
roseate tints and thin nebulous grays, her heart so sank, she felt so
tremulously guilty that had all the sixteen guns from the four bastions
opened fire upon her at once she would not have been surprised.

No such welcome, however, did the party encounter. The officer
commanding it stopped the ambassador and the linguister and let the
soldiers go on at a round trot toward the great gate, which stood open,
the bayonet on the musket of the sentry shining with an errant gleam of
light like the sword of fire at the entrance of Paradise. For now the
sun was up, the radiance suffusing the blue and misty mountains and the
seas of fog in the valleys. Albeit its dazzling focus was hardly visible
above the eastern heights, it sent a red glow all along the parapet of
the covered way and the slope beyond to the river bank, where only two
years before Captain Coytmore, then the commandant, had been murdered at
a conference by the treacherous Cherokees. The senior officer, Captain
Howard, being absent on leave, the present commandant, a jaunty
lieutenant, smart enough although in an undress uniform, was standing at
the sally-port now, all bland and smiling, to receive the ambassador and
his linguister. He perceived at once that the old gentleman was deaf
beyond any save adroit and accustomed communication. He looked puzzled
for a moment, then spoke to the sergeant.

"And who is this pretty little girl?" he asked.

The sergeant, who had heard of her prowess in the havoc of hearts among
the herders at the ranch, looked bewildered, then desperate, saluted
mechanically, and was circumspectly silent.

"I am not a little girl," said Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane with adult
dignity.

"Ah, indeed," said the embarrassed and discomfited officer. Then,
turning to lead the way, he added civilly, "Beg pardon, I'm sure!"

If the sight of the sixteen guns on the four bastions of Fort Prince
George had caused Peninnah Penelope Anne to shrink from her normal
proportions, not too expansive at best, she dwindled visibly and
continually when conducted within the palisaded parapets, across the
parade, past the barracks, built for a hundred men but now somewhat
lacking their complement, and into the officers' quarters, where in a
large mess-hall there sat all the commissioned officers at a table, near
the foot of which the two strangers were accommodated with chairs. It
had so much the air of a court-martial, despite their bland and
reassuring suavity, that Peninnah Penelope Anne, albeit a free lance and
serving under no banner but her own whim, had much ado to keep up her
courage to face them. Naturally she was disposed to lean upon her
grandfather, but he utterly failed her. She had never known him so deaf!
He could neither hear the officers nor her familiar voice. He would not
even tell his name, although she had so often heard him voice it
sonorously and in great pride, "Richard Mivane Huntley Mivane, youngest
son of the late Sir Alexander Mivane Huntley Mivane, of Mivane Hall,
Fenshire, Northumberland." Now he merely waved his hand to deputize her.
In truth he shrank from rehearsing to these young men the reason of his
flight from home, his duel and its fatal result, although his pride
forbade him to suppress it. He had come to think the cause of quarrel a
trifle, and the challenge a wicked folly. It was a bitter and remorseful
recollection as his age came on, and its details were edifying in no
sense. Hence, as Peninnah Penelope Anne knew naught of the story she
could not tell it, and he escaped the distasteful pose of a merciless
duelist.

She gave his name with much pride, noting the respect with which the
officers heard it. She accounted for the incongruities of his presence
here as the result of a trip from England to the province, where, as she
said, "he was detained by the snare of matrimony." It was his own
phrase, for as a snare he regarded the holy estate; but the younger of
the officers were pleased to find it funny, and ventured to laugh;
whereat she grew red and silent, and they perforce became grave again
that they might hear of the French. Here she was vague and discursive,
and prone to detail at great length the feud between the Blue Lick
Stationers and the "cow-drivers" on the Keowee, evidently hoping that it
might lie within the latitude of the commandant's military authority to
take some order with the herder gentry,--for which they would not have
thanked her in the least! But the officers of the garrison of Fort
Prince George had thought for naught but the French, and now and again
conferred dubiously together on the unsatisfactory points of her
evidence.

"Do you suppose she really knows anything about it?" the commandant said
aside to one of his advisers.

Suddenly, however, her grandfather's hearing improved, and they were
able to elicit from him the reports which he had had at second hand from
the cow-drivers themselves, in retailing which he honestly conceived
that he was repeating genuine news, never dreaming that the information
had blossomed forth from his own mission.

While less circumstantial and satisfactory than the commandant could
have wished, the details were too significant and serious of import to
be ignored, and therefore he acted upon his information as far as it was
developed.

He ordered out a scouting party of ten men, and, that he might utilize
Blue Lick Station as an outpost in some sort where they might find
refuge and aid, he dispatched to the settlement a present of gunpowder
to serve in the defense of the station, in case of attack by the French,
and two of the small coehorns of that day, each of which could be
carried between two men, to assist the little piece already at the
station. In return for the prospective courtesy and shelter to his
troops, he wrote a very polite letter urging the settlers to hold out if
practicable, relying on his succor with men, ammunition, and provisions;
but if compelled to give way, assuring the stationers of a welcome at
Fort Prince George.

The herders at the cow-pens on the Keowee had also determined to
reinforce Blue Lick Station, and with a number of the runaway horses of
the settlers, rounded up and driven in strings, several of them set
forth with the British soldiers from the fort. In this company Richard
Mivane and his grand daughter also took their way to Blue Lick Station
in lieu of waiting for a pack-train with provisions from Charlestown, as
they had anticipated.

It was a merry camping party as they fared along through the wilderness,
and she had occasion to make many sage observations on the inconsistency
and the unwisdom of man! That the prospect of killing some Frenchman, or
being themselves cruelly killed, in a national quarrel which neither
faction, the cow-drivers nor the Blue Lick Stationers, half understood,
should so endear men to each other was a sentiment into which she could
not enter. It was better, after all, to be a woman, she said to herself,
and sit soberly at home and sew the rational sampler, and let the world
wag on as it would and the cutthroats work their wild will on each
other. The least suggestion that brought the thought of the French to
their minds was received with eyes alight, and nerves aquiver, and blood
all in a rush. The favorite of the whole camp was a young fellow who had
achieved that enviable station by virtue of an inane yet inconceivably
droll intonation of the phrase, "Bong chure" _(Bon jour_), delivered at
all manner of unconformable times and in inappropriate connections, and
invariably greeted with shouts of laughter. And when at last the party
reached the vicinity of Blue Lick and the stationers swarmed out to meet
them, taking the news of the French invasion at second hand, each
repeating it to the other, and variously recounting it back again, never
dreaming that it was supposed to have originally issued from the
station, she meditated much upon this temperamental savagery in man, and
the difficulty it occasioned in conforming him to those sagacious
schemes for his benefit which she nourished in her inventive little
pate. The antagonisms of the Blue Lick Stationers and the cow-drivers
from the Keowee vanished like mist. On the one hand the stationers were
assured that the stampede of the cattle was now regarded as inadvertent,
and although it had occasioned an immense deal of vexatious trouble to
the ranchmen, all were now well rounded up and restored to the cow-pens
as of yore. And the ranchmen in turn received a thousand thanks for
their neighborly kindness in the restoration of the horses of the Blue
Lick Stationers, who knew that the animals had not been decoyed off by
the herders, as a malicious report sought to represent, but had merely
returned to their "old grass," according to their homing propensities.
And both parties loved the British soldiers, who had reinforced them,
and intended to go a-scouting with the military expedition; and the
soldiers earnestly reciprocated by assisting in the preparations for the
defense of the station. Especially active and efficient was the only
artilleryman among them, and the paradisaic peace amidst all the
preparations for war was so complete that his acrid scorn of that pride
of the settlement, the little swivel gun, and of the stationers' methods
of handling it, occasioned not even a murmur of resentment.

Peninnah Penelope Anne, although restored to private life and the
maternal domicile, having retired from statecraft and the functions of
linguister to the embassy, did not altogether escape public utility in
these bellicose preparations. The young gunner, who had had the
opportunity of observing her during the march hither, shortly applied to
her for assistance in his professional devoir. He wanted a deft-handed
young person to construct the cartridge-bags for the ammunition which he
was fixing for the little piece and the two coehorns. And thus it
chanced that she found herself in the blockhouse, cheek by jowl with the
little cannon, its grisly muzzle now looking out of the embrasure where
she herself had once been fond of taking observations of the stockade
entrance; the men came and went and speculated upon the chances of the
scouting quest, now about to set forth, while spurs clanking, ramrods
rattling down into gun-barrels, voices lifted in argument or joyous
resonance, made the whitewashed walls ring anew. The gunner, seated at a
table carefully and accurately measuring out the powder, now and again
urged strict cautions against the lighting of pipes or striking of
sparks from gun-flints. When he applied himself briskly to the cutting
out of more bags from flannel for his cartridges, he looked very
harmless and domestic in his solicitude to follow his wooden pattern, or
"pathron" as he called it, for the creature was Irish. He gave minute
and scrupulous directions to Peninnah Penelope Anne to sew the cylinder
with no more than twelve stitches to the inch, and to baste down the
seams, "now, moind ye that!--ivery wan!--that no powther might slip
through beyant!"

In the pride of the expert he was chary of commendation and eyed
critically the circular bottom of every bag before he filled it with
powder.

"See that, now," he said, snipping briskly with the scissors; "that
string of woolen yarn that yez left there, a-burnin' away outside, might
burst the whole gun, an' ivery sowl in the blockhouse would be kilt
intirely,--moind ye that, now!--an they would n't be the Frenchies,
nayther!" He gave her a keen warning glance at rather close range, then
once more renewed his labors.

The mockingbirds were singing in the woods outside. The sun was in the
trees. The leafage had progressed beyond the bourgeoning period and the
branches flung broad green splendors of verdure to the breeze. The Great
Smoky Mountains were hardly less blue than the sky as the distant
summits deployed against the fair horizon; only the nearest, close at
hand, were sombre, and showed dark luxuriant foliage and massive craggy
steeps, and their austere, silent, magnificent domes looked over the
scene with solemn uplifting meanings. Oh, life! life was so sweet, and
love and friendship were so easy to come by and so hard to part withal,
and glad, oh, glad was she that no men of the French nation or any other
were on their march hitherward to be torn in cruel lacerations by those
wicked cartridges, so cleverly and artfully and cheerfully
constructed,--men with homes, wives, mothers, sisters, children, every
soldier representing to some anxious, tender heart a whole world, a
microcosm of affection, all illuminated with hope and joy or to be
clouded with grief and terror and loss and despair,--oh, glad, glad was
she that the French invasion was but a figment,--a tissue of
misconceptions and vague innuendoes and groundless assumptions.

And yet she was sad and sorry and ashamed, because of the futile bustle
and bluster and cheerful courageous activity about her. Not a cheek had
blenched; not a hand had trembled; not a voice had been lifted to
protest or counsel surrender, despite their meagre capacities for
defense and their number, but a handful. What would these men say to her
if they knew that their patriotism and their valor were expended in
vain,--above all, their mutual cause of quarrel wasted!--as pretty a bit
of neighborhood spite as ever stopped a bullet--all foolishly and
needlessly reconciled without a blow! She had saved them from a bloody
feud, the chances of which were terrifying to her for their own sakes.
But what would they say when discovery should come!

Still, it might never come. And yet, should they patrol the woods in
vain and at last disperse and return each to his own home, she had no
placidity in prospect,--she was troubled and sad and her sorry heart was
heavy. Her scheme had succeeded beyond her wildest hopes. Her beneficent
artifice had fully worked its mission. And now, since there was no more
to be done, she had time to repent her varied deceits. Was it right? she
asked herself in conscientious alarm, not the less sincere because
belated. Ought she to have interfered, with what forces it was possible
for her limited capacity to wield? Had they an inalienable right to cut
each other's throats? Should she have so presumed? And now--

"Howly Moses!" a voice in shrill agitation broke in upon her
preoccupation. "An' is it sheddin' tears ye are upon the blessed
gunpowther? Sure the colleen's crazed! Millia Murther! the beautiful
ca'tridges is ruint intoirely! Any man moight be proud an' plazed to be
kilt by the loikes o' them! How many o' them big wathery tears have yez
been after sheddin' into aich o' them lovely ca'tridges?"

He had risen; one hand was laid protectingly upon the completed pile of
fixed ammunition as if to ward off the damping influences of her woe,
while he ruefully contemplated the suspected cartridge bags, all plump
and tidy and workmanlike, save for their possible charge of tears. She
made no answer, but sat quite motionless upon her low stool, a cartridge
bag unfinished in her lap, her golden brown curls against the cannon,
still weeping her large tears and looking very small.

His clamors brought half the force to the scene of the disturbance. A
keen question here, an inference heedfully taken there, and the
situation was plain!

In the abrupt pause in this headlong career it was difficult to sustain
one's poise. Now and again, indeed, sheepish conscious glances were
interchanged; for since the grievance of the cow-drivers had been
publicly annulled and the horses of the Blue Lick Stationers had been
restored in pure neighborly good-will, a resumption of the quarrel on
the old invalid scores was impossible. Perhaps some token of their
displeasure might have been visited upon her who had inaugurated so bold
and extensive a wild goose chase, but she looked so small as she sat by
the cannon weeping her large tears that she disarmed retaliation.

So small she looked, indeed, that certain of the young blades, who filed
in to gaze upon her and filed out again, would not believe that she
could have invented so large a French invasion, and for several days
they futilely scouted the woods in search of some errant "parlez-vous,"
all of whom, however, were very discreetly tucked away within the strong
defenses of Fort Toulouse.

The young gunner alone was implacable. He was the first of the returning
force to reach Fort Prince George, and he carried with him all the
powder that had been sent under mistake to the Blue Lick Station,
together with the tear-shotted cartridges, whose problematic interior
damage he explained to the amazed, chagrined, and nonplussed commandant.

"Oh, sor," the gunner said in conclusion, solemnly shaking his head,
"that gurl, sor!--she is a wily one! An' I should n't be surprised, sor,
if she is a dale taller than she looks!"

The Blue Lick Station in time recovered its equilibrium, and was
afterward prone to protest that of all frontier communities it bore the
palm for the efficiency of its "linguister."




A VICTOR AT CHUNGKE


At Tennessee Town, on the Tennessee River, there used to be a great
chungke-yard. It was laid off in a wide rectangular area nine hundred
feet long, two feet lower than the surface of the ground, level as a
floor, and covered with fine white sand. The ancient, curiously shaped
chungke-stones, fashioned with much labor from the hardest rock, perfect
despite immemorial use, kept with the strictest care, exempt by law from
burial with the effects of the dead, were the property of this Cherokee
town, and no more to be removed thence than the council-house,--the
great rotunda at one side of the "beloved square," built upon a mound in
the centre of the village.

Surely no spot could seem more felicitously chosen for the favorite
Indian game. The ground rose about the chungke-yard like the walls of an
amphitheatre, on every side save the slope toward the "beloved square"
and the river, furnishing an ideal position of vantage for spectators
were they even more numerous than the hundreds of Cherokees of all ages
that had gathered on the steep acclivities to overlook the game--some
ranged on the terrace or turfy ridge around the chungke-yard, formed by
the earth thrown out when the depressed area was delved down long ago,
others disposed beneath the spreading trees, others still, precariously
perched on clifty promontories beetling out from the sharp ascent. Above
all, Chilhowee Mountain, aflare with the scarlet glow of its autumnal
woods, touched the blue sky. The river, of a kindred blue, with a
transient steely change under the shadow of a cloud, showed flashes of
white foam, for the winds were rushing down from the Great Smoky
Mountains, which were revealed for an instant in a clear hard azure
against the pearl-tinted horizon--then again only a mirage, an illusion,
a dream of stupendous ranges in the shimmering mist.

In the idle, sylvan, tribal life of that date, one hundred and fifty
years ago, it might seem that there was scant duty recognized, imposing
serious occupation, to debar the population of Tennessee Town from
witnessing the long-drawn game, which was continued sometimes half the
day by the same hardy young warriors, indefatigable despite the hot sun
and the tense exercise, straining every muscle. A few old women, their
minds intent upon the preparation of dinner, a few of the very young
children, relishing their own pottering devices as of a finer flavor of
sport, a few old men, like other old men elsewhere, with thoughts of the
past so vivid that the present could show but a pallid aspect--these
were absent, and were not missed. For the most part, however, the little
dwellings were vacant. The usual groups of loungers had deserted the
public buildings, which consisted of a bark-and-log house of three
rooms, or divisions, at each angle of the "beloved square," and in which
were transacted the business affairs of the town;--one, painted red, was
the "war-cabin," whence arms, ammunition, etc., were distributed, the
divisions implying distinctions as to rank among the warriors; another,
painted white, was devoted to the priestcraft of the "beloved men"--head
men of note, conjurers, and prophets; the cabin of the aged councilors
faced the setting sun, as an intimation that their wars were ended and
their day done; and in the fourth cabin met the "second men," as the
traders called the subordinate authorities who conducted municipal
affairs, so to speak--the community labor of raising houses, and laying
off and planting with maize and pompions the common fields to be tilled
by the women, "who fret at the very shadow of a crow," writes an old
trader. All these cabins were now still and silent in the sun. The
dome-shaped town-house, of a different style of architecture, plastered
within and without with red clay, placed high on the artificial mound,
and reached by an ascent of stairs which were cut in regular gradations
in the earth, lacked its strange religious ceremonies; its secret
colloguing council of chiefs with the two princes of the town; its
visitors of distinction, ambassadors from other towns or Indian nations;
its wreaths of tobacco sent forth from diplomatically smoked pipes; its
strategic "talks;" its exchange of symbolic belts and strings of wampum
and of swans' wings--white, or painted red and black, as peace hovered
or war impended--and other paraphernalia of the savage government. Even
the trading-house showed a closed door, and the English trader, his pipe
in his mouth, smoked with no latent significance, but merely to garner
its nicotian solace, sat with a group of the elder braves and watched
the barbaric sport with an interest as keen as if he had been born and
bred an Indian instead of native to the far-away dales of Devonshire.
Nay, he bet on the chances of the game with as reckless a nerve as a
Cherokee,--always the perfect presentment of the gambler,--despite the
thrift which characterized his transactions at the trading-house, where
he was wont to drive a close bargain, and look with the discerning
scrupulousness of an expert into the values of the dressing of a
deerskin offered in barter. But the one pursuit was pleasure, and the
other business. The deerskins which he was wearing were of phenomenal
softness and beauty of finish, for the spare, dapper man was arrayed
like the Indians, in fringed buckskin shirt and leggings; but he was
experiencing a vague sentiment of contempt for his attire. He had been
recently wearing a garb of good camlet-cloth and hose and a bravely
cocked hat, for he was just returned from a journey to Charlestown, five
hundred miles distant, where he had made a considerable stay, and his
muscles and attitude were still adjusted to the pride of preferment and
the consciousness of being unwontedly smart. Indeed, his pack-train,
laden with powder and firearms, beads and cloth, cutlery and paints, for
his traffic with the Indians under the license which he held from the
British government, had but come in the previous day, and he had still
the pulses of civilization beating in his veins.

For this reason, perhaps, as he sat, one elbow on his knee, his chin in
his hand, his sharp, commercially keen face softened by a thought not
akin to trade, his eyes were darkened, while he gazed at one of the
contestants, with a doubt that had little connection with the odds which
he had offered. He was troubled by a vague regret, a speculation of
restless futility, for it concerned a future so unusual that no detail
could be predicted from the resources of the present. And yet this
sentiment was without the poignancy of personal grief--it was only a
vicarious interest that animated him. For himself, despite the
flattering, smooth reminiscence of the camlet-cloth yet lingering in the
nerves of his finger-tips, the recent relapse into English speech, the
interval spent once more among the stir of streets and shops, splendid
indeed to an unwonted gaze, the commercial validities, which he so
heartily appreciated, of the warehouses, and crowded wharves, and laden
merchantmen swinging at anchor in the great harbor, he was satisfied. He
was possessed by that extraordinary renunciation of civilization which
now and again was manifested by white men thrown among the Cherokee
tribe--sometimes, as in his instance, a trader, advanced in years, "his
pile made," to use the phrase of to-day, the world before him where to
choose a home; sometimes a deserter from the British or French military
forces, according to the faction which the shifting Cherokees affected
at the time; more than once a captive, spared for some whim, set at
liberty, free to go where he would--all deliberately and of choice cast
their lot among the Cherokees; lived and died with the treacherous race.
Whether the wild sylvan life had some peculiarly irresistible
attraction; whether the world beyond held for them responsibilities and
laborious vocations and irksome ties which they would fain evade;
whether they fell under the bewitchment of "Herbert's Spring," named
from an early commissioner of Indian affairs, after drinking whereof one
could not quit the region of the Great Smoky Mountains, but remained in
that enchanted country for seven years, fascinated, lapsed in perfect
content--it is impossible to say. There is a tradition that when the
attraction of the world would begin to reassert its subtle reminiscent
forces, these renegades of civilization were wont to repair anew to this
fountain to quaff again of the ancient delirium and to revive its potent
spell. Abram Varney had no such necessity in his own case; he only
doubted the values of his choice as fitted for another.

Apart from this reflection, it was natural that his eyes should follow
the contestant whom he had backed for a winner to the tune of more
silver bangles, and "ear-bobs," and strings of "roanoke," and gunpowder,
and red and white paint, than he was minded to lightly lose. He had laid
his wagers with a keen calculation of the relative endowments of the
players, their dexterity, their experience, their endurance. He was not
influenced by any pride of race in the fact that his champion was also a
white man, who, indeed, carried a good share of the favor of the
spectators.

A strange object was this champion, at once pathetic and splendid. No
muscular development could have been finer, no athletic grace more
pronounced than his physique displayed. The wild life and training of
the woods and the savage wars had brought out all the constitutional
endurance and strength inherited from his stanch English father and his
hardy Scotch mother. Both had been murdered by the Cherokees in a
frontier massacre, and as a boy of ten years of age, his life spared in
some freak of the moment, he had been conveyed hither, exhorted to
forget, adopted into the tribe, brought up with their peculiar kindness
in the rearing of children, taught all the sylvan arts, and trained to
the stern duties of war by the noted chief Colannah Gigagei, himself,
the Great Red Raven of Tennessee Town (sometimes called Quorinnah, the
name being a favorite war-title specially coveted). The youth had had
his baptism of fire in the ceaseless wars which the Cherokees waged
against the other Indian tribes. He had already won the "warrior's
crown" and his "war-name," a title conferred only upon the bravest of
the brave. He was now Otasite, the "Man-killer" of Tennessee Town. He
was just twenty years of age, and Abram Varney, gazing at him, wondered
what the people in Charlestown would think of him could they see him.
For a few days, a week, perhaps, the trader would refer all his thoughts
to this civilized standard.

Tall, alert as an Indian, supple too, but heavier and more muscular,
Otasite was instantly to be distinguished by his build from among the
other young men, although, like the Indians, he wore a garb of dressed
deerskin. His face, albeit no stranger to the use of their pigments and
unguents, still showed fair and freckled. His hair bore no resemblance
to their lank black locks; of an auburn hue and resolutely curling, it
defied the tonsure to which it had been for years subjected, coming out
crisp and ringleted close to his head where he was designed to be bald,
and on the top, where the "war-lock" was permitted to grow, it floated
backward in two long tangled red curls that gave the lie direct to the
Indian similitude affected by the two surmounting tips of eagle
feathers. He was arrayed in much splendor, according to aboriginal
standards; the fringed seams of his hunting shirt and leggings,
fashioned of fine white dressed doeskin, as pliable as "Canton silk
crape," were hung with fawns' trotters; his moccasins were white and
streaked with parti-colored paint; he had a curious prickly belt of
wolves' teeth, which intimated his moral courage as well as sylvan
prowess, for the slaying of these beasts was esteemed unlucky, and
shooting at them calculated to spoil the aim of a gun; many glancing,
glittering strings of "roanoke" swung around his neck.

Nothing could have been finer, athletically considered, than his
attitude at this moment of the trader's speculative observation. The
discoidal quartz chungke-stone[2] had been hurled with a tremendous
fling along the smooth sandy stretch of the yard, its flat edge, two
inches wide, and the curiously exact equipoise of its fashioning causing
it to bowl swiftly along a great distance, to fall only when the
original impetus should fail; his competitor, Wyejah, a sinewy, powerful
young brave, his buckskin garb steeped in some red dye that gave him the
look when at full speed of the first flying leaf of the falling season,
his ears split and barbarically distended on wire hoops[3] and hung with
silver rings, his moccasins scarlet, his black hair decorated with
cardinal wings, had just sent his heavy lance, twelve feet long,
skimming through the air; then Otasite, running swiftly but lightly
abreast with him, launched his own long lance with such force and nicety
of aim that its point struck the end of Wyejah's spear, still in flight
in mid-air, deflecting its direction, and sending it far afield from the
chungke-stone which it was designed in falling to touch. This fine cast
counted one point in the game, which is of eleven points, and the Indian
braves among the spectators howled like civilized young men at a
horse-race.

The sport was very keen, the contest being exceedingly close, for Wyejah
had long needed only one additional point to make him a winner, and when
Otasite had failed to score he had also failed. The swift motion, the
graceful agility, the smiling face of Otasite,--for it was a matter of
the extremest exaction in the Indian games that however strenuous the
exertion and tense the strain upon the nerves and grievous the
mischances of the sport, the utmost placidity of manner and temper must
be preserved throughout,--all appealed freshly to the trader, although
it was a long-accustomed sight.

"Many a man in Charlestown--a well-to-do man" (applying the commercial
standard of value)--"would be proud to have such a son," he muttered, a
trifle dismayed by the perverse incongruities of fate. "He would have
sent the boy to school. If there was money enough he would have sent him
to England to be educated--and none too good for him!"

The shadows of the two players, all foreshortened by the approach of
noontide, bobbed about in dwarfish caricature along the smooth sandy
stretch. The great chungke-pole, an obelisk forty feet high planted on a
low mound in the centre of the chungke-yard, and with a target at its
summit used for trials of skill in marksmanship, cast a diminished
simulacrum on the ground at its base scarcely larger than the
chungke-lances. Now and again these heavy projectiles flew through the
air, impelled with an incredible force and a skill so accurate that it
seemed impossible that both contestants should not excel. There was a
moment, however, when Otasite might have made the decisive point to
score eleven had not the chungke-stone slipped from the hand of Wyejah
as he cast it, falling only a few yards distant. Otasite's lance, flung
instantly, shot far beyond that missile, for which, had the stone been
properly thrown, he should have aimed. Wyejah, disconcerted and shaken
by the mischance, launching his lance at haphazard, almost mechanically,
struck by obvious accident the flying lance of his adversary, deflecting
its course--the decisive cast, for which he had striven so long in vain,
and which was now merely fortuitous.

The crowds of Indian gamblers, with much money and goods at hazard upon
the event, some, indeed, having staked the clothes upon their backs, the
rifles and powder for their winter hunt that should furnish them with
food, were at once in a clamor of discussion as to the fair adjustment
of the throw in the score. The backers of Wyejah claimed the accidental
hit as genuine and closing the game. The backers of Otasite protested
that it could not be thus held, since Wyejah's defective cast of the
chungke-stone debarred their champion from the possibility of first
scoring the eleventh point, which chance was his by right, it being his
turn to play; they met the argument caviling at Otasite's lack of aim by
the counter-argument that one does not aim at a moving object where it
is at the moment, but with an intuitive calculation of distance and
speed where it will be when reached by the projectile hurled after it,
illustrating cleverly by the example of shooting with bow and arrow at a
bird on the wing.

Otasite and Wyejah both, preserved an appearance of joyous indifference.
With their lances poised high in the right hand they were together
running swiftly up the long alley again to the starting-point, Otasite
commenting on the evident lack of intention in Wyejah's lucky cast with
a loud, jocosely satiric cry, "_Hala! Hala_!" (signifying, "You are too
many for me!")

"Lord! how the boy does yell!" Abram Varney exclaimed, a smile pervading
the wrinkles wrought about his eyes by much pondering on the problems of
the Indian trade, feeling incongruously a sort of elation in the youth's
noisy shouts, which echoed blatantly from the rocky banks of the
Tennessee River, and with reduced arrogance and in softer tones from the
cliffs of towering Chilhowee.

A sympathetic sentiment glowed in the dark eyes of an Indian chief on
the slope hard by, the great Colannah Gigagei. He was fast aging now;
the difficulties of diplomacy constantly increasing in view of
individual aggressions and encroachments of the Carolina colonists on
the east, and the ever specious wiles and suave allurements of the
French on the west, to win the Cherokees from their British alliance;
the impossibility, in the gentle patriarchal methods of the Cherokee
government, to control the wild young men of the tribe, who, as the
half-king, Atta-Kulla-Kulla said, "often acted like madmen rather than
people of sense" (and it is respectfully submitted that this peculiarity
has been observed in other young men elsewhere); the prophetic vision,
doubtless, of the eventual crushing of his people in the collisions of
the great international struggle of the Europeans for the possession of
this country,--all fostered tokens of time in the face of Colannah, and
bowed his straight back, and set an unwonted quiver in the nerves of his
old hand that had been firm in his heyday, and strong and crafty and
cruelly bloody. But his face now was softened with pleasure, and the
pride it expressed was almost tender.

"When a few years ago the Governor of South Carolina," he said
majestically, speaking in the Cherokee tongue but for the English names
(he pronounced the title "Goweno"), "offered to take some Cherokee
youths to train in his schools and make _scholars_ of them, I thanked
him with affection, for his thought was kind. But I told him that if he
would send some South Carolina youths to the Cherokee nation to be
trained, we would make _men_ of them!"

His blanket, curiously woven of feathers and wild hemp, requiring years
of labor in its intricate manufacture, fell away from one gaunt arm as
he lifted it to point with a kingly gesture at the young white man as
the illustration of his training. Every muscle of strength was on parade
in the splendid pose of hurling the great chungke-spear through the air,
as Otasite thus passed the interval while waiting the decision of the
umpire of the game. Then, with a laugh, oddly blent of affection and
pride, Colannah took his way down the slope and toward the
council-house: the council sat there much in these days of 1753, clouded
with smoke and perplexity.

Judging by this specimen of his athletic training to feats of prowess,
Colannah Gigagei might boast to the "Goweno" of South Carolina. It was
not, however, merely in muscle that the young captive excelled. As Abram
Varney thought of certain sterling manly traits of the highest type
which this poor waif had developed here in this incongruous environment,
one might suppose from the sheer force of heredity, he shook his head
silently, and his eyes clouded, the pulses of Charlestown still beating
in his veins. For he was wont to leave for months the treasures of his
trading-house, not merely a matter of trinkets and beads, but powder,
lead, and firearms, sufficient for accoutring an expedition for the
"war-path," and great store of cloths, cutlery, paints, in the charge of
this valiant gamester of chungke, stanch alike against friend and foe,
as safely as if its wealth were beneath his own eye. So insecure had
become the Cherokee allegiance to the government that it was impossible
now under its uncertain protection to retain white men from the colonies
here in his employ as agents and under-traders, or, indeed, those whose
interest and profits amounted to an ownership in a share of the stock.
The earlier traders in neighboring towns one by one had gone, affecting
a base several hundred miles nearer the white settlements. Some had
shifted altogether from the tribe, and secured a post among the
Chickasaws, who were indubitably loyal to the British. While their
withdrawal added to Varney's profits,--for each trader was allowed to
hold at this time a license only for two Indian towns, it being before
the date of the issuance of general licenses, and the custom which they
had relinquished, the barter with the Cherokees for deerskins, now came
from long distances, drawn as by a magnet to his trading-house at
Tennessee Town,--it had resulted in his isolation, and for years he had
been almost the only British subject west of the Great Smoky Mountains.
He had no fear of the Cherokees, however--not even should the political
sky, always somewhat overcast, become yet more lowering. He had long
been accustomed to these Indians, and he felt that he had fast friends
among them. His sane mercantile judgment appraised and appreciated the
added opportunities of his peculiar position, which he would not lightly
throw away, and the development of Otasite's incongruous commercial
values not only removed the possibility of loss during his absence, but
added to his facilities in enabling him to secure the fidelity of
Indians as packmen, hitherto impracticable, but now rendered to Otasite
as one of the tribe. He had recognized with satisfaction, mingled with
amusement, national traits in the boy, who, despite his Indian training,
would not, like them, barter strings of wampum measuring "from elbow to
wrist" without regard to the relative length of arm. Yet he had none of
the Indian deceit and treachery. He was blunt, sincere, and bold. His
alertness in computation gave Varney genuine pleasure, although they
wrangled much as to his method, for he used the Cherokee numeration, and
it set the trader's mercantile teeth on edge to hear twenty called
"_tahre skoeh_"--two tens.

"And why not?" Otasite would demand, full of faith in his own education.
"The Chickasaw will say '_pokoole toogalo_'--ten twos"--and he would
smile superior. This was his world, and these his standards--the
Cherokees and the Chickasaws!

He was not to be easily influenced or turned save by some spontaneous
acquiescence of his own mind, and Varney found himself counting "_skoeh
chooke kaiere_" (the old one's hundred) before he ever induced Otasite
to say instead "one thousand."

The boy even ventured on censorship in his turn. "You say 'Cherokee_s_'
and 'Chickasaw_s_' when you speak of the Tsullakee and the Chickasaw;
why don't you then say the English-_es_ and the French-_es_?" For the
plural designation of these tribes was a colonial invention.

His bulldog tenacity, his orderly instincts, his providence, so contrary
to the methods of the wasteful Indian, his cheerful industry, his
indomitable energy and perseverance,--all were so national that in days
gone past Varney used now and again to clap him on the shoulder with a
loud, careless vaunt, "British to the marrow!"

A fact, doubtless--and all of a sudden it had begun to seem a very
serious fact. So very serious, indeed, that the old trader did not
notice the crisis in the chungke-yard, the increasing excitement in the
crowds of spectators, the clamors presently when the game was declared a
draw and the bets off, the stir of the departing groups. It was silence
at last that smote upon his senses with the effect of interruption which
the continuance of sound had not been able to compass. He drew himself
up with a perplexed sigh, and looked drearily over the expanse of the
river. Its long glittering reaches were vacant, a rare circumstance, for
the Cherokees of that date were almost amphibious in habit, reveling in
the many lovely streams of their mountain country; on the banks their
towns were situated, and this fact doubtless contributed to the neatness
of their habitations and personal cleanliness, to which the travelers of
those times bear a surprised testimony. The light upon the water was
aslant now from a westering sun, and glittering on the snowy breasts of
a cluster of swans drifting, dreaming perhaps, on the current. The
scarlet boughs on the summit of Chilhowee were motionless against the
azure zenith. Not even the vaguest tissue of mist now lingered about the
majestic domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, painted clearly and
accurately in fine and minute detail in soft dense velvet blues against
the hard polished mineral blue of the horizon. The atmosphere was so
exquisitely luminous and pellucid that it might have seemed a fit medium
to dispel uncertainty in other than merely material subjects of
contemplation. Nevertheless he did not see his way clearly, and when he
came within view of his trading-house he paused as abruptly as if he had
found his path blocked by an obstacle.

There, seated on the step of the closed door which boasted the only lock
and key in Tennessee Town, or for the matter of that in all the stretch
of the Cherokee country west of the Great Smoky Range, was Otasite, the
incongruity of his auburn curls and his Indian headdress seeming a
trifle more pronounced than usual, since it had been for a time an
unfamiliar sight. He was awaiting the coming of the trader, and was
singing meanwhile in a loud and cheerful voice, "Drink with me a cup of
wine," a ditty which he had heard in his half-forgotten childhood. The
robust full tones gave no token of the draught made upon his endurance
by the heavy exercise of the day, but he seemed a bit languid from the
heat, and his doeskin shirt was thrown open at the throat, showing his
broad white chest, and in its centre the barbarous blue discolorations
of the "warrior's marks." These disfigurements, made by the puncturing
of the flesh with gars' teeth and inserting in the wound paint and
pitch, indelible testimonials to his deeds of courage and prowess,
Otasite valued as he did naught else on earth, and he would have parted
with his right hand as readily. The first had been bestowed upon him
after he had gone, a mighty gun-man, against the Muscogees. The others
he had won in the course of a long, furious, and stubborn contest of the
tribe with the Chickasaws, who, always impolitic, headlong, and brave,
were now reduced by their own valor in their many wars from ten thousand
fighting men to a few hundred. He had attained the "warrior's crown"
when he had shown their kindred Choctaws a mettle as fierce and a craft
as keen as their own. And now he was looking at Abram Varney with kindly
English eyes and an expression about the brow, heavily freckled, that
almost smote the tears from the elder man. The trader knew from long
experience what was coming, but suddenly he had begun to regard it
differently. Always upon the end of each journey from Charlestown he had
been met here within a day or two by Otasite on the same mission. The
long years as they passed had wrought only external changes since, as a
slender wistful boy of eleven years, heart-sick, homeless, forlorn,
friendless, save for his Indian captors, likely, indeed, to forget all
language but theirs, he had first come with his question, always in
English, always with a faltering eyelash and a deprecatory lowered
voice, "Did you hear anything in Charlestown of any people named
'Queetlee'?"

This was the distorted version of his father's name that Colannah had
preserved. As to the child himself, his memory had perhaps been shaken
by the events of that terrible night of massacre, which he only realized
as a frightful awakening from sleep to smoke, flames, screams, the
ear-splitting crack of rifle-shots at close quarters, the shock of a
sudden hurt--and then, after an interval of unconsciousness, a
transition to a new world of strange habitudes that grew speedily
familiar, and of unexpected kindness that became dear to a frank,
affectionate heart. Perhaps in the isolations of the frontier life he
had never heard his father addressed by his surname by a stranger; he
was called "Jan" by his wife, and her name was "Eelin," and this Otasite
knew, and this was all he knew, save that he himself also had been
called "Jan."

"They don't want you, my buck, or they would have been after you," the
trader used to reply, being harder, perhaps when he was younger.
Besides, he honestly thought the cadaverous brat, all legs, like a
growing colt, and skinny arms, was better off here in the free woodland
life which he himself considered no hardship, and affected long after
necessity or interest had dictated his environment. The little lad was
safe in the care of the powerful chief Colannah Gigagei of Tennessee
Town, who had adopted him, and who was a man of great force and
influence. Why should the child seek a home among his own people,
unwelcome doubtless, to eat the meagre crust of charity, or serve as an
overworked drudge somewhere on the precarious frontier? The trader did
not greatly deplore the lack of religious training, for in the remote
settlements this was often still an unaccustomed luxury, albeit some
thirty years had now gone by since Sir Francis Nicholson, then the
Governor, declared that no colony could flourish without a wider
diffusion of the gospel and education, and forthwith ordered spiritual
drill, so to speak, in the way of preaching and schooling. Although
himself described as "a profane, passionate, headstrong man, bred a
soldier," as if the last fact were an excuse for the former, he
contributed largely to the furtherance of these pious objects, "spending
liberally all his salary and perquisites of office," for which generous
trait of character an early and strait-laced historian is obviously of
the opinion that General Nicholson should have been suffered to swear in
peace and, as it were, in the odor of sanctity.

More than once, when in Charlestown, Varney, notwithstanding his
persuasions on the subject, had been minded to inquire concerning the
"Queetlees," who he understood from Colannah had come originally from
Cumberland in England. With his mercantile cronies he had canvassed the
question whether the queer, evidently distorted name could have been
"Peatley" or "Patey" or "Petrie,"--for the Cherokees always substituted
"Q" for "P," as the latter letter they could not pronounce,--and after
this transient consideration the matter would drop.

As the child, running about the Indian town with his new-found
playmates, grew robust and merry-hearted, and happiness, confidence, and
strength brought their embellishing influence to the expression of his
large dark gray eyes and straightened the nervous droop from his thin
little shoulders, the trader noticed casually once or twice how comely
the brat had become, and he experienced a fleeting, half-ridiculing pity
for his mother--how the woman would have resented and resisted the
persistent shearing and shaving of those silken, loosely twining red
curls! Then he thought of her no more. But when the child had come to
man's estate, when he was encased in a network of muscle like elastic
steel wires, when stature and strength had made him alike formidable and
splendid, when the development of his temperament illustrated virtues so
stanch that they seemed the complement of his physical endowment and a
part of his resolute personality, the old trader thought of the boy's
father, and thought of him daily--how the sturdy Cumbrian yeoman would
have rejoiced in so stalwart a son! Thus, with this vague bond of
sympathy with a man whom he had never seen, never known, so long ago, so
cruelly dead, this intuitive divination of his paternal sentiment,
Varney's fatherly attitude grew more definite daily and became
accustomed, and he was jealous of the influence of Colannah, who in turn
was jealous of his influence.

Now as Varney stood in the dusky trading-house among the kegs and bags
and bales of goods, the high peak of the interior of the roof lost in
the lofty shadows, he felt that he had been much in default in long-past
years, and he experienced a very definite pang of conscience as Otasite
swung abruptly around a stack of arms, a new rifle in his hand, the
flint and pan of which he had been keenly examining.

He lifted his eyes suddenly with that long-lashed dreary look of his
childhood.

"Did you hear of any Queetlees in Charlestown?" he asked.

"It is _you_ who should seek your kindred, Jan Queetlee!" Varney said
impulsively, calling him by his unaccustomed English name. "It is _you_
who should go to Charlestown to find the Queetlees!"

Otasite's face showed suddenly the unwonted expression of fear. He
recoiled abruptly, and Abram Varney was sensible of a deep depression.
It was as he had thought. The wish for restoration to those of his name
and his kindred which had animated the boy's earlier years had now
dwindled to a mere abstract sentiment of loyalty as of clanship, but was
devoid of expectation, of intention. All the members of his immediate
family had perished in the massacre, and he had been trained to regard
this as the fortunes of war, cherishing no personal antagonism, as
elsewhere among civilized people reconciliations are frequent between
the victors and the friends of the slain in battle. Moreover, he was not
brought close to it. The participators in the affray were of the distant
Ayrate settlements of the tribe, southeast of the mountains, and not
individualized. The Indians of Tennessee Town, which was then one of the
most remote of the Cherokee villages of the Ottare division, and this
perhaps was the reason it was selected as his home, were not concerned
in the foray, nor were any others of the Overhill towns. Thus he had
grown up without the thirst for vengeance, which showed how little the
methods of his Cherokee environment had influenced his heart. And truly
the far-away Queetlees, if any such were cognizant of his existence, had
troubled themselves nothing about it, and had infinitely less claim on
his gratitude and filial affection than Colannah. They had left him to
be as a waif, a slave. He had been reared as a son, nursed and tended,
fed and fostered, bedecked in splendor, armed in costly and formidable
wise, given command and station, carefully trained in all that the
Indian knew.

"Colannah would never consent!" he said at last.

Abram Varney afterward wondered why he should then have had a
vision--oh, so futile, so fleeting, so fantastic!--of the twenty, the
forty, nay, the sixty years that this man, so munificently endowed by
nature, might pass here among the grotesque, uncouth barbarities of the
savage Cherokee, while his heritage--his religion, the religion into
which he was born of Christian parents, his name and nation, his tongue
and station, his opportunity--doubtless some fair, valid, valuable
future--all lay there to the eastward but scant five hundred miles away
on the Carolina coast. He said as much, and the retort came succinctly,
"You live here!"

Otasite's English speech was as simple as a child's, but he thought as
diplomatically as Colannah himself, whom he esteemed the greatest man in
all the world, and he could argue in the strategic Cherokee method.
Nevertheless, to give him full sway, that everything possible might be
said in contravention of the proposition, the old trader lapsed into the
Indian speech, that was indeed from long usage like a mother tongue to
them both. He stayed here, he said, from choice, it was true, but for
the sake of the trade that gave him wealth, and with wealth he could
return to the colonies at any time, and go whither he would in all the
world. But Otasite was restricted; he had no goods for trade, no
adequate capital to invest; he could only return to the colonies while
young, to work, to make a way, to secure betimes a place appropriate to
his riper years. Even this could not be done without great
difficulty,--witness how many settlers came empty-handed to barely exist
on the frontier and wrest a reluctant living from the wilderness,--and
it could not be done at all without friends. Now he, Abram Varney, was
prepared to stand his friend; Otasite could take a place in the service
of the company, in the main depot of the trade at Charlestown. His
knowledge of the details of the business of which Abram Varney's long
absences had given him experience; of the needs of the Cherokee nation;
of the ever-continued efforts of the French traders, by means of the
access to the Overhill towns afforded by the Cherokee and Tennessee
rivers, despite the great distance from their settlements on the
Mississippi, to insinuate their supplies at lower prices, in the teeth
of the Cherokee treaty with the British monopolizing such traffic, and
bring down profits--all would have a special and recognized value and be
appreciated by his mercantile associates, who would further the young
man's advancement. Thence he could at his leisure make inquiries
concerning his father's family, and doubtless in the course of time be
restored to his kindred.

Otasite listened throughout with the courteous air of deliberation which
his Indian training required him to accord to any discourse, without
interruption, however unwelcome or trivial it might be esteemed. Then,
smiling slowly, he shook his head.

"You cannot be serious," he said. "It would break old Colannah's heart,
who has been like a father to me."

Abram Varney too had the British bulldog tenacity. "What will you do,
then," he asked slowly and significantly, "when Colannah takes up arms
against the British government? Will you fight men of your own blood?"

He was reinforced in this argument by the habit of thought of the
Indians--the absolute absence of tribal dissensions, of internecine
strife, so marked among the Cherokees: here no man's hand was lifted
against his brother.

Jan Queetlee palpably winced. Come what might, he could never fight for
the Cherokees against the British--his father's people, his mother's
people--no more than he could fight for the British against his adopted
tribe--the Cherokee--and he the "Man-killer!"

"They will fight each other," said Varney weightily, "and the day is not
far--the day is not far!"

For in 1753 the cumulative discontents of the tribe were near the
crisis, earnestly fostered by the French on the western boundaries, that
vast domain then known as Louisiana, toward whose siren voice the
Cherokees had ever lent a willing ear. The building by the British
government, two or three years later, of those great defensive works,
Fort Prince George and Fort Loudon, situated respectively at the eastern
and western extremities of the Cherokee territory, mounted with cannon
and garrisoned by British forces, served to hold them in check and
quieted them for a time, but only for a time. Jan Queetlee, by reason of
his close association with the chiefs, knew far more than Varney dreamed
of the bitterness roused in the hearts of the Indians by friction with
the government, the aggressions of the individual colonist, the
infringements of their privileges in the treaty, and in opposition the
influence of the ever seductive suavity of the French.

As with a sudden hurt, Jan Queetlee cried out with a poignant voice
against the government and its patent unfaith, striking his clinched
fist so heavily on the head of a keg of powder that the stout fibres of
the wood burst beneath the passionate blow, and in a moment he was
covered with the flying particles of the black dust. Realizing the
possibility of an explosion should a candle or a pipe be lighted here,
Varney did not wait for the return of one of the brawny packmen to
remove the keg to a cave beneath the trading-house, which he utilized
for storage as a cellar, but addressed himself to the job. Jan Queetlee
silently assisted, his face darker, more lowering with the thought in
his mind than with the smears of the powder.

Varney remembered this afterward, and that he himself, diverted by the
accident from the trend of his argument, had launched out in a tirade
against the government as they worked together, the young Briton's
energy, industry, and persistence so at variance with the aspect of his
tufted topknot of feathers on his auburn curls, and the big blue
warrior's marks on his broad white chest. For Varney too had his
grievances against the powers that were; but his woes were personal. He
vehemently condemned the reconciliation which the government had
effected between the Muscogees and the Cherokees, for although there
were more deerskins to be had for export when the Indian hunters were at
pacific leisure, Varney had considered the recent war between these
tribes an admirable vent for gunpowder and its profitable sale; and
since the savages must always be killing, it was manifestly best for all
concerned that they should kill each other. He could not sufficiently
deride the happy illustration which Governor Glen had given them (in his
fatuity, Varney thought) of the values of peace and concord. In the
presence of the two delegations the mediating Governor had taken an
arrow and shown them with what ease it could be broken; then how
impossible he found it to break a quiverful of arrows, thus
demonstrating the strength in union. Varney argued that the Indians
would readily perceive a further application of the principle and turn
it to account, combining against the colonists. In the same spirit he
animadverted upon a monopoly from which he was excluded in common with
the traders in general, and which had been granted to a mercantile
company seeking to establish posts among the Choctaws. The enterprise,
although favored by the government, obviously because, undertaken on a
scale of phenomenal magnitude, it promised to dislodge the French and
their long-established trade among the Choctaws, and bring that powerful
tribe to a British allegiance, had finally proved a failure; and with a
bitter joy in this fact he alternately contemned and pitied the
government, because it could not wrest this valuable opportunity from
the iron grasp of the "Mississippi Louisianians." He had, too, a
censorious word for the French commercially--called them "peddlers,"
celebrated their deceitful wiles, underrated the quality of their
cloths, and inconsistently berated them for their low prices, finding a
logical parity in all these matters in the tenets of their religion,
which they had so vainly and so zealously sought to instill into the
unreceptive hearts of the unimpressionable Choctaw.[4]

With the plethora of interest involved in these subjects, Varney grew
oblivious of the theme that had earlier occupied his mind. It recurred
no more to his thoughts until several days had passed. He then chanced
to be occupied with his new goods in his cavern. It was illumined only
from above; there was a trap-door in the floor of the trading-house, and
thence a pale tempered light drifted down, scarcely convenient, but
sufficient for his purposes. Once he noticed that a shadow flickered
across it. He experienced a momentary surprise, for he had left no one
in the building, and the outer door being locked, he imagined it could
not be forced without noise enough to rouse him. Again the shadow
flickered across the trap-door; then ensued a complete eclipse of the
scant glimmer of light. There was a step upon the ladder which served as
stairway--a man was descending.

Varney felt a sudden constriction about his throat. He realized an
impending crisis; the door above had been closed; by the sound he knew
that the ladder was now removed and laid upon the ground. He had an
idea--he could see naught--that the unknown invisible man had seated
himself on the ladder on the ground, where he remained motionless,
silent, in anger, in grief, or some strange savage whim hardly possible
for a civilized creature to divine.

The time that passed in this black nullity--he never could compute
it--moments, doubtless, but it seemed hours, tried to the utmost the
nerve of the entrapped trader, albeit inured by twenty years' experience
to the capricious temper of the Cherokee Indians. He felt he could
better endure the suspense could he only see his antagonist, identify
him, and thus guess his purpose, and shape his own course from his
knowledge of character. But with some acquired savage instinct he, too,
remained silent, null, passive; one might have thought him absent.
Perhaps his quiescence, indeed, fostered some doubt of his presence
here, for suddenly there sounded the rasping of flint on steel, the
spunk was aglow, and then in the timorous flame of the kindling candle,
taken from his own stores above, Varney recognized the face and figure
of the stately and imperious old chief Colannah. The next moment he
remembered something far more pertinent. He called out in an agitated
voice to the Indian to beware of the powder with which the place was
largely stocked.

"I came for that," said Colannah in Cherokee, with unaccustomed fingers
snuffing the wick as he had seen Varney perform the process, for the
Indians used torches and fires of split cane for purposes of
illumination.

"For God's sake, what have I done?" cried the trader in an agony of
terror, desirous to bring his accusation to the point as early as might
be and compass his release, thus forestalling the violent end of an
explosion.

"What do the English always?--you have robbed me!" said Colannah, the
light strong on his fierce indignant features, his garb of fringed
buckskin, his many rich strings of the ivory-like roanoke about his
neck, his gayly bedecked and feathered head, and in shadowy wise
revealing the rough walls of the cave, the boxes and bales of goods, the
reserve stock, as it were, the stands of arms, and the kegs and bags of
powder.

As Varney, half crouching on the ground, noted the latter in the dusk,
he cried out precipitately, "Robbed you of what? My God! let us go
upstairs. I'll give it back, whatever it is, twice over, fourfold! Don't
swing the candle around that way, Colannah! the powder will blow us and
the whole trading-house into the Tennessee River."

Colannah nodded acquiescence, the stately feathers on his head gleaming
fitfully in the clare-obscure of the cavern. "That is why I came! Then
the British government could demand no satisfaction for the life of the
British subject--an accident--the old chief of Tennessee Town killed
with him. And I should be avenged."

"For what? My God!" Varney had not before called upon the Lord for
twenty years. To hold a diplomatic conversation with an enraged wild
Indian, flourishing a lighted candle in a powder magazine, is calculated
to bring even the most self-sufficient and forgetful sinner to a sense
of his dependence and helplessness. The lighted candle was a more
subjugating weapon than a drawn sword. He had contemplated springing
upon the stanch old warrior, although, despite the difference in age, he
was no match for the Indian, in order to seek to extinguish it. He
reflected, however, that in the struggle a flaring spark might cause the
ignition of scattered particles of the powder about the floor, and thus
precipitate the explosion which he shuddered to imagine. "For what,
Colannah?" he asked again, in a soothing smooth cadence, "for what, my
comrade, my benefactor for years, my best-beloved friend--avenged on me
for what? Let's go upstairs!"

The flicker of the wavering candle showed a smile of contempt on the
face of the angry Indian for a moment, and admonished Varney that in
view of the Cherokees' relish of the torture his manifestations of
anxiety but prolonged his jeopardy. It brought, too, a fuller
realization of the gravity of the situation in that the Indian should so
valiantly risk himself. He evidently intended to take the trader's life,
but in such wise that no vengeance for his death should fall upon the
Cherokee nation. Abram Varney summoned all his courage, which was not
inconsiderable, and had been cultivated by the wild and uncertain
conditions of his life. Assured that he could do naught to hasten his
release, he awaited the event in a sort of stoical patience, dreading,
however, every motion, every sound, the least stir setting his expectant
nerves aquiver. Silence, quiescence, brought the disclosure earlier than
he had feared.

"When I took the boy Jan Queetlee--why do I call him thus, instead of by
the name he has earned for himself, the noble Otasite of Tennessee
Town?"--the old chief began as deliberately, as disregardfully of the
surroundings as if seated under the boughs of one of the giant oaks on
the safe slopes of Chilhowee yonder--"when I took him away from the
braves who had overcome the South Carolina stationers, I owed him no
duty. He was puny and ill and white and despised! You British say the
Indian has no pity. A man's son or brother or father or mother has
claims upon him. Otasite was naught to me, a mere _eeankke_!" (a
captive). "I owed the child no duty. My love was voluntary. I gave it a
free gift; no duty! And he was little, and drooping, and meagre, and ill
all the time! But he grew; soon no such boy in the Cherokee nation, soon
hardly such a warrior in all the land--not even Otasite of Watauga, nor
yet Otasite of Eupharsee; perhaps at his age Oconostota excelled"
(Oconostota always was preeminently known as the "Great Warrior"). He
paused to shake his head and meditate on difficult comparisons and
instances of prowess. After an interval which, long enough, seemed to
the trembling trader illimitable, he recommenced abruptly: "Says the
Goweno long time ago to me, 'Is not there a white youth among you?' I
say, 'He is content; he has no white friends, it seems.' Says the Goweno
to me, 'Ah, ah, we must look into this!' and says no more."

Colannah flung back his head and laughed so long and so loud that every
echo of the sarcastic guttural tones, striking back from the stone walls
of the cavern, smote Varney with as definite a shock as a blow.

"And now," the Cherokee resumed, with a changed aspect and a pathetic
cadence, "I am an old man, and I lean upon Otasite. My sons are all
dead--one in the wars with the Muscogee and two slain by the Chickasaw.
And the last he said to me, with his lingering latest breath, loath to
go and leave me desolate, 'But you have an adopted son, you have the
noble Otasite.' And now," his voice was firm again, "if I have him not,
I go too, and you go. We go together."

"I will not advise him to quit the nation--never again!" cried Varney,
suddenly enlightened, fervently repudiating his interference. "Since you
disapprove, he shall not return to Carolina. He _cannot_ go without
me--my help; he could not find a place--a home. Bold and fine as he is
here, he would be strange there; he knows naught of the ways of the
colonists. He would be poor, despised, while here he has been like the
first, the best. His pride could never stoop to a life like a slave's;
his pride would break his heart. Let me undo the mischief I have
wrought; let me unsay the unthinking, foolish words I have spoken."

It was perhaps with the faith that the artful trader could best turn the
young fellow's mind back to its wonted content, as his crafty arguments
had already so potently aroused this wild, new dissatisfaction, that
Colannah at last consented to liberate Varney for this essay, not
without a cogent reminder that he would be held responsible for its
failure. And indeed in recanting his former urgency, when he sought out
Otasite, Varney exerted himself to the utmost.

"You are satisfied here. You know the life. Like me, you love it. If I,
who can choose, prefer it, why not you?"

But Otasite shook his head.

"When I talk to you of the colonies I speak as a man does of a dream,"
Varney continued. "It is something true and something false. I add here
and I let slip there to make out the connection, and give the symmetry
of truth to the picture. But did I ever tell you how they love money in
the colonies, how they cheat and strive and slave their lives away to
add to their store; how they reverence and worship the wealth of others
till it seems that a rich man can do no wrong--if he is rich enough? Did
I ever tell you this? The poor, they are despised for being poor, and
they are let to suffer. Here poverty is not permitted. If a man lose his
dwelling by fire, the town builds him another house. You know this. If a
man fail in his winter hunt, the others give of their abundance. Here
one is rated by his personal worth. Here the deed is held to be fine,
not the mere thing. Here you are valued as the great Otasite, and all
men give you honor for your courage. There you are Jan Queetlee, a
penniless clod, and all men despise you and pass you by."[5]

But again Otasite shook his head.

It was no spurious flare of ambition, ineffectual, illusory; no
discontented yearning for a different, a wider life that the trader's
ill-advised words had roused. That sentiment of loyalty to the British
government, which had never sought to claim Jan Queetlee as a subject,
seemed bred in his bone and born in his blood. Perhaps it was the stuff
of which long afterward the Tories of the Revolution were made. He could
not lift his hand against this aloof, indifferent fetich. And yet take
part against the Cherokees, whom he loved as they loved him! For with
his facilities for understanding the trend of the politics of the day he
could no longer blind himself to the approach of the war of the tribe
with the British government, which, indeed, came within the decade. The
sons of Colannah, slain in the cruel wars with other Indians, had been
to him like brothers, and in their loss he had felt his full and bitter
share of the grief of a common household. Even yet he and Colannah were
wont to sadly talk of them with that painful elimination of their names,
a mark of Indian reverence to the dead, substituting the euphemism "the
one who is gone," and linger for hours over the fire at night or on the
shady river-bank in sunlit afternoons, rehearsing their deeds and
recalling their traits, and repeating their sayings with that blending
of affectionate pride and sorrow that is the consolation of bereavement
when time has somewhat softened its pangs and made memory so dear. And
Colannah had been like a father--it seemed to Jan Queetlee as if he had
had no other father. He could not leave Colannah, old, desolate, and
alone. Yet the war was surely coming apace, as they both knew, a war
which already tore his heart in sunder, in which he could evade taking
part against his own--his own of both factions--only by going at once
and going far. He could decide no such weighty matter.

At last he determined he would leave it to fate, to chance, showing how
truly a gambler his Indian training had made him. He would stake the
crisis on a game at chungke; if he won, as he told Varney, he would go
to Carolina, and take sides with neither faction; if he lost, he would
cast his future with the Cherokee nation.

Varney, thoroughly uneasy, had come to feel a personal interest
involved. If Otasite quitted the country, he felt his life would hardly
be safe here, since the craft of Colannah had drawn from the
unsuspecting young fellow the details of the plan of removal to
Charlestown which he had proposed. And yet Varney himself was averse to
any change, unless it was indeed necessary. When put to the test he felt
he would rather live in the Cherokee nation than anywhere else in all
the world, and he valued his commerce with the tribe and his license
from the government, under duly approved bond and security, to conduct
that traffic in Tennessee Town and Tellico as naught else on earth. He
manifested so earnest and genuine a desire to repair the damage of his
ill-starred suggestion that Colannah, showing his age in his haste and
his tremulousness and excitement, disclosed to him in a flutter of
triumphant glee that he had a spell to work which naught could
withstand--a draught from Herbert's Spring to offer to Otasite. Thither
some fifty miles he had dispatched a runner for a jar of the magic
water, and after drinking of it Otasite could not quit for seven years
the Cherokee nation even if he would.

It was in the council-house that the mystic beverage was quaffed. There
had been guests--head men from Great Tellico and Citico--during the
afternoon, received in secret conclave, and now that their deliberations
were concluded and they were gone, Otasite, not admitted to the council,
being one of those warriors who did the fighting of the battles devised
by the "beloved men," strolled into the deserted, dome-like place. Its
walls, plastered with red clay, were yet more ruddy for a cast of the
westering sun. The building was large enough to accommodate several
hundred people, and around the walls were cane seats, deftly constructed
and artificially whitened, making, according to an old writer, "very
genteel settees or couches." Tired with the stress of mental depression
and anxiety as physical effort could not tame him, and vaguely prescient
of evil, Otasite had flung himself down on one of these, which was
spread with dressed panther-skins, his hands clasped under his head, his
scalp-lock of two auburn curls dangling over them.

Through the tall narrow doorway the autumnal landscape was visible,
blazing with all the fervors of summer; the mountains, however, were
more softly blue, the sunlight of a richer glister; the river, now
steel, now silver, now amber, reflected the atmosphere as a sensitive
soul reflects the moods of those most dear; the forests, splendid with
color, showed the lavish predominance of the rich reds characteristic of
the Chilhowee woods; a dreamlike haze over all added a vague ideality
that made the scene like some fondest memory or a glamourous forecast.

"_Akoo-e-a!_" (summer yet!) said Colannah, his eyes too on the scene, as
he sat on a buffalo-rug in the centre of the floor drawing in the last
sweet fragrant breaths from his long-stemmed pipe, curiously wrought of
stone, for in the manufacture of these pipes the Cherokees of that day
were said to excel all other Indians. The young Briton experienced no
mawkish pang to note that it was ornamented at one end by a dangling
scalp, greatly treasured, the interior of the skin painted red for its
preservation. He had, in fact, a pipe of his own with a scalp much like
it. Indeed, his trophy was a fine specimen, and it had been a feat to
take it, for it had once covered a hot Chickasaw head.

"_Akoo-e-a!_ the day is warm!" remarked Colannah. He lifted his storied
pipe, and with its long stem silently motioned to a young Indian woman,
indicating a great jar of water. She quickly filled one of those quaint
bowls, or cups, of the Cherokee manufacture, and advanced with it to
Otasite; but the proffer was in the nature of an interruption of his
troubled thoughts, and he irritably waved her away.

"I am displeased with you," said Colannah sternly, lifting his dark,
deeply sunken eyes to where the "Man-killer" lay at full length on the
cane settee. "You set me aside. You have no thoughts for me--no words.
Yet you can talk when you go to the trading-house. You have words and to
spare for the trader. You can drink with him. You can sing, 'Drink with
me a cup of wine.'" He lifted his raucous old voice in ludicrous
travesty of the favorite catch, for sometimes the two Britons, so
incongruous in point of age, education, sentiment, and occupation,
cemented their bond as compatriots by carousing together in a mild way.

But this ebullition of temper had naught of the ludicrous in Jan
Queetlee's estimation. He was pierced to the heart.

"_Aketohta!"_ (Father!) he cried reproachfully. He had sprung to his
feet, and stood looking down at the old chief, who would not look at
him, but kept his eyes on the landscape without, now and then drawing a
long, lingering whiff from his pipe.

"_Aketohta_! I have no thought for _you_!--who alone have taken thought
for me! I have words for the trader and silence for _you_! You say keen
things, and you know they are not true! You know that I had rather drink
water with you than wine with him. I am not thirsty; but since it is you
who offer it"--His expression changed; he broke into sudden pleasant
laughter, and with a rollicking stave of the song, "Drink with me a cup
of wine," he caught the bowl from the girl's hand and drained it at a
draught.

"_Seohsta-quo_!" (Good!) cried Colannah, visibly refreshed, as if his
own thirst were vicariously slaked. But Otasite stood blankly staring,
the bowl motionless in his hand. "It is well for wine to be old," he
said wonderingly, "but not water."

For his palate was accustomed to the exquisite sparkle and freshness of
the mountain fountains, and this had come from far.

The crafty Colannah stolidly repressed his delight, save for the glitter
in his eyes fixed on the azure and crimson and silver landscape
glimmering beyond the dusky portals of the terra-cotta walls. "_Nawohti!
nawohti_!" (Rum!) he said, with an affectation of severity. "You drink
too much of the trader's strong physic! You have no love now for the
sweet, clear water." And he shook his head with the uncompromising
reproof of a mentor of present times as he growled disjointedly,
"_Nawohti! nawohti_!"

Otasite nothing questioned the genuineness of this demonstration, for
the Cherokee rulers, in common with those of other tribes, had long
waged a vigorous opposition to the importation of strong drink into
their country; indeed, as far back as 1704, when holding a solemn
conference with Governor Daniel of North Carolina to form a general
treaty of friendship, the chiefs of several tribes petitioned the
government of the Lords Proprietors for a law, which was afterward
enacted (and disregarded), forbidding any white man to sell or give rum
to an Indian, and prescribing penalties for its infringement. It was not
the first time that Otasite had heard unfavorably of the influences of
"_nawohti_," which, by the way, with the Cherokees signified physic, as
well as spirituous liquor, a synonymous definition which more civilized
people have sought to apply. He was content that he and the old chief
were once more in affectionate accord, and he did not seek to interpret
the flash of triumph in Colannah's face.

For seven years! for seven years! the white "Man-killer" could not, if
he would, quit the Cherokee country. Well might the old chief's eyes
glisten! The youth was like a son to his lonely age, and Otasite's
prowess the pride of his life. And like others elsewhere he had softened
as age came on, and loved the domestic fireside and the companionship
about the hearth, hearing without participating in the hilarious talk of
the young, and looking out at the world through the eyes of the new
generation, undaunted, expectant, aglow with a spirit that had long ago
smouldered in his own; for the fierce Indian at the last was but an old
man.

Abram Varney, too, experienced a recurrence of ease. He had unwittingly
imbibed much outlandish superstition in his residence among the
Cherokees, and indeed other traders and settlers long believed in the
enchaining fascination of Herbert's Spring, and drank or refrained as
they would stay or go.

Otasite, however, was all unaware of the spell cast upon him when he
came into the chungke-yard the next day, arrayed in his finest garb, the
white dressed doeskin glittering in the sun, his necklaces of beads, his
belt of wolf fangs, his flying feet in their white moccasins--all
catching the light with a differing effect of brilliancy.

Varney watched him;--with the two eagle feathers stiff and erect on his
proud head, his two incongruous long auburn curls, that did duty as a
"war-lock," floating backward in the breeze, he ran so deftly, so
swiftly, with so assured and so graceful a gait that the mere
observation of such symmetrical motion was a pleasure. The trader had
scarcely a pulse of anxiety. Indeed, disingenuously profiting by the tip
afforded by Herbert's Spring, he was heavily backing Wyejah as a winner!

A windy day it was; the clouds raced through the sky, and their shadows
skimming over the valleys and slopes challenged their speed. The
Tennessee River was singing, singing! The mountains were as clearly and
definitely blue as the heavens. That revelation of ranges on the far
horizon unaccustomed to the view, only vouchsafed by some necromancy of
the clarified autumnal air, never before seemed so distinct, so
alluring--new lands, new hopes, new life they suggested. Wyejah's
scarlet attire, its fringes tasseled with the spurs of the wild turkey,
rendered his lithe figure strongly marked against these illusory
ethereal tints as he sped abreast with Otasite along the level sandy
stretch of the chungke-yard. And how well he played! Varney realized
this with a satisfaction as of having already won his wagers, many and
large, for Otasite would leave the nation should he be victorious, and
having drunk unwittingly of Herbert's Spring, he could not quit the
Cherokee country, although he himself was still unaware of having
quaffed of those mystic waters. Therefore defeat was obviously his
portion. Whenever the trader thought anew of his secret knowledge of
this fact he offered odds on Wyejah, and glanced at him with
approbation--at the young Indian warrior's face fiercely, eagerly
smiling, his great flattened ears distended on their wire hoops, his
dark eyes full of sombre brilliance. How well he played! and how hard
the skill of his opponent pressed him! How accurate was the aim of the
long lance of Otasite as he poised his weight on the supple tips of his
white moccasins and hurled the missile through the air; how strong and
firm his grasp that sent the circular, quartz chungke-stone, whirling
along the sand; how tirelessly his long sinewy steps sped back and forth
in the swift dashes up and down the smooth spaces of the chungke-yard;
how faithfully he was doing his best, regardless of his own preference
in the interests that he had adventured on the result! How like a Briton
born it was, Abram Varney thought, for he alone knew of Otasite's
resolution, and the significance of the game to him, that the boy could
thus see fair play between the factions that warred within him for his
future. He had staked the future on the event,--and suddenly it was the
present!

A wild clamor of excitement, of applause, rose up from the throats of
the crowd in the natural amphitheatre, clanging and clattering in long
guttural cries,--all intensified by a relish of the unexpected, a joy in
a new sensation, for Wyejah had never before been beaten, and Otasite
was the victor at chungke.

Abram Varney felt his heart leap into his throat, then sink like lead;
Colannah, triumphant, knowing naught of the subtler significance of the
contest, joyful, aglow with pride, rose up in his splendid feathered
mantle, standing high on the slope, to sign to the boy his pleasure in
the victory. The sunlight fell, glittering very white, on the young
fellow's doeskin garb, his prickly belt of fangs, his bare chest with
the blue warrior's marks, the curls of his auburn scalp-lock tossing in
the wind. He had seemed hitherto stoical, unmoved by victory as he would
have appeared in defeat; but Varney, eager to get at him, to combat his
resolution, knew that he was stunned by the complications presented by
this falling out of the event. He visibly faltered as his eye met the
triumph and affection expressed in Colannah's quivering old face. He
could not respond to its congratulation. He dropped on one knee
suddenly, bending low, affecting to find something amiss with one of his
moccasins.

Wyejah, too, could seem unmoved by victory, but indifference to defeat
was more difficult to simulate. He had in the first moment of its
realization felt the blood rush to his head; despite his strong nerve
his hand trembled; the smile of placidity which it was a point of honor
to preserve became a fixed grin. Several other young braves had come
into the yard, and were idly tossing the lance at the great
chungke-pole--as a billiardist of the civilized life of that day might
pocket the balls with a purposeless cue after a match. Wyejah, too, had
cast his lance aslant; then he idly hurled the chungke-stone with a
muscular fling along the spaces of the white sand. His nerve was shaken,
his aim amiss, his great strength deflected. The heavy discoidal quartz
stone skimmed through the air above the stretch of sand, and striking
with its beveled edge the kneeling figure on the temple, the future of
the victor at chungke became in one moment the past.

The trader could only have likened the scene that ensued to the moment
of an earthquake or some other stupendous convulsion of nature. In the
midst of the confusion, the wild cries, the swift running figures, the
surging of the crowds into the chungke-yard that obliterated the wide
glare of the sun on the white sand, he made good his escape. He knew
enough of the trend of Cherokee thought to be prescient of the fate of
the scapegoat. Colannah in the first burst of grief he knew would blame
himself that he should have tempted fate by the mystic draught from
Herbert's Spring to hold here that bright young form for seven years
longer. How sadly true!--for seven years Otasite would remain, and seven
to that, and, alack, seven more, and forever! Soon, however, the natural
impulses of the Indian's temper, intensified by long cultivation, would
be reasserted. He would cast about for revenge, remembering the first
suggestion of the departure of Otasite, and from whom it had emanated.
But for the English trader and his specious wiles, the old chief would
argue, would Otasite have thought of forsaking his foster nation, his
adopted father, for the selfish, indifferent British, the "Goweno" at
Charlestown, who cared for him nothing? The trader it was who had
brought this calamity upon them, who had in effect, by the hand of
another, administered the fatal draught. Seek for him!--hale him forth!
--wreak upon him the just, unappeasable vengeance of the forever
bereaved!

The old trader had evinced an instinct in flight and concealment that an
animal might envy. No probable hiding-place he selected, such as might
be known or divined--a cave, the attic of his trading-house, the cellar
beneath--all obvious, all instantly explored. Instead, he slipped into a
rift in the rocks along the river-bank. Myriads of such crevices there
were in the tilted strata--unheeded, unremarked, too strait and
restricted to suggest the idea of refuge, too infinitely numerous for
search. There, unable in the narrow compass to turn, even to shift a
numbing muscle of his lean old body, in all the constraint of a standing
posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its
fossils,--as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once
been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed
hence,--or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in
the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds. He listened to
the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing
party went out to overtake him, presumably on his way to Charlestown,
maintaining a very high rate of speed, for the Cherokees of that period
had some famously fine horses.

Straining his senses--all unnaturally alert--he distinguished, as the
afternoon wore on, the details of the preparations for the barbarous
sepulture of the young Briton. Now and then the cracking of rifle-shots
betokened the shooting of his horses and cattle and all the living
things among his possessions--a practice already in its decadence among
the Cherokees, and later, influenced by the utilitarian methods of
civilization, altogether abandoned. Swift steps here and there
throughout the town intimated errands to gather all his choicest effects
to be buried with him, for his future use. To this custom, it is said,
and the great security of the fashioning of the sepulchres of the
Cherokees, may be attributed the fact that little of their pottery,
arms, beads, medals, the more indestructible of their personal
possessions, can be found in this region where so lately they were a
numerous people; for the effects of the dead, however valued, were never
removed or the graves robbed, even by an Indian enemy. The Cherokees
rarely permitted the presence of an alien at the ceremonies of the
interment of one of the tribe; but Varney in times past had seen and
heard enough to realize, without any definite effort of the imagination,
how Otasite, arrayed in his most gorgeous apparel, his beautiful English
face painted vermilion, would be placed in a sitting posture in front of
his house, and there in the sunlit afternoon remain for a space, looking
in, as it were, at the open door. Presently sounded the wild
lamentations and melancholy cadences of the funeral song; the tones rose
successively from a deep bass to a tenor, then to a shrill treble,
falling again to a full bass chorus, with the progression of the mystic
syllables, "_Yah! Yo-he-wah! Yah! Yo-he-wah!"_ (said to signify
"Jehovah"). This announced that the funeral procession, bearing the
body, was going thrice around the house of the dead, where he had lived
in familiar happiness these many years, and beneath which he would rest
in solemn silence in his deep, deep grave, covered with heavy timbers
and many layers of bark, and the stanch red clay, maintaining a sitting
posture, and facing the east, while the domestic life of homely cheer
would go on over his unheeding head as he awaited the distant and
universal resurrection of the body, in which the Cherokee religion
inculcated a full and firm faith.

The sun went down, and through all the night sounded the plaints of
grief. Late the moon rose, striking aslant on the melancholy Tennessee
River, full of deep shadows and vaguely pathetic pallid glimmers. A wind
sprang up for a time, then suddenly sank to silence and stillness. A
frost fell with a keen icy chill. Mists gathered, and the day did not
break,--it seemed as if it might never dawn again; only a pallid
visibility came gradually upon clouds that had enshrouded all the world.
The earth and the sky were alike indistinguishable; the mountains were
as valleys, the valleys as plains. One might scarcely make shift to see
a hand before the face. Through this white pall, this cloud of nullity,
came ever the dolorous chant, "_Yo-he-ta-wah! Yo-he-ta-weh!
Yo-he-ta-hah! Yo-he-ta-heh!_" as in their grief and poignant bereavement
the ignorant and barbarous Indians called upon the God who made them,
and He who made them savages doubtless heard them.

Creeping out into the invisibility of the clouded day, Abram Varney had
not great fear of detection. The mists that shielded him from view
furthered still his flight, for his footsteps were hardly to be
distinguished amidst the continual dripping of the moisture from the
leaves of the dank autumnal woods. At night he knew the savages would be
most on the alert. They would scarcely suspect his flight in the broad
day. Moreover, their suspicions of his presence here were lulled;
craftily enough he followed after the horsemen who fancied they were
pursuing him--they would scarcely look for their quarry hard on their
own heels. He experienced no sentiment but one of intense satisfaction
when, as invisible as a spirit, he passed his own trading-house, and
divined from the sounds within that the Indians were busy in sacking it,
albeit a greater financial loss than seems probable at the present day;
for the Indian trade was a very considerable commerce, as the accounts
of those times will show. The English and French governments did not
disdain to compete for its monopoly with various nations of Indians, for
the sake of gaining control of the savages thereby, in view of supplies
furnished by the white traders vending these commodities and resident in
the tribes.

Recollections of the items and values of his invoices, afflicting to
Varney's commercial spirit, threaded his consciousness only when again
safe in Charlestown. He reached that haven at last by the exercise of
great good judgment. He realized that another party would presently be
sent out when no news of capture came from the earlier pursuers; he
divined that the second expedition would take the Chickasaw path, for
being friendly to the British, that tribe would naturally be thought of
as a refuge to an Englishman in trouble with the Cherokees; therefore
Varney, lest he be overtaken on the way, avoided with a great struggle
the temptation, mustered all his courage, and adopting an unprecedented
expedient, turned off to the country of the Muscogees. These Indians,
always more or less inimical to the colonists, bloodthirsty, cruel,
crafty, and but recently involved in a furious war against the
Cherokees, were glad to thwart Colannah in any cherished scheme of
revenge, and received the fugitive kindly. Although but for this fact
his temerity in venturing among them would have cost him his life, they
ministered to his needs with great hospitality, and forwarded him on his
way to Charlestown, sending a strong guard with him as far as Long Cane
settlement, a little above Ninety-Six.

Wyejah also made his escape. Appalled by the calamity of the accidental
blow, he "took sanctuary." In the supreme moment of excitement he flung
himself into the Tennessee River, and while eagerly sought by the
emissaries of Colannah in the woods, he swam to Chote, "beloved town,"
the city of refuge of the whole Cherokee nation, where the shedder of
blood was exempt from vengeance. As years went by, however, either
because of the death of Colannah, or because time had so far softened
the bereavement of the friends of Otasite that they were prevailed upon
to accept the "satisfaction," the presents required even from an in
voluntary homicide, he was evidently freed from the restricted limits of
the "ever-sacred soil," for his name is recorded in the list of warriors
who went to Charlestown in 1759 to confer with Governor Lyttleton on the
distracted state of the frontier, and being held as one of the hostages
of that unlucky embassy, he perished in the massacre of the Cherokees by
the garrison of Fort Prince George, after the treacherous murder of the
commandant, Captain Coytmore, by a ruse of the Indian king, Oconostota.

Abram Varney never ventured back among "the Nation," as he called the
Cherokees, as if they were the only nation on the earth. Now and again
in their frequent conferences with the Governor at Charlestown, rendered
necessary by their ever-recurrent friction with the British government,
he sought out members of the delegation for some news of his old
friends, his old haunts. Not one of them would take his hand; not one
would hear his voice; they looked beyond him, through him, as if he were
the impalpable atmosphere, as if he did not exist.

It was a little thing,--the displeasure of such men--mere savages,--but
it cut him to the heart. So long they had been his friends, his
associates, as the chief furniture of the world!

He busied himself with the affairs of his firm at Charlestown, but for a
time he was much changed, much cast down, for he had a sense of
responsibility, and his conscience was involved, and although he had
sought to do good he had only wrought harm, and irreparable harm. He
grew old very fast, racked as he was by rheumatism, a continual reminder
of the stern experiences of his flight. He had other reminders in his
unquiet thoughts, but he grew garrulous at a much later date. Years
intervened before he was wont to sit in front of the warehouse, with his
stick between his knees, his hands clasped on the round knob at its top,
his chin on his hands, and cheerily chirp of his days in "the Nation."
The softening touch of time brought inevitably its glamours and its
peace; his bleared old eyes, fixed on the glittering expanse of the
harbor, beheld with pleasure, instead of the sea, the billowy reaches of
that mighty main of mist-crested mountains known as the Great Smoky
Range, and through all his talk, and continually through his mind,
flitted the bright animated presence of the victor at chungke.




THE CAPTIVE OF THE ADA-WEHI


Attusah was obviously an impostor. Many, however, had full faith in his
supernatural power, and often he seemed to believe in his own spectral
account of himself.

"_Tsida-wei-yu_!" (I am a great ada-wehi![6]) the young warrior would
cry with his joyous grandiloquent gesture, waving his many braceleted
right arm at full length as he held himself proudly erect.
"_Akee-o-hoosa! Akee-o-hoosa!"_ (I am dead). Then triumphantly, "And
behold I am still here."

Attusah had gone unscathed through that bloody campaign of 1761 in which
the Cherokees suffered such incredible rigors. After their total defeat
at Etchoee the Indians could offer no further resistance to the troops
of Colonel Grant, who triumphantly bore the authority of the British
king from one end of the Cherokee country to the other, for there was no
more powder to be had in the tribe. The French, from whom they had hoped
a supply, failed them at their utmost need, and now those massive crags
of the Great Smoky Mountains, overhanging the Tennessee River, no longer
echoed the "whoo-whoop!" of the braves, the wild cry of the Highlanders,
"Claymore! Claymore!" the nerve-thrilling report of the volleys of
musketry from the Royal Scots, the hissing of the hand grenades flung
bursting into the jungles of the laurel. Instead, all the clifty defiles
of the ranges were filled with the roar of flames and the crackling of
burning timbers as town after town was given to the firebrand, and the
homeless, helpless Cherokees frantically fleeing to the densest coverts
of the wilderness,--that powerful truculent tribe!--sought for shelter
like those "feeble folk the conies" in the hollows of the rocks.

Thus it was that Digatiski, the Hawk, of Eupharsee Town, long the terror
of the southern provinces, must needs sit idle, forlorn, frenzied with
rage and grief, in a remote and lofty cavity of a great cliff, and
looking out over range and valley and river of this wild and beautiful
country, see fire and sword work their mission of destruction upon it.
By day a cloud of smoke afar off bespoke the presence of the soldiery.
At night a tremulous red light would spring up amidst the darkness of
the valley, and expanding into a great yellow flare summon mountains and
sky into an infinitely sad and weird revelation of the landscape, as the
great storehouses of corn were burned to the ground, leaving the hapless
owners to starvation.

His pride grudged his very eyes the sight of this humiliation, for
despite the oft-repeated assertion of the improvidence of the Indian
character, these public granaries, whence by the primitive Cherokee
government food was dispensed gratis to all the needy, were always full,
and their destruction meant national annihilation or subjugation. After
one furtive glance at the purple obscurities of the benighted world he
would bow his head, and with a smothered groan ask of the ada-wehi,
"Where is it now, Attusah?"

The young warrior, half reclining at the portal of the niche, would lift
himself on one elbow,--the glow of the little camp-fire within the
recess on his feather-crested head, his wildly painted face, the twenty
strings of roanoke passed tight like a high collar around his neck,
thence hanging a cascade of beads over his chest, the devious arabesques
of tattooing on his bare, muscular arms, the embroideries of his
buckskin raiment and gaudy quiver,--and searching with his gay young
eyes through the stricken country reply, "Cowetchee," "Sinica,"
"Tamotlee," whichever town might chance to be in flames.

Doubtless Attusah realized equally the significance of the crisis. But a
certain joyous irresponsibility characterized him, and indeed he had
never seemed quite the same since he died. He had been much too
reckless, however, even previous to that event. Impetuous, hasty,
tumultuously hating the British colonists, he had participated several
years earlier in a massacre of an outlying station, when the Cherokees
were at peace, without warrant of tribal authority, and with so little
caution as to be recognized. For this breach of the treaty his execution
was demanded by the Royal Governor of South Carolina, and reluctantly
conceded by the Cherokees to avert a war for the chastisement of the
tribe. Powder must have been exceedingly scarce!

Attusah was allowed to choose his method of departure to the happy
hunting-grounds, and thus was duly stabbed to death. He was left
weltering in his blood to be buried by his kindred. The half king,
Atta-Kulla-Kulla, satisfied of his death, himself reported the execution
to the Carolina authorities, and as in his long and complicated
diplomatic relations with the colonial government this Cherokee chief
had never broken faith, he was implicitly believed.

Whether the extraordinary vitality and vigor of the young warrior were
reasserted after life had been pronounced wholly extinct, and thus his
relations were induced to defer the obsequies, or that he was enabled to
exert supernatural powers and in the spirit reappear in his former
semblance of flesh,--both theories being freely advanced,--certain it is
that after a time he returned to his old haunts as gay, as reckless, as
impetuous as ever. He bore no token of his strange experience save
sundry healed-over scars of deep gashes in his breast, which he seemed
at times to seek to shield from observation; and this he might have
accomplished but for his solicitude that a very smart shirt, much
embroidered and bedizened with roanoke, should not suffer by exposure to
water; wherefore he took it off when it rained, and in swimming, and on
the war-path. He manifested, too, a less puerile anxiety to escape the
notice of Atta-Kulla-Kulla and other head men, who were supposed to be
well affected at that time to the British government. This he was the
better enabled to do as his habitat, Kanootare, was the most remote of
the Cherokee towns, his name, Attusah, signifying the "Northward
Warrior."

After the capitulation of Fort Loudon and the massacre of the garrison
the previous year, and the organized resistance the Cherokees had made
in the field of battle against Colonel Montgomerie, then commanding the
expeditionary forces, he had felt that the tribe's openly inimical
relations with the British government warranted him in coming boldly
forth from his retirement and competing for the honors of the present
campaign of 1761. His friends sought to dissuade him. The government had
had, as assurance of his death, the word of Atta-Kulla-Kulla, who might
yet insist that the pledge be made good. That chief, they urged, had a
delicate conscience, which is often an engine of disastrous efficiency
when exerted on the affairs of other people. Attusah was advised that he
had best stay dead. Although he finally agreed with this, he could not
stay still, and thus as he appeared in various skirmishes it became
gradually bruited abroad among the Cherokees that Attusah, the Northward
Warrior, was a great ada-wehi, a being of magical power, or a ghost as
it might be said, of special spectral distinctions. Thus he lived as
gayly yet as before the dismal day of his execution, always carefully,
however, avoiding the notice of Atta-Kulla-Kulla, whose word had been
solemnly accepted by the British government as the pledge of his death.

It is impossible to understand how a man like Digatiski of Eupharsee
could believe this,--so sage, despite his ignorance, so crafty, so
diplomatic and acute in subterfuge, yet he was sodden in superstition.

"Can you see Colonel Grant, the Barbarous?"[7] he asked suddenly,
lifting his head and gazing steadily at the young Indian's face, which
was outlined against the pallid neutral tint of the sky. The dark
topmost boughs of a balsam fir were just on a level with the clear
high-featured profile; a single star glittering beyond and above his
feathered crest looked as if it were an ornament of the headdress; the
red glow of the smouldering fire within, which had been carefully masked
in ashes as the darkness came on, that its sparkle might not betray
their presence here to any wandering band of troopers, still sufficed to
show the impostor's painted red cheek. He was armed with a tomahawk and
a pistol, without powder as useless as a toy, and a bow borne in default
of aught better lay on the floor beside him, while a gayly ornamented
quiver full of poisoned arrows swung over his shoulder.

"_Ha-tsida-wei-yu!_" he proclaimed. "I am a great ada-wehi! I see him!
Of a surety I see him!"

Attusah gazed at the sombre night with an expression as definitely
perceptive as if the figure in his thoughts were actually before his
eyes.

"And he is not dead?" cried Digatiski, in despair.

Some such wild rumor, as of hope gone mad, had pervaded the groups of
Cherokee fugitives.

"He would be if I could get close enough with a bare pinch of powder
that might charge my gun!" declared Attusah disconsolately. Then himself
again, "But I will tell you this! He is waiting for my poisoned arrow!
And when he dies he will come back no more. He is not like me."

He paused to throw out his hand with his splendid pompous gesture.
"_Akee-o-hoo-sa! Tsida-wei-yu!_" (I am dead! I am a great ada-wehi!)

Digatiski groaned. It mattered not to him whether Colonel Grant came
back or abode in his proper place when dead. The grievous dispensation
lay in the fact that he was here now, in the midst of the wreck he was
so zealously wreaking.

There were three women in the niche. One with her head muffled in her
mantle of fringed deerskin sat against the wall, silently weeping,
bemoaning her dead slain in the recent battle, or the national
calamities, or perhaps the mere personal afflictions of fatigue and fear
and hunger and suspense. Another crouched by the fire and gazed
dolorously upon it with dreary tear-filled eyes, and swollen, reddened
eyelids. The sorrowful aspect of a third was oddly incongruous with her
gay attire, a garb of scarlet cloth trimmed with silver tinsel tassels,
a fabric introduced among the Cherokees by an English trader of the name
of Jeffreys, and which met with great favor. Her anklets, garters, and
bracelets of silver "bell-buttons" tinkled merrily as she moved, for she
had postponed her tears in the effort to concoct some supper from the
various scraps left from the day's scanty food. The prefatory scraping
of the coals together caused a sudden babbling of pleasure to issue from
the wall, where, suspended on a projection of rock, was one of the
curious upright cradles of the people, from which a pappoose, stiff and
perpendicular, gazed down at the culinary preparations, evidently in the
habit of participating to a limited extent in the result, having
attained some ten months of age.

The mother glanced up, and despite the tear stains about her eyes,
dimpled and laughed in response. Griefs may come and pleasures go,
nations rise and fall, the world wag on as it will, but this old joy of
mother and child, each in the other, is ever new and yet ever the same.

Resuming her occupation, the woman hesitated for a moment as she was
about to lay the meat on the coals, the half of a wood duck, fortunately
killed by an arrow, for larger game was not attainable, the wild beasts
of the country being in flight as never heretofore. The conflagration of
the towns of a whole district, the turmoils of the heady victorious
troops, hitherto held together, but now sent through the region in
separate detachments, each within reach of support, however, had
stripped the tribe of this last means of subsistence. Years and years
afterward the grim dismantled fragments of these buildings were still to
be seen, the charred walls and rafters mere skeletons against the sky,
standing, melancholy memorials of war, on the hillsides and in the
valleys, along the watercourses "transparent as glass," of that lovely
country where these pleasant homes had been.

The Indian woman doubted if the bit of fat could be spared; then poising
it in her hand under the watchful eyes of all, she flung it into the
fire, the essential burnt-offering according to their old religious
custom.

Digatiski, bowing his head still lower, once more groaned aloud. He
would not have stayed her hand,--but to hunger even for the offering to
the fire! The woman whose head was muffled had only to repeat her sobs
anew; she could not sorrow more! But the pappoose in its primitive
cradle on the wall babbled out its simple pleasure, and now and again
the tearful little mother must needs lift smiling eyes.

The great ada-wehi looked out at the night. On the whole he was glad he
was dead!

He took no bite, nor did Digatiski. The Indian men were accustomed to
long fasts in war and in hunting, and they left the trivial bits to the
women. The muffled figure of grief held out her hand blindly and munched
the share given her in the folds of her veil. Then, for tears are of no
nutritive value, she held out her hand again. Feeling it still empty,
she lifted the veil from a swollen tear-stained face to gaze aghast at
the others. They silently returned the gaze, aghast themselves, and then
all three women fell to sobbing once more. But the pappoose was crowing
convivially over a bone.

Hunger does not dispose to slumber, nor does war with the sight of a
dozen towns aflame. They slept, but in fitful starts, and the first gray
siftings of light through the desolate darkness found them all gazing
drearily at it, for what might a new day signify to them but new
dangers, fresh sorrows, and quickened fears.

A flush was presently in the east, albeit dusk lingered westward. The
wonderful crystalline white lustre of the morning star palpitated in the
amber sky, seeming the very essence of light, then gradually vanished in
a roseate haze. The black mountains grew purple, changing to a dark rich
green. The deep, cool valleys were dewy in the midst of a shadowy gray
vapor. The farthest ranges showed blue under a silver film, and suddenly
here were the rays of the sun shooting over all the world, aiming high
and far for the western hills.

And abruptly said the ada-wehi, as he still lay at length on the floor
of the niche,--

"_Skee_!" (Listen!)

Naught but the breeze of morning, delicately freighted with the breath
of balsams, the dew, the fragrance of the awakening of the wild flowers,
the indescribable matutinal freshness, the incense of a new day in June.

"_Skee_!"

Only the sound of the rippling Tennessee, so silver clear, beating and
beating against the vibrant rocks as its currents swirl round the bend
at the base of the cliff.

"_Skee_!"

The sudden fall of a fragment of rock from the face of the crag to the
ground far below!--the interval of time between the scraping dislodgment
and the impact with the clay beneath implies a proportional interval of
distance.

The conviction is the same in the mind of each. A living creature is
climbing the ascent! A bear, it may be. A great bird, an eagle, or one
of the hideous mountain vultures, very busy of late, alighting in quest
of food--which it might find in plenty elsewhere, in the track of the
invaders.

Attusah does not rely, however, on a facile hypothesis with a triumphant
enemy at hand, and a dozen towns charring to ashes in sight.

As noiseless as a shadow, as swift, Attusah is on his feet. At the back
of the great niche, so high that none could conceive that it might
afford an exit, a fissure lets in a vague dreary blur of light from
spaces beyond. Leaping high into the air, the lithe young warrior fixes
his fingers on the ledge, crumbling at first, but holding firm under a
closer grasp. The elder man, understanding the ruse as if by instinct,
lays hold of the knees of the other, held out stiff and straight below.
Then by a mighty effort Attusah lifts the double weight into the
fissure, the elder Indian aiding the manoeuvre by walking up the wall,
as it were, with his feet successively braced against it.

Outside, now and again bits of rock continued to fall, seeming to herald
a cautious approach, for after each sound a considerable interval of
silence would ensue. So long continued was this silence at last that the
three women, now alone, began to deem the alarm of an intrusion vain and
fantastic. The elder of them motioned to one of the others to look out
and terminate the painful suspense.

The young squaw, brilliant in her scarlet dress and silver tassels, the
pappoose piously quiet in his perpendicular cradle on her back, slipped
with gingerly caution to the verge of the precipice and looked down.

Nothing she saw, and in turn she was invisible from without. She wheeled
around briskly to reassure the others, and at that moment a young
soldier of the battalion of Scotch Highlanders stepped from the
horizontal ledge alongside, which he had then gained, and into the
niche, bringing up short against the pappoose, stiff and erect in its
cradle.

"Hegh, sirs!" he cried in jocular surprise, happy to find naught more
formidable, perhaps, although a brave man, for he had volunteered to
examine the source of the smoke from this precarious perch,--which had
attracted the attention of the ensign commanding a little
detachment,--despite the fact that a Cherokee in his den and brought to
bay was likely to prove a dangerous beast.

The Highlander had a piece of bread in his hand, from which he had been
recklessly munching as he had stood for a moment's breathing spell on
the horizontal ledge beside the niche before venturing to enter, for the
command had broken camp with scant allowance of time for breakfast. With
a genial laugh he thrust a morsel into the pappoose's open mouth and put
the rest in its little fingers.

Perhaps it was because of his relief to find no bigger Cherokee man
stowed away here in ambush; perhaps because he was himself hearty and
well-fed and disposed to be gracious; perhaps because he had a
whole-souled gentle nature hardly consonant with the cruel arts of war
which he practiced,--at all events he was thoughtful enough of others to
mark the ravenous look which the women cast upon the food in the child's
hand.

"Gude guide us!" he exclaimed. "This is fearfu' wark! The hellicat
hempies are half starved!"

For if Colonel Grant compassionated the plight of the savages, as he has
recorded, and shrank from the ruin wrought in the discharge of his duty
of destroying their capacities for resistance and the maintenance of
existence other than as peaceful dependents of the British colonies, the
rank and file of his command, weighted with no such responsibilities,
may well have indulged now and then a qualm of pity.

The British soldier had been ordered to halloo for help should he
encounter armed resistance, but otherwise to rest a bit at the top of
the precipice before making the effort to descend, lest he become dizzy
from fatigue and the long strain upon his faculties, and fall; the
ensign added a pointed reminder that he had no means of transportation
for "fules with brucken craigs." The opportunity was propitious. The
Highlander utilized the interval to open his haversack and dispense such
portion of its contents as he could spare. While thus engaged he was
guilty of an oversight inexcusable in a soldier: the better to handle
and divide the food, he leaned his loaded gun against the wall.

A vague shadow flickered across the niche.

The young Highlander was a fine man physically, although there was no
great beauty in his long, thin, frank, freckled face, with its
dare-devil expression and bantering blue eyes. But he was tall, heavily
muscled, clean-limbed, of an admirable symmetry, and the smartest of
smart soldiers. His kilt and plaid swung and fluttered with martial
grace in his free, alert, military gait as he stepped about the
restricted space of the cavity, bestowing his bounty on all three women.
His "bonnet cocked fu' sprash" revealed certain intimations in his
countenance of gentle nurture, no great pretensions truly, but
betokening a higher grade of man than is usually found in the rank and
file of an army. This fact resulted from the peculiar situation of the
Scotch insurgents toward government after the "Forty-Five," and the
consequent breaking up of the resources of many well-to-do middle-class
families as well as the leaders of great clans.

The Highlander hesitated after the first round of distribution, for
there would be no means of revictualing that haversack until the next
issuance of rations, and he was himself a "very valiant trencher-man."
Nevertheless their dire distress and necessity so urged his generosity
that he began his rounds anew.

Once more a shadow. Whence should a shadow fall? It flickered through
the niche.

The three women stood as mute as statues. The pappoose in its cradle on
its mother's back, its face turned ignominiously toward the wall, and
perhaps aware that something of interest in the commissariat department
was going forward, had begun to whimper in a very civilized manner, and
doubtless it was this trivial noise that deterred the young Scotchman
from hearing sounds of more moment, calculated to rouse his suspicions.
He had already added to the portions of the elder women and was
bestowing his donations upon the young mother, when suddenly the shadow
materialized and whisked past him.

It fell like a thunderbolt from above.

Bewildered, agitated, before he could turn, his gun was seized and
presented at his breast by a warrior who seemed to have fallen from the
sky. The soldier, nevertheless, instantly laid his hand on the great
basket-hilt of his claymore. Before he could draw the blade, the warrior
and the three women flung themselves upon him, their arms so closely
wound about him that his own arms were effectually pinioned to his
sides. With a violent effort he shook himself free from their grasp for
one moment; yet as the blade came glittering forth from the scabbard, a
sharp blow scientifically administered upon the wrist by the ada-wehi
almost broke the bone and sent the weapon flying from his hand and
clattering to the floor of the niche. The women had taken advantage of
the opportunity afforded by the struggle between the two men to
substitute the coils of a heavy hempen rope for the clasp of their arms,
and Attusah had only to give a final twist to the knots of their skilled
contriving, when the captive was disarmed and bound.

He had instantly bethought himself of his comrades and an appeal for
rescue, and sent forth a wild, hoarse yell, which, had it been heard,
must have apprised them of his plight. But as he had not at once given
the signal of danger agreed upon, they had naturally supposed the coast
clear, and while he rested presumably at the top of the precipice they
gave their attention to other details of their mission, firing several
houses at a little distance down the river. Therefore they would have
heard naught, even if Attusah had not precluded further efforts of his
captive to communicate with his comrades by swiftly fashioning a gag out
of the Highlander's bonnet and gloves.

Perhaps never was a brave man more dismayed and daunted. Not death
alone, but fire and torture menaced him. The shining liquid delight in
the eyes of the women reminded him of the strange fact that they were
ever the most forward in these cruel pleasures, for the ingenuity of
which the Cherokees were famous among all the tribes. Yet the
realization of his peril did not so diminish his scope of feeling as to
prevent him from inwardly upbraiding his ill-starred generosity as the
folly of a hopeless fool, more especially as the elder woman--she of the
many tears--held up the substantial gift of provisions, jeering at him
with a look in her face that did not need to be supplemented by the
scoffing of language.

"The auld randy besom!" the soldier commented within himself. "But eh, I
didna gie it to be thankit,--nae sic a fule as that comes to, neither!"

Hoping against hope, he thought that the length of his absence would
inevitably alarm the ensign for his scout's safety, when it should
attract attention, and induce the officer to send a party for his relief
and for further investigation of the precipice, whence the smoke
intimated an ambush of the enemy. This expectation had no sooner
suggested its solace and the exercise of patience in the certainty of
ultimate rescue, than the Highlander began to mark the preparations
among the Indians for a swift departure. But how? The precipice was a
sheer descent for eighty feet, the ruggedness of its face barely
affording foothold for a bird or a mountaineer; and at its base hovered
the ensign's party within striking distance. A resisting captive could
not be withdrawn by this perilous path. The soldier looked in doubt and
suspense about the restricted limits of the cavity in the great crag.
The mystery was soon solved.

The position of all had changed in the struggle, and from where Kenneth
MacVintie now stood he noted a scant suggestion of light flickering down
from a black fissure in the roof of the cavity, and instantly realized
that it must give an exit upon the mountain slope beyond. The agility
with which Attusah of Kanootare sprang up and leaped into it was
admirable to behold, but MacVintie did not believe that, although
knotted up as he was in his own plaid passed under his arms and around
his waist for the purpose, he could be lifted by the ends of the fabric
through that aperture by the strength of any one man. Naturally he
himself would make no effort to facilitate the enterprise. On the
contrary, such inertness as the sheer exercise of will could compass was
added to his dead weight. Nevertheless he rose slowly, slowly through
the air. As he was finally dragged through the rift in the rocks, his
first feeling was one of gratification to perceive that no one man could
so handle him. The feat had required the utmost exertions of two
athletic Indians pulling strenuously at the ends of the plaid passed
over a projection of rock, thus acting pulley-wise, and the good Glasgow
weave was shedding its frayed fragments through all the place by reason
of the strain it had sustained.

The next moment more serious considerations claimed his thoughts. He saw
that two men, fully armed, for Digatiski had secured ammunition for his
own gun from the cartouch-box of the soldier, could force his
withdrawal, bound as he was, farther and farther from the ensign and his
party, whose attention had been temporarily diverted from the scout's
delay in returning by signs of the enemy ambushed in another direction.

MacVintie still struggled, albeit he knew that it was vain to resist,
more especially when another Cherokee joined the party and dedicated
himself solely to the enterprise of pushing and haling the captive over
the rugged way,--often at as fair a speed as if his good will had been
enlisted in the endeavor. Now and again, however, the Highlander
contrived to throw himself prone upon the ground, thus effectually
hampering their progress and requiring the utmost exertions of all three
to lift his great frame. The patience of the Indians seemed illimitable;
again and again they performed this feat, only to renew it at the
distance of a few hundred yards.

At length the fact was divined by MacVintie. More than the ordinary fear
of capture animated Attusah of Kanootare. Colonel Grant's treatment of
his prisoners was humane as the laws of war require. Moreover, his
authority, heavily reinforced by threats of pains and penalties, had
sufficed, except in a few instances, to restrain the Chickasaw allies of
the British from wreaking their vengeance on the captive Cherokees in
the usual tribal method of fire and torture. The inference was obvious.
Attusah of Kanootare was particularly obnoxious to the British
government, the civil as well as the military authorities, and fleeing
from death himself, he intended at all hazards to prevent the escape of
his prisoner, who would give the alarm, and inaugurate pursuit from the
party of the ensign.

In this connection a new development attracted the attention of
MacVintie. As they advanced deeper and deeper into the Cherokee country
and the signs and sights of war grew remote,--no sounds of volleys nor
even distant dropping shots clanging from the echoes, no wreaths of
smoke floating among the hills, no flare of flames flinging crude red
and yellow streaks across the luminous velvet azure of distant mountains
with their silver haze, viewed through vistas of craggy chasms near at
hand,--he observed a lessening of cordiality in the manner of the other
two Indians toward the Northward Warrior, and a frequency on his part to
protest that he was a great ada-wehi, and was dead although he appeared
alive. The truth soon dawned upon the shrewd Scotchman, albeit he
understood only so much Cherokee as he had chanced to catch up in his
previous campaign in this region with Montgomerie and the present
expedition. Attusah was for some reason obnoxious to his own people as
well as to the British, and was in effect a fugitive from both factions.
Indeed, the other two Indians presently manifested a disposition to
avoid him. After much wrangling and obvious discontent and smouldering
suspicion, one lagged systematically, and, the pace being speedy,
contrived to fairly quit the party. Digatiski accompanied them two more
days, then, openly avowing his intent, fell away from the line of march.
It was instantly diverted toward the Little Tennessee River, on the
western side of the Great Smoky Mountains; and as Attusah realized that
without his connivance his captive's escape had become impossible,
MacVintie found himself unbound, ungagged, and the society of the
ada-wehi as pleasant as that of a savage ghost can well be.

There was now no effort to escape. MacVintie's obvious policy was to
await with what patience he might the appearance of the British
vanguard, who in the sheer vaunt of victory would march from one end of
the unresisting territory to the other, that all might witness and bow
before the triumph of the royal authority. As yet remote from the
advance of the troops, he dared not quit his captor in these sequestered
regions lest he fall into the power of more inimical Cherokees, maddened
by disaster, overwhelmed in ruin, furious, and thirsting for revenge for
the slaughter of their nearest and dearest, and the ashes of their
homes.

Attusah made known his reason for his own uncharacteristic leniency to a
soldier of this ruthless army, as they sat together by the shady
river-side. He went through the dumb show of repeatedly offering to his
captive guest the fish they had caught, pressing additional portions
upon him, laughing significantly and joyously throughout his mimicry.
Then suddenly grave, he seized the Highlander's left arm, giving it an
earnest grasp about the wrist, the elbow, then close to the shoulder to
intimate that he spared him for his gift to the needy and helpless.

But Kenneth MacVintie, remembering his ill-starred generosity, flushed
to the eyebrows, so little it became his record as a soldier, he
thought, that he should be captured and stand in danger of his life by
reason of the unmilitary performance of feeding a babbling pappoose.

Attusah, however, could but love him for it; he loved the soldier for
his kind heart, he said. For great as he himself was, the Northward
Warrior, he had known how bitter it was to lack kindness.

"It is not happy to be an ada-wehi!" he confessed, "for those who
believe fear those who do not!"

And tearing open the throat of his bead-embroidered shirt to reveal the
frightful gashes of the wounds in his breast, he told the story of his
legal death, with tears in his gay eyes, and a tremor of grief in the
proud intonations of his voice, that thus had been requited a feat, the
just guerdon of which should have been the warrior's crown,--in the
bestowal of which, but for a cowardly fear of the English, all the tribe
would have concurred.

"_Akee-o-hoosa!_" (I am dead!) he said, pointing at the scars. And the
Highlander felt that death had obviously been in every stroke, and
hardly wondered that they who had seen the blows dealt should now
account the appearance of the man a spectral manifestation, his unquiet
ghost.

Then, Attusah's mood changing suddenly, "_Tsida-wei-yu!_" (I am a great
ada-wehi!) he boasted airily.

That he was truly possessed of magical powers seemed to MacVintie least
to be questioned when he angled, catching the great catfish, after the
manner of the Indians, with the open palm of his hand. In these fresh
June mornings he would dive down in some deep shady pool under the dark
ledges of rock where the catfish are wont to lurk, his right arm wrapped
to the fingers with a scarlet cloth. Tempted by the seeming bait, the
catfish would take the finger-tips deep in its gullet, the strong hand
would instantly clinch on its head, and Attusah would rise with his
struggling gleaming prey, to be broiled on the coals for breakfast.

But for these finny trophies they too might have suffered for food, in
the scarcity of game and the lack of powder; but thus well fed, the two
enemies, like comrades, would loiter beside their camp-fire on the
banks, awaiting as it were the course of events. The dark green
crystalline lustre of the shady reaches of the river, where the gigantic
trees hung over the current, contrasted with the silver glister of the
ripples far out, shimmering in the full glare of the sun. The breeze,
exquisitely fragrant, would blow fresh and free from the dense forests.
The mockingbird, a feathered miracle to the Highlander, would sway on a
twig above them and sing jubilantly the whole day through and deep into
the night. The distant mountains would show-softly blue on the horizon
till the sun was going down, when they would assume a translucent
jewel-like lustre, amethystine and splendid. And at night all the stars
were in the dark sky, for the moon was new.

So idle they were they must needs talk and talk. But this was an
exercise requiring some skill and patience on the part of each, for the
Scotchman could only by the closest attention gather the meaning of the
Cherokee language as it was spoken, and the magic of the ada-wehi
compassed but scanty English. Attusah was further hampered by the
necessity of pausing now and then to spit out the words of the tongue he
abhorred as if of an evil taste. Nevertheless it was by means of this
imperfect linguistic communication that Kenneth MacVintie, keenly alive
to aught of significance in this strange new world, surrounded with
unknown unmeasured dangers, was enabled to note how the thoughts of his
companion ran upon the half king Atta-Kulla-Kulla. Yet whenever a
question was asked or curiosity suggested, the wary Attusah diverted the
topic. This fact focused the observation of the shrewd, pertinacious
Scotchman. At first he deemed the special interest lay in a jealousy of
artistic handicraft.

Atta-Kulla-Kulla's name implied the superlative of a skillful carver in
wood, Attusah told him one day.

"An' isna he a skilly man?" MacVintie asked.

"Look at that!" cried the braggart, holding aloft his own work. He was
carving a pipe from the soft stone of the region, which so lends itself
to the purpose, hardening when heated. "_Tsida-wei-yu!_"

There was a long pause while the mockingbird sang with an exuberant
magic which might baffle the emulation of any ada-wehi of them all.
MacVintie had almost forgotten the episode when Attusah said suddenly
that the colonists translated the name of Atta-Kulla-Kulla as the
"Little Carpenter."

"Hegh! they hae a ship named for his honor!" exclaimed the Highlander.
"I hae seen the Little Carpenter in the harbor in Charlestoun, swingin'
an' bobbin' at her cables, just out frae the mither country! Her
captain's name wull be Maitland."

This evidence of the importance of the Cherokee magnate in the opinion
of the British colonists did not please the ada-wehi. He spat upon the
ship with ostentatious contempt as it were, and then went on silently
with his carving.

The mockingbird paused to listen to a note from the hermit thrush in the
dense rhododendron, still splendidly abloom on the mountain slope. The
Scotchman's eyes narrowed to distinguish if the white flake of light in
the deep green water across a little bay were the reflection of the
flower known as the Chilhowee lily, or the ethereal blossom itself.

Attusah's mind seemed yet with the seagoing craft. He himself knew the
name of another ship, he said presently; and the Highlander fancied that
he ill liked to be outdone in knowledge of the outer world.

But it was immediately developed that in this ship Atta-Kulla-Kulla had
sailed to England many years before to visit King George II. in
London.[8] Attusah could not at once anglicize the name "Chochoola," but
after so long a time MacVintie was enabled to identify the Fox, then a
noted British man-of-war.

In these leisurely beguilements the days passed, until one morning
Attusah's fears and presentiments were realized in their seizure by a
party of Cherokees, who swooped down upon their hermitage and bore them
off by force to the council-house of the town of Citico, where
Atta-Kulla-Kulla and a number of other head men had assembled to discuss
the critical affairs of the tribe, and decide on its future policy.

So critical indeed was the situation that it seemed to MacVintie that
they might well dispense with notice of two factors so inconsiderable in
the scale of national importance as the ada-wehi and his captive. But
one was a British prisoner, calculated to expiate in a degree with his
life the woe and ruin his comrades had wrought. The more essential was
this course since the triumph of putting him to the torture and death
would gratify and reanimate many whose zeal was flagging under an
accumulation of anguish and helpless defeat, and stimulate them to
renewed exertions. For before the Cherokees would sue for peace they
waited long in the hope that the French would yet be enabled to convey
to them a sufficient supply of powder to renew and prosecute the war.

As to the arrest of the other, Attusah of Kanootare, this was necessary
in the event that submission to the British government became
inevitable. For since he claimed to be a ghost, surely never was spectre
so reckless. He had indeed appeared to so many favored individuals that
the English might fairly have cause to doubt his execution in
satisfaction of his crimes against the government; and the breach of
faith on the part of the Cherokee rulers in this conspicuous instance
might well preclude the granting of any reasonable terms of peace now,
and subject the whole nation to added hardship.

This was the argument advanced by Atta-Kulla-Kulla as he stood and
addressed his colleagues, who sat on buffalo-skins in a circle on the
floor of the council-house of Citico,--the usual dome-shaped edifice,
daubed within and without with the rich red clay of the country, and
situated on a high artificial mound in the centre of the town.

The council-fire alone gave light, flashing upon the slender figure and
animated face of this chief, who, although of slighter physique and
lower stature than his compeers, wielded by reason of his more
intellectual qualities so potent an influence among them.

The oratorical gifts of Atta-Kulla-Kulla had signally impressed
Europeans of culture and experience.[9] Imagine, then, the effect on the
raw young Highland soldier, hearing the flow of language, watching the
appropriate and forceful gestures, noting the responsive sentiment in
the fire-lit countenances of the circle of feather-crested Indians, yet
comprehending little save that it was a masterpiece of cogent reasoning,
richly eloquent, and that every word was as a fagot to the flames and a
pang to the torture.

Attusah of Kanootare, the Northward Warrior, rose to reply in defense of
himself and his captive, and Atta-Kulla-Kulla listened as courteously as
the rest, although the speech of the ada-wehi depended, like the oratory
of many young men, chiefly on a magical assurance. He had an ally,
however, in the dominant superstition of the Cherokees. Numbers of the
warriors now ascribed their recent disasters to the neglect of various
omens, or the omission of certain propitiatory observances of their
ancient religion, or the perpetration of deeds known to be adversely
regarded by the ruling spirits of war.

Moreover, they were all aware that this man had been killed, left for
dead, reported as dead to the British government, which accepted the
satisfaction thus offered for his crimes,--the deeds themselves,
however, accounted by him and the rest of the tribe praiseworthy and the
achievements of war.

And here he was protesting that he was dead and a ghost. "_Akee-o-hoosa!
Akee-o-hoosa! Tsida-wei-yu!_" he cried continually.

Indeed, this seemed to be the only reasonable method of accounting for
the renewed presence in the world of a man known to be dead. This was
his status, he argued. He was a dead man, and this was his captive. The
Cherokee nation could not pretend to follow with its control the actions
of a dead man. They themselves had pronounced him dead. He had no place
in the war. He had been forbidden, on account of his official death, to
compete for the honors of the campaign. Apart from his former status as
a Cherokee, merely as a supernatural being, a spirit, an ada-wehi, he
had captured this British soldier, who was therefore the property of a
dead man. And the Cherokee law of all things and before all things
forbade interference with the effects of the dead.

Despite the curling contempt on the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council
did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered
the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the
details of this choice argument. There was an illogical inversion of
values in the experience of the tribe, and while they could not now
accept the worthless figments of long ago, it was not vouchsafed to them
to enjoy the substantial merits of the new order of things. Reason,
powder, diplomacy, had brought the Cherokee nation to a point of
humiliation to which superstition, savagery, and the simplicities of the
tomahawk had never descended in "the good old times." Reason was never
so befuddled of aspect, civilization never so undesired as now. In their
own expanded outlook at life, however, they could not afford to ignore
the views of Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the advocate of all the newer methods, in
so important a matter as the release of a British prisoner of war on the
strange pretext that his captor was a ghost of a peculiar spectral
power, an ada-wehi, although this course would have been more agreeable
to the "old beloved" theories of their halcyon days of eld, when the
Cherokee name was a terror and a threat.

Therefore, averse as they were to subscribe to the modern methods which
had wrought them such woe and humiliation and defeat, the dominant
superstition of the race now fell far short of the fantasy of liberating
a British prisoner at this crisis under the influence of any spectral
manifestation whatsoever. The council was obviously steeled against this
proposition, as MacVintie shortly perceived, and equally determined that
the ada-wehi must needs exert phenomenal and magical powers indeed to
avoid yet making good the nation's pledge of his death to the British
government, and becoming a ghost in serious earnest. MacVintie's heart
sank within him as he noted the hardening of the lines of their grave
harsh faces and the affirmative nodding of the feather-crested heads,
conferring together, as the decision was reached.

It accorded, however, with their ancient custom to postpone over a night
the execution of any sentence of special weight, and therefore the
council adjourned to the next day, the two prisoners being left in the
deserted building, each securely bound with a rope to a pillar of the
series which upheld the roof of the strange circular edifice. This
colonnade stood about four feet from the wall, and the interval between
was occupied by a divan, fashioned of dexterously woven cane, extending
around the room; and as the prisoners could seat themselves here, or lie
at full length, they were subjected to no greater hardship than was
consistent with their safe custody.

A sentinel with his musket on his shoulder stood at the door, and the
sun was going down. Kenneth MacVintie could see through the open portal
the red glow in the waters of the Tennessee River. Now and then a flake
of a glittering white density glided through it, which his eyes,
accustomed to long distances, discriminated as a swan. Thunder-heads,
however, were gathering above the eastern slopes and the mountains were
a lowering slate-toned purple, save when a sudden flash of lightning
roused them to a vivid show of green.

The dull red hue of the interior of the council-house darkened
gradually; the embers of the council-fire faded into the gray ash, and
the night came sullen and threatening before its time.

The young Highlander sought to bend his mind to the realization that his
days on earth were well-nigh ended, and that it behooved him to think on
the morrow elsewhere. He had an old-fashioned religious faith presumed
to be fitted for any emergency, but in seeking to recall its dogmas and
find such consolation in its theories as might sustain a martyr at the
stake, he was continually distracted with the momentous present.

The two prisoners could no longer see each other, and the little
gestures and significant glances which had supplemented their few words,
and made up for the lack of better conversational facilities were
impracticable in the darkness.

The silent obscurity was strangely lonely. MacVintie began to doubt if
the other still lived.

"Attusah!" he said at length.

"_Tsida-wei-yu!_" (I am a great ada-wehi) murmured the ghost
mechanically.

He was quite spent, exhausted by the effort to logically exist as a
ghost in a world which had repudiated him as a live man.

MacVintie, who found it hard enough to reconcile himself to die once,
felt a poignant sympathy for him, who must needs die again. But the
Highlander could not think. He could not even pray. He desisted from the
fitful effort after a time. He had a depressing realization that a good
soldier relies upon the proficiency acquired by the daily drill to serve
in an emergency, not a special effort at smartness for an occasion. The
battle or the review would show the quality of the stuff that was in
him.

Despite the stunned despair which possessed his mental faculties, his
physical senses were keenly acute. He marked unconsciously the details
of the rising of the wind bringing the storm hitherward. A searching
flash of lightning showed the figure of the sentinel, half crouching
before the blast, at his post in the open portal. The rain was presently
falling heavily, and ever and anon a great suffusion of yellow glare in
its midst revealed the myriads of slanting lines as it came. He inhaled
the freshened fragrance it brought from the forests. He noted the
repeated crash of the thunder, the far-away rote of the echoes, the
rhythmic beat of the torrents on the ground, and their tumultuous swift
dash down the slope of the dome-shaped roof, and suddenly among these
turmoils,--he could hardly believe his ears,--a mild little whimper of
protest.

The sentinel heard it too. MacVintie saw his dark figure in the doorway
as he turned his head to listen. A woman's voice sounded immediately,
bidding a child beware how he cried, lest she call the great white owl,
the Oo-koo-ne-kah, to catch him!

The flare of the lightning revealed a pappoose the next moment, upright
in his perpendicular cradle, as it swung on his mother's back, in the
drenching downpour of the rain, for the woman had advanced to the
sentinel and was talking loudly and eagerly.

Kenneth silently recognized the small creature who had moved him to a
trivial charity which had resulted in so strangely disproportionate a
disaster. Doubtless, however, the squaws would never have been able to
return to their accustomed place but for the food which he had given
them, sustaining them on the journey home.

It would imply some mission of importance surely, he thought, to induce
the woman to expose the child to a tempest like this; and indeed the
pappoose, buffeted by the wind, the rain full in his face, lifted up his
voice again in a protest so loud and vehement that his mother was
enabled to see the great white owl, whose business it is to remove
troublesome little Cherokees from the sphere of worry of their elders,
already winging his way hither. One might wonder if the Oo-koo-ne-kah
would do worse for him than his maternal guardian, but pelted by the
pitiless rain he promptly sank his bleatings to a mere babble of a
whimper. Thereby Kenneth was better enabled to hear what the woman was
saying to the sentinel.

An important mission indeed, as MacVintie presently gathered, for she
must needs lift her voice stridently to be heard above the din of the
elements. Some powder, only a little it was true, had been sent by the
French to the town, and a share had been left at the house of the
sentinel that night in the general distribution. But there was no one at
home. All his family were across the mountains, whither, according to
the custom of the Cherokees, they had gone to find and bring back the
body of his brother, who had been killed in the fight at Etchoee. And
the leak in the roof! She, his nearest neighbor, had just bethought
herself of the leak in the roof! Would not the powder, the precious
powder, be ruined? Had he not best go to see at once about it?

He hesitated, letting the butt of his gun sink to the ground. She seized
the weapon promptly. She would stand guard here till he returned, she
promised. The prisoners were bound. They could not move. It would
require but an instant's absence,--and the powder was so scarce, so
precious!

The next moment the sentinel was gone! The darkness descended, doubly
intense, after a succession of electric flashes; the rain fell with
renewed force. MacVintie suddenly heard the babbling whimper quite close
beside him, somewhat subdued by a fierce maternal admonition to listen
to the terrible voice of the Oo-koo-ne-kah, coming to catch a Cherokee
cry-baby!

A stroke of a knife here and there, and the two prisoners were freed
from their bonds. The Highland soldier did not know whether Attusah
looked back while in flight, but his last glimpse of the Cherokee town
of Citico showed the broad glare of lightning upon the groups of conical
roofs in the slanting lines of rain; the woman on the high mound at the
portal of the council-house, with the pappoose on her back and the gun
in her hand; the sentinel once more climbing the ascent to his post. And
the last words he heard were chronicling the adverse sentiments
entertained toward bad children by the Oo-koo-ne-kah, the mysterious
great white owl.

The escape was not discovered till the next day, and was universally
attributed to the magic of the ada-wehi. Even the sentinel himself
doubted naught, having left a trusty deputy in his stead, for the
devotion of the Cherokee women to the tribal cause was proverbial, and
gratitude, even for a rescue from starvation, is not usually an urgent
motive power.

Kenneth MacVintie was seen again in the Cherokee country only in his
place as a marker in the march of his regiment, and as he was evidently
exceedingly desirous to permit no one to incur penalties for his
liberation, his officers spared him questions concerning his escape,
save in a general way.

When the ada-wehi next reappeared in a remote town of the district and
was sedulously interrogated as to how his freedom had been achieved, he
threw out his right hand at arm's length in his old, boastful, airy
gesture.

"_Cheesto kaiere!_" (An old rabbit!) he exclaimed. "A little old rabbit
ran down the slope. I turned the soldier into a rabbit, and he ran away.
And I turned myself into a fish, and I swam away. Ha! _Tsida-wei-yu!_"
(I am a great ada-wehi!)




THE FATE OF THE CHEERA-TAGHE


Along the old "trading-path" that was wont to wind from the Cherokee
country among the innumerable spurs and gorges of the Great Smoky
Mountains, and through the dense primeval forests full five hundred
miles to the city of Charlestown, was visible for many years, on the
banks of the Little Tennessee, an "old waste town," as the abandoned
place was called in the idiom of the Indians. An early date it might
seem, in 1744, in this new land, for the spectacle of the ruins of a
race still in possession, still unsubdued. Nearly twenty years later,
after the repeated aggressive expeditions which the British government
sent against the Cherokees, such vestiges became more numerous. This
"waste town," however, neither fire nor sword had desolated, and the
grim deeds of British powder and lead were still of the future. The
enemy came in more subtle sort.

Only one of the white pack-men employed to drive a score of well-laden
horses semi-annually from Charlestown to a trading-station farther along
on the Great Tennessee--then called the Cherokee River--and back again
used to glower fearfully at the "waste town" as he passed. He had ample
leisure for speculation, for the experienced animals of the pack-train
required scant heed, so regularly they swung along in single file, and
the wild whoops of their drivers were for the sake of personal
encouragement and the simple joy which very young men find in their own
clamor. It grew specially boisterous always when they neared the site of
Nilaque Great, the deserted place, as if to give warning to any vague
spiritual essences, unmeet for mortal vision, that might be lurking
about the "waste town," and bid them avaunt, for the place was reputed
haunted.

The rest of the Carolina pack-men, trooping noisily past, averted their
eyes from the darkened doors of the empty houses; the weed-grown spaces
of the "beloved square," where once the ceremonies of state, the
religious rites, the public games and dances were held; the
council-house on its high mound, whence had been wont to issue the bland
vapors of the pipe of peace or the far more significant smoke emitted
from the cheera, the "sacred fire," which only the cheera-taghe, the
fire-prophets,[10] were permitted to kindle, and which was done with
pomp and ceremony in the new year, when every spark of the last year's
fire had been suffered to die out.

Cuthbert Barnett, however, always looked to see what he might,--perhaps
because he was a trifle bolder than the other stalwart pack-men, all
riding armed to the teeth to guard the goods of the train from robbery
as well as their own lives from treachery, for although the Cherokees
professed friendship it was but half-hearted, as they loved the French
always better than the English; perhaps because he had a touch of
imagination that coerced his furtive glance; perhaps because he doubted
more, or believed less, of the traditions of the day. And he
saw--silence! the sunset in vacant spaces, with long, slanting,
melancholy rays among the scattered houses of the hamlet; an empty
doorway, here and there; a falling rotting roof; futile traces of
vanished homes. Once a deer and fawn were grazing in the weed-grown
fields that used to stand so thick with corn that they laughed and sung;
once--it was close upon winter--he heard a bear humming and humming his
content (the hunters called the sound "singing") from the den where the
animal had bestowed himself among the fallen logs of a dwelling-house,
half covered with great drifts of dead leaves; often an owl would cry
out in alarm from some dark nook as the pack-train clattered past; and
once a wolf with a stealthy and sinister tread was patrolling the
"beloved square." These were but the natural incidents of the time and
the ruins of the old Cherokee town.

Little did Cuddy Barnett imagine, as he gazed on the deserted and
desolate place, that he was yet to behold the smoke of the "sacred fire"
flaring up into the blue sky from the portal of the temple, as the
cheera-taghe would issue bearing the flame aloft, newly kindled in the
opening year, and calling upon many assembled people to light therefrom
their hearths, rekindling good resolutions and religious fervor for the
future, and letting the faults of the unavailing past die out with the
old year's fire; that he was to mark the clash of arms in the "beloved
square," once more populous with the alert figures of warriors in
martial array, making ready for the war-path; that he was to hear the
joyful religious songs of greeting to the dawn, and the sonorous
trumpeting of the conch-shells, as the vanished Indians of the "old
waste town" would troop down at daybreak into the water of that bright
stream where long ago they had been wont to plunge in their mystic
religious ablutions. All this, however, the pack-men might see and hear,
to believe the tradition of the day, in camping but a single night near
the old "waste town."

And so anxious were these gay itinerant companies to see and hear
nothing of such ghostly sort that whatever the stress of the weather,
the mischances of the journey, the condition of the pack-animals, this
vicinity was always distinguished by the longest day's travel of the
whole route, and the camp was pitched at the extreme limit of the
endurance of man and horse to compass distance from Nilaque Great. For
believe what one might, the fact remained indisputable, that a decade
earlier, when the place was inhabited, strange sounds were rife about
the locality, the "sacred fire" was unkindled on the great "Sanctified
Day," the two cheera-taghe of the town mysteriously disappeared, and
their fate had remained a dark riddle.

One of these men, Oo-koo-koo, was well known in Charlestown. Both were
of influence in the tribe, but often he had been specially chosen as one
of the delegations of warriors and "beloved men" sent to wait in
diplomatic conference on the Governor of South Carolina, to complain of
injustice in the dealings of the licensed traders or the encroachments
of the frontier settlers, or to crave the extension of some privilege of
the treaty which the Cherokee tribe had lately made with the British
government.

Two white men, who had become conspicuous in a short stay in the town of
Nilaque Great, disappeared simultaneously, and the suspicion of foul
dealing on their part against the cheera-taghe, which the Cherokee
nation seemed disposed to entertain, threatened at one time the peace
that was so precious to the "infant settlements," as the small, remote,
stockaded stations of the Carolina frontiersmen were tenderly called.

Therefore the Governor of South Carolina, now a royal province,--the
event occurred during the incumbency of Robert Johnson, who having acted
in that capacity for the Lords Proprietors, well understood the menace
of the situation,--busied himself with extreme diligence to discover the
subsequent movements of the two white men, whose names were Terence
O'Kimmon and Adrien L'Epine, in order to ascertain the fate of the
cheera-taghe, and if evilly entreated, to bring the perpetrators of the
deed to justice.

With a long, unguarded, open frontier such as his province presented to
the incursions of the warlike and fierce Cherokees, who, despite their
depopulating wars with other tribes, could still bring to the field six
thousand braves from their sixty-four towns, the inhabitants of which
were estimated at twenty thousand souls, he was by no means disposed to
delay or to indulge doubts or to foster compatriot commiseration in
meting out the penalty of the malefactors. The united militia of South
Carolina and Georgia at this time numbered but thirty-five hundred rank
and file, these colonies being so destitute of white men for the common
defense that a memorial addressed to his majesty King George II. a
little earlier than this event, bearing date April 9, 1734, pathetically
states that "money itself cannot here raise a sufficient body of them."
The search for the suspects, however, although long, exhaustive, and of
such diligence as to convince the Indians of its sincerity of purpose,
resulted fruitlessly. The government presently took occasion to made
some valuable presents to the tribe, not as indemnity, for it could
recognize no responsibility in the strange disaster, but for the sake of
seeming to comply with the form of offering satisfaction for the loss,
which otherwise the Indians would retaliate with massacre.

Nilaque Great with this cloud upon it grew dreary. The strange
disappearance of its cheera-taghe was canvassed again and again,
reaching no surmise of the truth. Speculations, futile as they were
continuous, began to be reinforced with reminiscences of the date of the
event, and certain episodes became strangely significant now, although
hardly remarked at the time; people remembered unexplained and curious
noises that had sounded like muffled thunder in the deep midnight, and
again, scarcely noted, in the broad daylight. The "sacred fire" remained
unkindled, and sundry misfortunes were attributed to this unprecedented
neglect; an expert warrior, young and notably deft-handed, awkwardly
shot himself with his own gun; the crops, cut short by a late and
long-continued drought, were so meagre as to be hardly worth the
harvesting; the days appointed for the annual feasts and thanksgiving
were like days of mourning; discontents waxed and grew strong.
Superstitious terrors became rife, and at length it was known at
Charlestown that the Cherokees of Nilaque Great had settled a new place
farther down upon the river, for at the old town the vanished
cheera-taghe were abroad in the spirit, pervading the "beloved square"
at night with cries of "_A-kee-o-hoo-sa! A-kee-o-hoo-sa!_" (I am dead! I
am dead!) clamoring for their graves and the honors of sepulture due to
them and denied. And this was a grief to the head men of the town, for
of all tribes the Cherokees loved and revered their dead. Thus when
other cheera-taghe kindled for the municipality the "sacred fire" for a
new year it was distributed to hearths far away, and Nilaque Great,
deserted and depopulated, had become a "waste town."

A fair place it had been in its prime, and so it had seemed one
afternoon in June, 1734, when for the first time the two white strangers
had entered it. Mountains more splendid than those which rose about it
on every hand it would be difficult to imagine. The dense, rich woods
reach in undiminished vigor along the slopes covering them at a height
of six thousand feet, till the "tree line" interposes; thence the great
bare domes lift their stately proportions among the clouds. Along these
lofty perspectives the varying distance affords the vision a vast array
of gradations of color,--green in a thousand shades, and bronze, and
purple, and blue,--blue growing ever fainter and more remote till it is
but an illusion of azure, and one may believe that the summits seen
through a gap to the northeast are sheer necromancy of the facile
horizon.

In the deep verdant cove below, groups of the giant trees common to the
region towered above the stanchly constructed cabins that formed the
homes of the Indians, for the Cherokees, detesting labor and experts in
procrastination, builded well and wisely that they might not be forced
to rebuild, and many of the distinctive features of the stout frontier
architecture were borrowed by the pioneers from aboriginal example. Out
beyond the shadows were broad stretches of fields with the lush June in
the wide and shining blade and the flaunting tassel. The voices of women
and young girls came cheerily from the breezy midst as they tilled the
ground, where flourished in their proper divisions the three varieties
of maize known to Indian culture, "the six weeks' corn, the hominy corn,
and the bread corn." A shoal of canoes skimmed down the river, each with
its darting shadow upon that lucent current and seeming as native, as
indigenous to the place as the minnows in a crystal brown pool there by
the waterside--each too with its swift javelin-like motion and a darting
shadow. Sundry open doors here and there showed glimpses of passing
figures within, but the arrival of the strangers was unnoticed till some
children playing beside the river caught sight of the unaccustomed
faces. With a shrill cry of discovery, they sped across the square,
agitated half by fright and half by the gusto of novelty. In another
moment there were two score armed men in the square.

"Now hould yer tongue still, an' I'll do the talkin'," said one of the
white adventurers to the other, speaking peremptorily, but with a suave
and delusive smile. "If yez weren't Frinch ye'd be a beautiful
Englishman; but I hev got the advantage of ye in that, an' faix I'll
kape it."

He was evidently of a breeding inferior to that of his companion, but he
had so sturdy and swinging a gait, so stalwart and goodly a build, so
engaging a manner, and so florid a smile, that the very sight of him was
disarming, despite the patent crafty deceit in his face. It seemed as if
it could not be very deep or guileful, it was so frankly expressed. It
was suggestive of the roguish machinations of a child. He had twinkling
brown eyes, and reddish hair, plaited in a club and tied with a thong of
leather. His features were blunt, but his red, well-shaped lips parted
in a ready, reassuring smile, and showed teeth as even and white as the
early corn. Both men were arrayed in the buckskin shirt and leggings
generally worn by the frontiersmen, but the face of the other had a
certain incongruity with his friend's, and was more difficult to
decipher. It looked good,--not kind, but true. It had severe pragmatic
lines about the mouth, and the lips were thin and somewhat fixedly set.
His eyes were dark, serious, and very intent, as if he could argue and
protest very earnestly on matters of no weight. He would in a question
of theory go very far if set on the wrong line, and just as far on the
right. The direction was the matter of great moment, and this seemed now
in the hands of the haphazard but scheming Irishman.

"If it plaze yer honor," said O'Kimmon in English, taking off his
coonskin cap with a lavish flourish as a tall and stately Indian hastily
garbed in fine raiment of the aboriginal type, a conspicuous article of
which was a long feather-wrought mantle, both brilliant and delicate of
effect, detached himself from the group and came forward, "I can't spake
yer illigant language,--me eddication bein' that backward,--but I kin
spake me own so eloquent that it would make a gate-post prick up the
ears of understanding. We've come to visit yez, sor."

The smile which the Hibernian bent upon the savage was of a honeyed
sweetness, but the heart of his companion sank as he suddenly noted the
keen, intuitive power of comprehension expressed in the face of the old
Indian. Here was craft too, but of a different quality, masked, potent,
impossible to divine, to measure, to thwart. The sage Oo-koo-koo stood
motionless, his eyes narrowing, his long, flat, cruel mouth compressed
as with a keen scrutiny he marked all the characteristics of the
strangers,--first of one, then deliberately of the other. A war captain
(his flighty name was Watatuga, the Dragon-fly, although he looked with
his high nose and eagle glance more like a bird of prey), assuming
precedence of the others, pressed up beside the prophet, and the
challenge of his eyes and the contempt that dilated his nostrils might
have seemed more formidable of intent than the lacerating gaze of the
cheera-taghe, except that to an Irishman there is always a subtle joy
even in the abstract idea of fight. The rest of the braves, with their
alert, high-featured cast of countenance, inimical, threatening,
clustered about, intent, doubtful, listening.

Adrien L'Epine had his secret doubts as to the efficacy of the bold,
blunt, humorous impudence which Terence O'Kimmon fancied such masterful
policy,--taking now special joy in the fact that its meaning was
partially veiled because of the presumable limitations of the Indian's
comprehension of the English language. The more delicate nurture that
L'Epine obviously had known revolted at times from this unkempt
brusquerie, although he had a strong pulse of sympathy with the wild,
lawless disregard of conventional standards which characterized much of
the frontier life. He feared, too, that O'Kimmon underrated the extent
of the Cherokee's comprehension of the language of which, however, the
Indians generally spoke only a few disconnected phrases. So practiced
were the savages in all the arts of pantomime, in the interpretation of
facial expression and the intonation of the voice, that L'Epine had
known in his varied wanderings of instances of tribes in conference,
each ignorant of the other's language, who nevertheless reached a
definite and intricate mutual understanding without the services of an
interpreter. L'Epine felt entrapped, regretful, and wished to recede. He
winced palpably as O'Kimmon's rich Irish voice, full of words, struck
once more upon the air.

"Me godson, the Governor o' South Carolina," Terence O'Kimmon resumed,
lying quite recklessly, "sint his humble respects,--an' he's that swate
upon yez that he licks his fingers ter even sphake yer name! (Pity I
furgits ut, bein' I never knew ut!)"

Although possessing an assurance that he could get the better of the
devil, "could he but identify him," as O'Kimmon frequently said, he felt
for one moment as if he were now in the presence. Despite his nerve the
silence terrified him. He was beginning to cringe before the steady
glare of those searching eyes. It was even as a refreshment of spirit to
note a sudden bovine snort of rage from the lightsome Dragon-fly, as if
he could ill bridle his inimical excitement.

The adventurers had not anticipated a reception of this sort, for the
hospitality of the Indians was proverbial. Credentials surely were not
necessary in the social circles of the Cherokees, and two men to six
thousand offered no foundation for fear. O'Kimmon had such confidence in
his own propitiating wiles and crafty policy that he did not realize how
his genial deceit was emblazoned upon his face, how blatant it was in
his voice. But for its challenging duplicity there would hardly have
arisen a suggestion of suspicion. Many men on various errands easily
found their way into the Indian tribes when at peace with the British,
and suffered no injury. Nevertheless as the wise Oo-koo-koo looked at
O'Kimmon thus steadily, with so discerning a gaze, the Irishman felt
each red hair of his scalp rise obtrusively into notice, as if to
suggest the instant taking of it. He instinctively put on his coonskin
cap again to hold his scalp down, as he said afterward.

"Why come?" Oo-koo-koo demanded sternly.

"Tell the truth, for God's sake!" L'Epine adjured O'Kimmon in a low
voice.

"I'm not used to it! 'T would give me me death o' cold!" quavered the
Irishman, in sad sincerity, at a grievous loss.

"_Asgaya uneka_ (White man), but no Ingliss," said the astute Indian,
touching the breast of each with the bowl of his pipe, still in his hand
and still alight as it was when the interruption of their advent had
occurred.

"No, by the powers,--not English!" exclaimed the Irishman impulsively,
seeing he was already discovered. "I'm me own glorious nation!--the
pride o' the worruld,--I was born in the Emerald Isle, the gem o' the
say! I'm an Oirishman from the tip o' me scalp--in the name o' pity
_why_ should I mintion the contrivance" (dropping his voice to an
appalled muffled tone)--"may the saints purtect ut! But surely, Mister
Injun, I've no part nor lot with the bloody bastes o' Englishers either
over the say or in the provinces. If I were the brother-in-law o' the
Governor o' South Carolina I'd hev a divorce from the murtherin'
Englisher before he could cry, 'Quarter!'"

Oo-koo-koo, the wise Owl, made no direct answer.

"_Asgaya uneka_ (White man), but no Ingliss," he only said, now
indicating L'Epine.

"Frinch in the mornin', plaze yer worship, an' only a bit o' English
late in the afternoon o' the day," cried O'Kimmon, officiously, himself
once more.

"French father, English mother," explained L'Epine, feeling that the
Indian was hardly a safe subject for the pleasantries of conundrums.

"But his mother was but a wee bit of a woman," urged O'Kimmon; "the most
of him is Frinch,--look at the size of him!"

For O'Kimmon was now bidding as high against the English aegis as
earlier he had been disposed to claim its protection, when he had
protested his familiarity with the Royal Governor of South Carolina. In
an instant he was once more gay, impudent, confident of carrying
everything before him. He divined that some recent friction had
supervened in the ever-clashing interests subsisting between the
Cherokee nation and the British government, and was relying on the
recurrent inclination of this tribe to fraternize with the French. Their
influence from their increasing western settlements was exerted
antagonistically to the British colonists, by whom it was dreaded in
anticipation of the war against a French and Cherokee alliance which
came later. Oo-koo-koo, complacent in his own sagacity in having
detected a difference in the speech of the new-comers from the English
which he had been accustomed to hear in Charlestown, and animated by a
wish to believe, hearkened with the more credulity to an expansive
fiction detailed by the specious Irishman as to their mission here.

They were awaiting the coming of certain pettiaugres from New
Orleans,--a long journey by way of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the
Cherokee, and the Tennessee rivers,--with a cargo of French goods
cheaper than the English. They designed to establish a trading-post at
some convenient point, out of reach of the grasping British, and thus to
compete with the monopoly of the Cherokee commerce which the English
government sought to foster. And then, to furnish a leaven of truth to
this mass of lies, he detailed, with such a relish as only an Irishman
can feel in a happy incongruity, that the French, having no market in
old France for deerskins, the chief commodity of barter that the Indians
possessed, disposed of them to ships of the British colonies, from New
York and elsewhere, lured thus to New Orleans, in exchange for English
cloths and other British manufactures, which the French then
surreptitiously furnished to the Indians of the British alliance,
underselling them on every hand.

"The intellects of the Frinch are so handsome!" cried O'Kimmon, the
tears of delighted laughter in his eyes. "Faix, that is what makes 'em
so close kin to the Oirish!"

Albeit the Cherokee treaty with the British forbade the Indians to trade
with white men of any other nationality than the English, these
professed aliens were promised protection and concealment from the
British government, and the pretext of their mission served to
countenance their lingering stay.

Soon their presence seemed a matter of course. The Indians had recurred
to their methods of suave hospitality. The two strangers encountered
only friendly looks and words, while affecting to gratify curiosity by
peering into all the unaccustomed habitudes,--the preparation of food,
the manufacture of deerskin garments, the care of the sick, the modeling
of bowls and jars of clay, in which the Cherokees were notably expert as
well as in the weaving of feather-wrought fabrics and baskets, the
athletic games, the horse-races, the continual dances and pantomimic
plays,--and were presently domiciled as it were in the tribe. Of so
little note did they soon become that when they gradually ceased these
manifestations of interest, as if familiarity had sated their curiosity,
it seemed to occasion no comment. They were obviously free to rove, to
stay, to live their lives as they would without interference or
surveillance.

Nevertheless, they still maintained the utmost caution. Sometimes,
idleness being no phenomenon, they would lie half the day in the shade
on the river-bank. The Tennessee was shrunken now in the heated season,
and great gravelly slopes were exposed. The two loiterers were
apparently motionless at first, but as their confidence increased and
the chances of being observed lessened, L'Epine, always dreading
discovery, began to casually pass the gravel and sand through his
fingers as he lay; sometimes he idly trifled with the blade of a hoe in
a shallow pool left by the receding waters, while the jolly Irishman,
now grave and solicitous, watched him breathlessly. Then L'Epine would
shake his head, and the mercurial O'Kimmon groaned his deep despondency.

Once the Frenchman's head was not shaken. A flush sprang up among the
pragmatic lines of L'Epine's face; his dark eyes glittered; his hand
shook; for as he held out the hoe, on its blade were vaguely glimmering
particles among the sand.

Later the two adventurers cherished a small nugget of red, red gold!

This find chanced below a bluff in a sort of grotto of rock, which the
water filled when the river was high, and left quite dry and exposed as
it receded in the droughts of summer.

Whether the two strangers were too much and too long out of sight;
whether attention was attracted by certain perforated dippers or pans
which they now brought into assiduous use, but which they sought to
conceal; whether they had been all the time furtively watched, with a
suspicion never abated, one can hardly say. They had observed every
precaution of secrecy that the most zealous heed could suggest. Only one
worked with the pan while the other lay motionless and idle, and
vigilantly watched and listened for any stealthy sign of approach. They
fully realized the jealousy of the Indians concerning the mineral wealth
of their territory, lest its discovery bring hordes of the craving white
people to dispossess them. This prophetic terror was later fulfilled in
the Ayrate division of the tribe, but to the northward, along the
Tennessee River, they sedulously guarded this knowledge. Traditions
there are to the present day in the Great Smoky Mountains concerning
mines of silver and lead, and of localities rich in auriferous gravel
which are approximately ascertained, but which the Cherokees knew
accurately and worked as far as they listed;--they carried their secret
with them to the grave or the far west.

The exploration of L'Epine and O'Kimmon of necessity was conducted
chiefly by day, but one night the prospectors could not be still, the
moon on the sand was so bright!

The time which they had fixed for a silent, secret departure was drawing
near. Their bags were almost filled, but they lingered for a little
more, and covetously a little more still. And this night, this memorable
night, the moon on the sand was as bright as day!

The light slanted across the Tennessee River and shimmered in the
ripples. One could see, if one would, the stately lines of dark summits
along a far horizon. A mockingbird was singing from out the boscage of
the laurel near at hand, and the night wind was astir. And suddenly the
two gold-washers in the depths of the grotto became conscious that they
were not alone.

There, sitting like stone figures one on each side of the narrow portal,
were the two cheera-taghe of the town, silent, motionless, watching with
eyes how long alert, listening with ears how discerningly attentive, it
is impossible to divine.

The gold-washers sprang to their feet, each instinctively grasping for
his weapon, but alack, neither was armed! The pan had come to seem the
most potent of accoutrements, with which, in good sooth, one might take
the world by storm, and the rifle and knife were forgotten, in their
absorption. Doubtless the Cherokees interpreted aright the gesture, so
significant, so obvious to their methods of life. Both the cheera-taghe
were armed with pistol as well as tomahawk and scalping-knife.

Perhaps because of this they felt secure, at leisure, acquiescently
allowing the event to develop as it needs must,--or perhaps realizing
the significance of the discovery to the young strangers, their
palpitant eagerness to gauge its result, their dread of reprisal, of
forced renunciation of their booty, the Indians permitted themselves a
relish of the torture of an enemy on a more aesthetic scheme than their
wont.

The two cheera-taghe, the shadow of their feather-crested heads in the
moonlight on the sand of the grotto almost as distinct as the reality,
spoke suddenly to each other, and the discomfited gold-seekers, who had
learned to comprehend to a certain extent the language, perceived with
dismay the sarcasm that lengthened their suspense. For it was thus that
the rulers among the Cherokees rebuked their own young people, not
upbraiding them with their misdeeds, but with gentle satire
complimenting them for that in which they had notably failed.

"A reward for hospitality we find in these young men," said one, whose
voice was hoarse and croaking and guttural and who was called Kanoona
(the Bull-frog).

"Strangers to us, yet they requite us, for we treated them as our own,"
said Oo-koo-koo.

"They treat us as _their own!_" the croaking, satiric, half-smothered
laughter of this response intimated an aside. Then Kanoona in full voice
went on, "Open and frank as the day, they keep no secrets from us!"

"They are honest! They rob us not of the yellow stone which the Carolina
people think so precious!" rejoined Oo-koo-koo, while O'Kimmon and
L'Epine looked from one to the other as the cheera-taghe sustained this
fugue of satiric accusation.

"Not they," croaked the responsive voice, "for behold, we have long time
fed and lodged them and given them of our best. We have believed them
and trusted them. We have befriended them and loved them."

"And they have befriended and loved us!" said Oo-koo-koo.

Then silence. The river sang, but only a murmurous rune; the mute
moonlight lay still on the mountains; the wind had sunk, and the
motionless leaves glistened as the dew fell; a nighthawk swept past the
portal of the grotto with the noiseless wing of its kind.

"Had they desired to explore our land they would have asked our
consent," the croaking voice of Kanoona resumed the antiphonal reproach.
"They would not have brought upon us the hordes of British colonists,
who would fain drive us from our habitations for their greed of the
yellow stone."

"Oh, no! never would they make so base a recompense!--to bring upon us
the destruction of our men and women and children, the wresting from us
of our land, the casting of us forth from our homes,--because the poor,
unsuspecting Indians gave them food and shelter and a haven of rest
while waiting for the pettiaugres that are coming up from New Orleans."

"_The pettiaugres from New Orleans_!" Kanoona repeated with a burst of
raucous laughter. "Hala! Hala!"

But Oo-koo-koo preserved his gravity. "They would not lie! Surely the
white men would not lie!"

Then turning to O'Kimmon he asked point-blank, "Chee-a-koh-ga?" (Do you
lie?)

The direct address was a relief to O'Kimmon. He had often wondered to
see the young braves reduced almost to tears by this seemingly gentle
discipline; he felt its poignancy when the keen blade of satire was
turned against himself.

"I did lie!" he admitted, as unreservedly as it he were at confession.
"But Oo-koo-koo, we will pay for what we've got. This is all of ut! An'
faix, yez have thrated us well,--an' begorra, we would have axed yer
consint, if we had dramed we could have got ut!" he concluded
ingenuously.

The two Indians gazed at him with a surprise so evident that a chill ran
through his every nerve.

"We will never reveal the secret,--the place of the gold," declared
L'Epine. Then perceiving in his turn something uncomprehended in their
expression he reinforced his promise with argument. "We will want to
come back--alone--to get more of it--all for ourselves. We will not be
willing to share our discovery with others."

The cheera-taghe still silently gazed at the two young men; then turned
toward each other with that patent astonishment yet on their faces. At
last they burst forth into sarcastic laughter.

L'Epine and O'Kimmon, albeit half bewildered, exchanged appalled
glances. There was no need of speech. Each understood at last.

Return! There was no chance of departure. They were to pay the penalty
of the dangerous knowledge they had acquired. Already some vague report,
some suspicion of the hidden gold of the locality had been bruited
abroad,--thus the Indians must reason,--or these white men would not
have come so far to seek it. Should they be permitted to depart, their
sudden wealth would proclaim its source, even though as they had
promised they should keep silence.

This was equally true should they eventually escape. Therefore--hideous
realization!--the actual possession by the Indians of their own country
depended upon the keeping of the secret inviolate. Dead men tell no
tales!

O'Kimmon, with a swelling heart, bethought himself of his status as a
British subject and the possible vengeance of the province. It would
come, if at all, too late. For the Cherokees believed the two to be
without the pale of the English protection. One had repudiated the
government, declaring himself an Irishman, a nationality then unknown to
the Cherokees. The other was French,--no reprisal for his sake was
possible to a tribe under British allegiance. Death it must
be!--doubtless with all the pomp and circumstance of the torture, for
from the standpoint of the Indians they had requited hospitality with
robbery. Death was inevitable,--unless they could now escape. Had they
but one weapon between them they might yet make good their flight.

An Irishman rarely stops to count the odds. With the thought O'Kimmon,
heavy, muscular, yet alert, threw himself upon Oo-koo-koo, and in an
instant he had almost wrenched the knife from the Indian's belt.

The other Cherokee cried warningly, "_Akee-rooka! Akee-rooka_!" (I will
shoot!) Then drew his pistol and fired.

The next moment, perhaps for many moments thereafter, none of them knew
very definitely what had happened. There was a cloud of dust, a terrific
detonation, a sudden absolute darkness, as in some revulsion of nature,
a stifling sensation. They were penned within the grotto by a great
fragment of the beetling cliff. Doubtless it had been previously
fractured by the action of continuous freezes, and the concussion of the
pistol shot in the restricted space of the cave below had brought it
down.

The days went on. The men were missed after a time, but a considerable
interval had elapsed. The two strangers had of late kept themselves much
apart, owing to their absorption and their covert methods of seeking for
gold. It was an ill-ordered, roaming, sylvan life they led at best. The
cheera-taghe, although "beloved men" and priests of their strange and
savage religion, were but wild Indians, and their temporary absence
created no surprise. In fact, until sought with anxiety when the drought
had become excessive and threatened the later crops, and the services of
the cheera-taghe were necessary to invoke and with wild barbaric
ceremonials bring down the lightning and thunder to clear the atmosphere
and the rain to refresh the soil, it was not ascertained that the
prophets had definitely disappeared.

Then it was that excitement supervened, search, anxiety, grief, fear.
There began to be vague rumors of untoward sounds, remembered rather
than noticed at the time. Faint explosions had been heard in the night
as if under the ground, and again in broad daylight as if in the air.
None could imagine that the doomed men had sought to attract the
attention of the town by firing off their pistols, thus utilizing their
scanty ammunition. The strain grew intense; superstitious fancies
supplemented the real mystery; the place was finally abandoned, and thus
Nilaque Great became a "waste town."

It was ten years, perhaps, after this blight had fallen upon it, that
one day as the pack-train came down the valley of the Little Tennessee,
on its autumnal return trip to Charlestown, the snow began to sift down.
An unseasonable storm it was, for the winter had hardly set in. A north
wind sprang up; the snow was soon heavily driving; within an hour the
woods, still in the red leafage of autumn, were covered with snow and
encased in ice. Only by a strenuous effort would the train be able to
pass the old "waste town" before the early dusk,--a mile or two at most;
but it was hoped that this might suffice to keep the ghosts out of the
bounds of visibility. The roaring bacchanalian glees with which the
pack-men set the melancholy sheeted woods aquiver might well send the
ghosts out of earshot, presuming them endowed with volition.

Suddenly Cuddy Barnett discovered that one of the pack-horses of his own
especial charge was missing,--a good bay with a load of fine dressed
deerskins to take to Charlestown, then the great mart of all this far
region. A recollection of a sharp curve in the trading-path, running
dangerously near a bluff bank, came abruptly into his mind. Drifts had
lodged in its jagged crevices, and it might well have chanced that here
the animal had lost his footing and slipped out of the steadily trotting
file along the river bank unnoticed in the blinding snow.

This theory seemed eminently plausible to his comrades, but when they
learned that he was of the opinion that the disaster had happened at the
old "waste town," as he had there first missed the animal in the file,
not one would go back with him to search the locality,--not for the
horse, not for the peltry, not even to avert the displeasure of their
employer in Charlestown. Barnett besought their aid for a time, urging
the project of rescue as they all sat around the roaring camp-fire under
the sheltering branches of a cluster of fir trees that, acting as
wind-break, served to fend off in some degree the fury of the storm. The
ruddy flare illumined far shadowy aisles of the snowy wilderness, all
agloom with the early dusk. Despite the falling flakes, they could still
see the picketed pack-horses, now freed from their burdens, huddling
together and holding down their heads to the icy blast as they munched
their forage. The supper of the young pack-men was broiling on the
coals; their faces were florid with the keen wind, their coonskin caps
all crested with snow; and the fringes of their buckskin raiment had
tinkling pendants of icicles; but although they had found good cheer in
a chortling jug, uncorked as the first preliminary of encamping, they
had not yet imbibed sufficient fictitious courage to set at naught their
fears of the old "waste town."

Barnett at last acquiesced in the relinquishment of his desire of
rescue. Some losses must needs occur in a great trade, and considering
the stress of the weather, the long distances traversed, the dangers of
the lonely wildernesses in the territory of savages, the incident would
doubtless be leniently overlooked. And then he bethought himself of the
horse,--a good horse, stout, swift, kindly disposed; a hard fate the
animal had encountered,--abandoned here to starve in these bleak winter
woods. Perhaps he might be lying there at the foot of the cliffs with a
broken leg, suffering the immeasurable agonies of a dumb beast, for the
lack of a merciful pistol-ball to put him at peace. Barnett could not
resist the mute appeal of his fancy.

Presently he was trudging alone along the icy path. The flare of the red
fire grew dim behind him; the last flicker faded. The woods were all
unillumined, ghastly white, with a hovering gray shadow. The song of the
bivouac fainted in the distance and failed; the echo grew doubtful and
dull; and now in absolute silence that somehow set his nerves aquiver he
was coming in with the dreary dusk and the driving snow to the old
"waste town," Nilaque Great.

More silent even than the wilderness it seemed with the muffling drifts
heavy on the roofs, blocking the dark open doors of the tenantless
dwellings, lying in fluffy masses on the boughs of the trees that had
once made the desert spaces so pleasantly umbrageous in those sweet
summers so long ago. The great circular council-house, shaped like a
dome, was whitely aglimmer against the gray twilight and the wintry
background of the woods and mountains,--only the vaguest suggestions of
heights seen through the ceaseless whirl of the crystalline flakes. No
wolf now, although remembering the casual glimpse he had had he was
prepared with rifle and pistol, and held his knife in his hand; no bear;
no sign of living creature until, as he skirted the jagged bluff of the
river where he fancied the horse might have lost his footing, he heard a
sudden whinny of welcome, the sound keen and eerie and intrusive in the
strange breathless solemnity of the silent place.

Gazing cautiously over the verge of the precipice, he saw the animal
despite the gathering shadows. The horse was quite safe, having
doubtless slipped down in the soft densities of a great drift dislodged
from the crevice by his own weight. His pack was still on his back, now
piled twice as high with snow. He lifted his arched neck as he sprang
about with undiminished activity, vainly seeking to ascend the almost
sheer precipice.

Daylight, however, was essential for his rescue. The effort now on these
icy steeps might cost either man or beast a broken limb, if no more.
With an instinct of self-protection the animal had chosen the lee of a
great buttress of the cliff, and could stand there safely all night
though the temperature should fall still lower. The young pack-man
called out a word or two of encouragement, listening fearfully as the
sound struck back in the silence from the icy bank of the river, the
craggy hillsides, and the resonant walls of the deserted houses in the
old "waste town." Himself suddenly stricken to silence, he realized as
he turned that the night had at last closed in. It lay dark and desolate
in the limitless woods, where a vague sense of motion gave token that
the snow was still viewlessly falling in the dense obscurities.

But in the "waste town" itself a pallid visibility lingered in the open
spaces where the trees were few, and gloomily showed the empty cabins,
the deserted council-house, the vacant "beloved square." Somehow, turn
as he would, this dim scene in the midst of the dense darkness of the
stormy night was before his eyes. Again and again he plunged into the
woods seeking to follow the well-known trail of the trading-path to the
camp and rejoin his companions, but invariably he would emerge from the
wilderness after a toilsome tramp, entering the old "waste town" at a
different angle.

He perceived at length that he could not keep the direction, that he was
wandering in a circle after the manner of those lost in forests. His
clothing, freezing upon his body, was calculated for warmer weather; the
buckskin shirt and leggings, the garb of the frontiersmen, copied from
the attire of the Indians, were of a thin and pliable texture, owing to
the peculiar skill of the savages in dressing peltry. An early historian
describes such costume in a curiously sophisticated phrase as the
"summer visiting dress of the Indians." The southern tribes were
intensely averse to cold, for in winter they wore furs and garments made
of buffalo hides, the shaggy side inward; this raiment was sewed with
the sinews of deer and a kind of wild hemp for thread, and with needles
dexterously fashioned of fishbone.

Barnett had now no thought of the ghosts of the old "waste town." His
first care was to save his life this cruel night; without fire, without
food, without shelter, it might be that he had indeed come to the end.
He was induced by this reflection to climb the mound to the old
council-house. For here the walls, plastered both within and without
with the strong adhesive red clay of the region, admitted no wind, while
in the cabins which had been dwellings the drifts lay deep beneath the
rifts in the dilapidated roofs and the crevices in the wall, and the
flying flakes sifted in as the keen gusts surged through. He had had the
forethought to gather as he went bits of wood, now a loose clapboard or
piece of bark from low-hanging eaves, now a fragment of half-rotten
puncheon from a doorstep, and as he groped into the dense darkness of
the council-house with his steel and flint he set them alight on the
hearth in the centre of the floor.

When he was once more warm and free of the fear of death, other fears
took hold upon him. In the first glimmers of the fire he could see
through the tall narrow doorless portal only the dark night outside and
a flickering glimpse against its blackness of the quivering crystals of
the snow,--these but vaguely, for the blue smoke eddying through the
great room veiled the opposite side, there being no chimney or window,
and he sat in the interior behind the fire.

He gazed furtively over his shoulder ever and anon, as the flames flared
up, revealing the deeply red walls of the dome-like place with here and
there a buffalo skin suspended against them, the inside of the hide
showing, painted in curious hieroglyphics, brilliant with color, and
instinct with an untranslated meaning; a number of conch shells lay
about, with jars and vases of clay, and those quaintly fashioned earthen
drums, the heads of tightly stretched deerskin,--all paraphernalia of
the savage worship which the cheera-taghe had conducted, now abandoned
as bewitched.

Sitting here comfortably in the place of those men of the "divine fire,"
Cuthbert Barnett, his rifle by his side, his knife in his belt, his
coonskin cap pushed back from his face, once more florid, warm, tingling
from the keen wind of the day and the change to this heated air, and
with perchance a drowsy eyelid, began to marvel anew as to the fate of
the cheera-taghe. Hardly a drowsy eyelid, he consciously had, however,
for he had resolved that he would not sleep. His situation here alone
was too dangerous; he feared wolves,--the fire that would otherwise
affright them might untended sink too low. He feared also some wandering
Indian. Should he be discovered here by means of the unaccustomed light
he might be wantonly murdered as he slept, or in revenge for the
sacrilege of his intrusion among these things that the savages had
esteemed sacred.

Therefore, when he suddenly saw the cheera-taghe he saw them quite
plainly. Tall, stately, splendidly arrayed in their barbaric garb,
draped with their iridescent feather-wrought mantles, their heads
dressed with white plumes, a staff of cane adorned with white feathers
in the right hand, a green bough in the left, preceded by those
curiously sonorous earthen drums, of which the drone blended with the
notes of the religious song, _Yo-he-wah-yah! Yo-he-wah-yah!_ they thrice
led the glittering procession of the "holy dance" around and around the
"beloved square."

A blank interval ensued. And then again he saw them, nearer now, more
distinct; they were entering the temple; they were close at hand;
triumphant of mien, assured, so full of life!--he could laugh to think
that he had had a dream, or had heard somehow, that they were dead or
lost or vaguely gone. For here, without seeming in the least to notice
his presence, they kindled anew with friction of bits of poplar or white
oak the fire for the new year, the _cheera_, the "sacred flame," to bear
it outside to distribute it to the assembled people of Nilaque Great.
Without was summer; the trees were full of green leaves; canoes were
glancing along the shimmering river; the "beloved square" was crowded
with braves,--he saw their feathered crests wave and glisten; the wind
was blowing fresh and cool; the sun shone.

And suddenly it was shining in his face, as it came up over the Great
Smoky Mountains, sending its first long slanting wintry beams through
the narrow portal to the hearth where he had lain asleep before the
ashes of the once "sacred fire," covered with the fresh ashes of last
night's vigil, for they too were dead. He staggered to his feet and went
out into the glistening dawn of this snowy sunlit day, hardly able to
reconcile its aspect with the summer-tide scene he had just quitted. Now
and again he paused, half-bewildered, as if unfamiliar with the pathetic
miseries of the old "waste town"--the scene in his mind savored far more
of reality.

The necessity of caring for the pack-horse, perhaps better than aught
else, served to restore his faculties. He found it easy now to climb
down the jagged face of the bluffs of the river bank, whence the snow
had vanished, for in the changeable southern climate a sudden thaw had
begun in the earlier hours and now the warm sun was setting all the
trees and eaves adrip. As he stood below the cliff on the sandy slope
whence the snow had slipped down into the river, the volume of which the
storm of last night would much increase after the long drought of the
summer, he carefully examined the horse to ascertain what injuries he
might have sustained; a few abrasions on the right flank seemed to be
all, until the animal moved, a bit stiffly with the near fore leg. This
attracted Barnett's attention to a gash on the knee received doubtless
when the horse first fell on the ground,--a queer gash, long, jagged,
unaccountable, as if it had been made by a dull blade. Glancing down to
search the gravel, the pack-man discerned, half-imbedded in the sand,
the edge of a fragment of a knife, a scalping-knife, broken half in two;
and there, lying not three yards away, was a handle attached to a belt
heavily wrought with roanoke,--only a bit of the belt,--and the other
half of the knife.

The pack-man's hand trembled and his florid cheek went pale, for these
lay just under the sharp edge of a huge fragment of rock that had
evidently fallen from the cliff above, breaking the blade and holding
the belt fast.

How long he stood and stared he did not know. For a time he heard
without realizing the significance of the sounds the whoops and shouts
of his comrades, wildly racing back through the old "waste town" in
search of him; but although in the strenuous duty of his rescue they
would venture to pass it in broad daylight, no ardor of persuasion could
induce them to linger there to investigate the locality of his find, or
to aid in moving the rock and exploring the grotto that had evidently
proved a sepulchre.

On the contrary, they deemed the discovery might be resented by the
Indians as intrusive, and, keeping the secret, they made haste to get
out of the country with even more speed than their wont. Cuthbert
Barnett, however, carried his information to the authorities in
Charlestown, who, promptly acting upon it, solved the mystery of the
fate of the cheera-taghe.

Since peace with the Cherokees was becoming more and more precarious,
some satisfaction was experienced by the Royal Governor of South
Carolina, James Glen, at that time, in being able to urge upon the
attention of the head-men of the tribe the fact that, although the two
white strangers had obviously been captured in the act of robbing
Cherokee soil of its gold, they had as evidently been unarmed, and the
Irishman, a British subject, had been shot down by one of the
cheera-taghe, for there was the bullet still imbedded firmly in the
sternum of his broad chest. Thus a political crisis, which the event had
threatened, was averted.

Despite the evil chance that had befallen the gold-seekers, now widely
bruited abroad, stealthy efforts were ever and anon made by the hardy
frontier prospectors of those days, already busy in the richer deposits
of the Ayrate division of the Cherokee country, to pan also the sands of
the banks of the Tennessee; but the yield here was never again worth the
work, and the interest in the possibility of securing "pay gravel" in
this region died out, until the later excitements of the discovery of
the precious metal in a neighboring locality, Coca Creek, during the
last century.

The old "waste town" long remained a ruin, and at last fell away to a
mere memory.




THE BEWITCHED BALL-STICKS


At no time in the history of mankind, except during that brief
Paradisiac courtship in the Garden of Eden, has the heart of a lover
been altogether unvexed by the presence, or even the sheer suspicion, of
that baleful being commonly denominated "another." Here, however, it
would seem that the field must needs be almost as clear. The aspect of
the world was as if yet young; the swan, long ago driven from the
rivers, still snowily drifted down the silver Tennessee; the deer, the
bear, the buffalo, the wolf in countless hordes roamed at will
throughout the dense primeval wildernesses; the line of Cherokee towns
along the banks represented almost the only human habitations for many
hundred miles, but to Tus-ka-sah the country seemed to groan under a
surplus of population, for there yet dwelt right merrily at Ioco Town
the youthful Amoyah, the gayest of all gay birds, and a painful sense of
the superfluous pressed upon the brain at the very sight of him.

This trait of frivolity was to Tus-ka-sah the more revolting, since he
himself was of a serious cast of mind and possessed of faculties, rare
in an Indian, which are called "fine business capacity." He was esteemed
at an English trading-house down on the Eupharsee River as the best
"second man" in any of the towns; this phrase "second man" expressing
the united functions of alderman, chief of police, chairman of boards of
public improvements, and the various executive committees of
civilization. His were municipal duties,--the apportionment of community
labor, the supervision of the building of houses and the planting of
crops, the distribution of public bounty, the transaction of any
business of Ioco Town with visitors whom individual interest might bring
thither. So well did he acquit himself when these errands involved
questions of commercial policy that the English traders were wont to
declare that Tus-ka-sah, the Terrapin, had "horse sense"--which
certainly was remarkable in a terrapin!

His clear-headed qualities, however, valued commercially, seemed hardly
calculated to adorn the fireside. In sensible cumbrous silence and
disastrous eclipse he could only contemplate with dismayed aversion the
palpable effect of Amoyah's gay sallies of wit, his fantastic lies, his
vainglorious boastings, and his wonderful stories, which seemed always
to enchant his audience, the household of the damsel to whom in
civilized parlance they were both paying their addresses. These
audiences were usually large, and far too lenient in the estimation of
Tus-ka-sah. First there was present, of course, Amoyah himself, seeming
a whole flock instead of one Pigeon. Then must be counted Altsasti, who
although a widow was very young, and as slight, as lissome, as graceful
as the "wreath" which her name signified. She was clad now in her winter
dress of otter skins, all deftly sewn together so that the fur might lie
one way, the better to enable the fabric to shed the rain; the petticoat
was longer than the summer attire of doeskin, for although the tinkle of
the metal "bell buttons" of her many garters might be heard as she
moved, only the anklets were visible above her richly beaded moccasins.
She seldom moved, however; sitting beside the fire on a buffalo rug, she
monotonously strung rainbow-hued beads for hours at a time. Her glossy,
straight black hair was threaded with a strand of opaque white beads
passing through the coils, dressed high, and copiously anointed with
bear's oil, and on her forehead she wore a single pendant wrought of the
conch-shell, ivory-white and highly polished. She maintained a busy
silence, but the others of the group--her father, sometimes her mother
and grandmother and the younger sisters and brothers--preserved no such
semblance of gravity, and indulged in appreciative chuckles responsive
to Amoyah's jests, idly watching him with twinkling eyes as long as he
would talk.

It would be difficult to say how long this might be, for there were no
windows to the winter houses of the Cherokees; in point of architecture
these structures resembled the great dome-shaped council-house,
plastered within and without with red clay; the floor was some three
feet lower than the surface of the ground outside, and the exit
fashioned with a narrow winding passage before reaching the outlet of
the door. The sun might rise or set; the night might come or go; no
token how the hour waxed or waned could penetrate this seclusion. The
replenishing of the fire on the chimneyless hearth in the centre of the
floor afforded the only comment on the passage of time. Its glow gave to
view the red walls; the curious designs of the painted interior of the
buffalo hides stretched upon them, by way of decoration; the cane divans
or couches that were contrived to run all around the circular apartment,
and on which were spread skins of bear and panther and wolves, covering
even the heads of the slumbering members of the household, for the
Cherokees slept away much of the tedious winter weather.

The fire would show, too, how gayly bedight and feather-crested was
Amoyah, wearing a choice garb of furs;--often, so great was his vanity,
his face was elaborately painted as if for some splendid festive
occasion, a dance or the ball-play, instead of merely to impress with
his magnificence this simple domestic circle. Tus-ka-sah dated the
events that followed from one night when this facial decoration of his
rival was even more fantastic than usual. Like a fish was one side of
the young Cherokee's profile; the other in glaring daubs of white and
black and red craftily represented the head of a woodpecker. The effect
in front was the face of a nondescript monster, that only a gleeful
laughing eye, and now and then a flash of narrow white teeth, identified
as the jovial Amoyah, the Pigeon of Ioco.

The snow lay on the ground without, he said as he shook a wreath of it
from a fold of his fur and it fell hissing among the coals. The shadows
were long, he told them, for the moon was up and the world was dimly
white and duskily blue. The wind was abroad, and indeed they could hear
the swirl of its invisible wings as it swooped past; the boughs of the
trees clashed together and ice was in the Tennessee River. The winter
had come, he declared.

Not yet, Tus-ka-sah pragmatically averred. There would be fine weather
yet.

For the snowfall so early in the season was phenomenal and the red
leaves were still clinging to the trees.

Had they been together among men Amoyah would not have cared enough for
the subject to justify contention, but in the presence of women he would
suffer no contradiction. He must needs be paramount,--the infinitely
admired! He shook his head.

The winter had surely come, he insisted. Why, he argued, the bears
knew,--they always knew! And already each had walked the round with his
shadow.

For in the approach of winter, in the light of the first mystic, icicled
moon, the night when it reaches its full, a grotesque pageant is afoot
in that remote town of the bears, immemorially fabled to be hidden in
the dense coverts of the Great Smoky Mountains,--the procession of the
bears, each walking with his shadow, seven times around the illuminated
spaces of the "beloved square."

The bears knew undoubtedly, the "second man," the man of facts and
method and management, soberly admitted. But how did Amoyah know that
already they had trodden those significant circles, each with his
shadow? He smiled triumphant in his incontrovertible logic.

And now Amoyah's face was wonderful to view, whether as a fish on one
side or a woodpecker on the other, with that most human expression of
surprise and indignation and aversion as distinctly limned upon it as if
in pigments, for he loved the "second man's" facts no more than the
"second man" loved his fancies. How did he know, forsooth? Because,
Amoyah hardily declared, he himself had witnessed the march,--he had
been permitted to behold that weird and grotesque progress!

He took note of the blank silence that ensued upon this startling
asseveration. Then emboldened to add circumstance to sheer statement he
protested, "I attended the ceremony by invitation. I had a place in the
line of march--I walked beside the Great Bear as his shadow!"

For, according to tradition, each bear, burly, upright in the moonlight,
follows the others in Indian file, but at the side of each walks his
shadow, and that shadow is not the semblance of a bear, but of a
Cherokee Indian!

Now, as everybody has heard, the bears were once a band of Cherokee
Indians, but wearying of the rigors and artificialities of tribal
civilization they took to the woods, became bears, and have since dwelt
in seclusion.

The thoughts, however, persistently reach out for the significance of
the fact that in the tradition of this immemorial progress each creature
is accompanied by the shadow, not of the thing that he is, but of the
higher entity that he was designed to be.

Whether this inference is merely the mechanical deduction of a lesson,
or a subtlety of moralizing, with a definite intention, on the part of
the Cherokees, always past-masters in the intricacies of symbolism, it
is difficult to determine, but the bears are certainly not alone in this
illustration of retrogression, and memory may furnish many an image of a
lost ideal to haunt the paths of beings of a higher plane.

The picture was before the eyes of all the fireside group,--the looming
domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, where the clouds, white and opaline,
hung in the intervals beneath the ultimate heights; the silences of the
night were felt in the dense dark lonely forest that encompassed the
open spaces of that mysterious city, with the conical thatched roofs of
its winter houses and the sandy stretch of the "beloved square; "--and
there was the line of bears, clumsy, heavy-footed, lumbering, ungainly,
and beside each the feather-crested similitude of what he had been,
alert, powerful, gifted with human ingenuity, the craft of weapons,
mental endowment, and an immortal soul,--so they went in the wintry
moonlight!

There was naught in this detail of the annual procession of the bears,
always taking place before the period of their hibernation, that
surprised or angered Tus-ka-sah; but that they should break from their
ancient law, their established habit of exclusiveness, single out Amoyah
(of all the people in the world), summon him to attend their tribal
celebration, and participate in their parade, as the shadow of Eeon-a,
the Great Bear,--this passed the bounds of the possibilities. This
fantasy had not the shreds of verisimilitude!

Yet even while he argued within himself Tus-ka-sah noted the old
warrior's gaze fix spellbound upon Amoyah, the hands of Altsasti
petrify, the bead in one, the motionless thread in the other. The eyes
of the more remote of the group, who were seated on rugs around the
fire, glistened wide and startled, in the shadow, as Amoyah proceeded to
relate how it had chanced.

A frosty morning he said it was, and he was out in the mountain
a-hunting. He repeated the song which he had been singing, and the wind
as it swirled about the house must have caught his voice and carried it
far. It was a song chronicling the deeds of the Great Bear, and had a
meaningless refrain, "_Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!"_ But
when he reached the advent upon the scene of the secondary hero, the
Great Bear himself, very polite, speaking excellent Cherokee ("since we
are alone," he said), very recognizant of the merits of Amoyah,--the
fame of which indeed was represented to have resounded through the
remotest seclusions of the ursine realm,--fiction though it all
obviously was, the man of facts could no longer endure this
magnification of his rival.

"The great Eeon-a said all that to you?" he sneered. "The fire-water at
the trading-house makes your heart very strong and your tongue crooked.
This sounds to me like the language of a simple seequa, not the Great
Bear--a mere bit of an opossum!"

Amoyah paused with a sudden gasp. He was not without an aggressive
temper, albeit, persuaded of his own perfection, he feared no rival, and
least of all Tus-ka-sah.

"You, Tus-ka-sah," he retorted angrily, "have evidently strongly shaken
hands with the discourse of the opossum, speaking its language like the
animal itself, and also the wolfish English. You have too many tongues,
and, more than all, the deceitful, forked tongue of the snake, which is
not agreeable to the old beloved speech. For myself, the Great Bear made
me welcome in the only language that does not make my heart weigh
heavy,--the elegant Cherokee language."

The spellbound listeners had broken out with irritated protests against
the interruption, and Tus-ka-sah said no more.

As the blasts went sonorously over the house and the flames swirled anew
into the murky atmosphere of the interior, a weird, half-smothered voice
suddenly invaded the restored quiet of the hearthstone: "_Eeon-a,
Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!_"

Like an echo the barbaric chant vibrated through the room. One of the
sleepers, a half-grown youth, had semi-consciously caught the familiar
refrain and sang it in that strange uncanny voice of slumber. The tones
gave fitting effect to the grotesque details of the supernatural
adventure, and as Tus-ka-sah rose and surlily took his way toward the
door his departure did not attract even casual notice from the
listeners, hanging enthralled upon the words of the Great Eeon-a, so
veraciously repeated for their behoof. Their eyes showed intent even in
the murky gloom and glistened lustrous in the alternate fitful flare;
the red walls seemed to recede and advance as the flames rose and fell;
the sleeping boy on the broad bed-place stirred uneasily, flinging now
and again a restless arm from out the panther skins in which he was
enveloped, and ever and anon his cry, "_Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a,
Ha-hoo-jah!"_ punctuated the impressive dramatic tones of the raconteur.

The next instant Tus-ka-sah was in the utter darkness of the narrow
tortuous little passage, but after threading this he came out of the
doorway into the keen chill air of a snowy world, the scintillations of
frosty stars, the languid, glamourous radiance of the yellow moon, low
in the sky, and his accustomed mental atmosphere of the plainest of
plain prose. His thoughts were with the group he had just left, and he
marveled if no influence could be brought to reduce the prestige with
which the immaterial chief of the bears, the fabled Eeon-a, had
contrived to invest the illusory Amoyah.

Tus-ka-sah's expectations concerning the weather were promptly
justified. A continual dripping from the roofs and trees pervaded the
early hours of the morning, and soon the snow was all gone here in the
valley; even the domes of the mountains so early whitened with drifts
showed now a bare, dark, sketch-like outline against the horizon and
above the garnet tint of the massed sere boughs of the forests of the
slopes. A warm sun shone. Not a summer bird was yet lingering, but here
and there a crisp red leaf winged the blue sky as gallantly as any
crested cardinal of them all. The town of Ioco was now astir, and
Tus-ka-sah noted how the softening of the air had brought out the
inhabitants from their winter houses. Children played about the
doorways; boys in canoes shot down the shimmering reaches of the river;
warriors congregated in the council-house and the half-open buildings
surrounding the "beloved square," and in its sunny sandy spaces sundry
old men were placidly engaged in the game of "roll the bullet."

It was at this group that Tus-ka-sah looked with an intent gaze and a
sort of indignant question in his manner, and presently an elderly
Cherokee, one of the cheera-taghe of the town, detached himself from it
and came toward him. Despite this show of alacrity Cheesto distinctly
winced as he contemplated the sullen and averse mien of his client or
parishioner, for the relation in which Tus-ka-sah stood toward him
partook of the characteristics of both. The professional wiseacre,
however, made shift to recover himself.

"I will tell you what you have come to tell me," the prophet said
quickly. "The spell on Amoyah does not work."

Tus-ka-sah assented surlily, gazing meanwhile at the face of the
conjurer. It was a face in which the eyes were set so close together as
to suggest a squint, although they were not crossed. He had an uncertain
and dilatory tread, the trait of one who hesitates, and decides in
doubt, and forthwith repents; being in his prophetic character an
appraiser of the probable, and the sport of the possible. He wore many
beads in strings around his neck, and big earrings of silver, heavy and
costly. His fur garments reached long and robe-like almost to his feet,
the shaggy side of the pelt outward, the weather being damp, for when it
was dry and cold it was customary to wear the fur turned inward.

The wise man had been recently unfortunate in his sorcery. The corn crop
had been cut short by reason of a lack of rain which he had promised
should fall in June. He had justified the drought, in the opinion of
most of the Indians, by feigning illness and taking to his bed; for by
these it was believed that if he had been able to be up and about his
ordinary vocations the preposterous conduct of the weather must needs
have been restrained. The fields about Ioco had suffered especially, and
Tus-ka-sah, as the chief business man of that town, had manifested half
veiled suspicions that the art of the conjurer was incompetent; this
rendered Cheesto particularly solicitous to succeed when his magic had
been invoked to reduce the attractions of Amoyah in the eyes of Altsasti
and turn her heart toward Tus-ka-sah. For among the Indians the lives of
the weather-prophets were not safe from the aggrieved agriculturists,
and there are authentic cases in which the cheera-taghe suffered death
by tribal law as false conjurers. Cheesto fixed an anxious gaze upon his
interlocutor as Tus-ka-sah rehearsed, by way of illustrating how
worthless were the charms wrought, the unsubstantial fiction that had so
beguiled the fancy of Altsasti, and posed Amoyah in the splendid guise
of the representative of the great Eeon-a in the shadow-march of the
bears.

The fate of the over-wise is ever the sorrowful dispensation. The fool
may be merry and irresponsible. Cheesto was at his wit's end. With that
unlucky drought in June to confront him, and dealing with the sharp
business man of Ioco, who exacted his due in the exchange of the Fates
as rigorously as if in a merely mundane market, the jeopardy of the
magician was great and his discredit almost assured.

Old Cheesto set his jaw firmly. Somehow, somewhere, something must be
wrought that would place Amoyah at a disadvantage and bring ridicule
upon him. No great matter, it might be said, to compass the change of a
fickle woman's mind, to disconcert a giddy young man. But how? Cheesto
was aweary of his own incantations and his ineffectual spells. He would
fain lend Fate a muscular hand.

This thought was uppermost in his mind for several days, even when he
went with the other cheera-taghe of Ioco to share in the conjurations
and incantations of the preliminary ceremonials of the Ball-Play,
without which success would never be anticipated, for a great match
between the towns of Ioco and Niowee was impending.

This game was usually played in the mid-summer or fall, but it would
seem that the unseasonable cold weather was well suited for such violent
exercise and the severe physical training which preceded it, and
although Amoyah noticed ice in the river as he dashed in for the
ceremonial plunge which accompanies the incantations, he remembered the
fact for a different reason than discomfort.

The eighty ball-players of Ioco stood in a row near the bank, submerged
to the knees. They had gone in with a tumultuous rush, and with their
faces painted, their heads crested with feathers, clad fantastically and
gorgeously but scantily, they were holding their ball-sticks high in the
air with an eager grasp,--all except Amoyah. Although still in his place
in the line, he was looking over his shoulder with an amazed and
startled gaze.

For there upon the bank, as if struck from his hand in the confusion and
turmoil of first entering the water, lay his ball-sticks. He seemed
about to return for them, as the implement of the game must be dipped
also in the water at the appropriate moment of the incantation. But old
Cheesto, the Rabbit, motioned him to forbear lest by this unprecedented
quitting of the line during the ceremonial the efficacy of the spell be
annulled; he himself stooped down and picked up the ball-sticks. Then,
notwithstanding his age and his fierce rheumatism, notwithstanding his
long and cumbrous robe of buffalo skin, the skirt of which he seemed to
clutch with difficulty, he plunged into the icy water, waded out to the
young man, handed him the ball-sticks, and regained the bank just as the
other cheera-taghe standing at the margin of the river began the
incantations supposed to influence the success of the competition.

This Indian game, which has left its name on one of the watercourses of
Tennessee, Ball-Play Creek, required a level space of some five or six
hundred yards in length but no other preparation of the ground. At one
end, in the direction of Niowee, two tall poles were fixed firmly in the
earth about three yards apart, and slanting outward. At the end toward
Ioco a similar goal was prepared. Every time the ball should be thrown
over either goal the play would count one for the proximate town, and
the game was of twelve or twenty points according to compact, the
catcher of the twentieth ball being entitled to especial honor. It was
of course the object of each side to throw the ball over the goal toward
their own town, and to prevent it from going in the direction of the
town of the opposing faction.

All the morning crowds of Cherokees of all ages and both sexes had been
gathering from the neighboring towns, and were congregated in the wide
spaces about the course at Ioco. These fields had earlier been planted
in corn, but the harvest had stripped the plain, and now the trampling
of hundreds of feet erased all vestiges of the growth except for the
yellow-gray tint of the stubble, spreading out on every side to the
brown of the dense fallen leaves on the slopes where the forests began
to climb the mountain sides. Here and there fires were kindled where
some spectator felt the keen chill of the approaching winter, and more
than one meal was in progress,--perhaps such groups had come from far.
Pack-horses were in evidence laden with rich garments of fur, various
peltry, blankets, valuable gear of every sort to be staked on the result
of the game, and soon the men were betting heavily. All the various
tones of the gamut were on the air,--the deep bass guttural laugh of the
braves; the shrill callow yelping of boys; the absent-minded bawl of
spoiled pappooses interested in the stir, but with an ever-recurrent
recollection of the business of vocally disciplining their patient
mothers; the keen treble chatter of women,--all were suddenly resolved
into a strong dominant chord of sound as a tremendous shout arose upon
the appearance of the ball-players of Ioco. Fresh from the river, they
made a glittering show with the tossing feathers of their crested heads,
their faces painted curiously and fantastically in white, the bright
tints of their gaudy though scanty raiment, their bare arms and legs
suppled with unguents and shining in the sun. This note of welcome had
hardly died away and the echo of the encompassing mountains grown
silent, when an agitated murmur of excitement went sibilantly through
the throng.

A cloud of dust was approaching in the distance, heralding a band of
men. A new sound invoked the echoes. The breath was held to hear it. The
throb of a drum--faint--far. And here thunderously beating, hard at
hand, overpowering all lesser sounds, the drums of loco responded. To
the vibrations of these sonorous earthen cylinders, the sticks plied
with a will on the heads of wet deerskins tightly stretched, the
ball-players of Niowee advanced. In a diagonal direction and at a sturdy
trot they came for a space,--a sudden halt ensued, and eighty pairs of
muscular feet smote tumultuously on the ground. Then once more forward
diagonally, at that swinging jaunty pace, and the stamping pause as
before. The sound seemed to shake the ground, the impact of the feet
with the earth was heard despite the turmoil of the drums; the stamping
vibrations were felt in the midst of the stir of the crowds, and now in
the nearer approach the individual faces could be distinguished, wildly
painted; the athletic figures, gaudily clad and barbarically decorated;
the ball-sticks, held aloft in a sort of rhythmic vibration as if
quivering for a chance at the ball; and fourscore wild young voices
howled defiance at loco Town, whose youth in return howled its municipal
pride, failing only with failing breath.

They were all in the course at last. The judges, elderly warriors and
absolutely impartial, chosen from towns which had no interest at stake
in the match, were seated on a little knoll, commanding a view of the
ground, but at a sufficient distance to be in no danger from a maladroit
handling of the ball. This was made of deerskin, stuffed hard with hair,
and sewn up with deer sinews. The ball-sticks, of which each player
owned his pair, were also partly made of deerskin, the two scoops or
ladles being fashioned of a network of thongs on a wooden hoop, each
furnished with a handle of hickory three feet long, worked together with
a thong of deerskin to catch the ball between the rackets,--it being of
course prohibited to catch the ball in the hand.

The drums beat furiously; the word was given; the ball was flung high in
the air in the middle of the course, and the next instant one hundred
and sixty young athletes rushed together with a mighty shock the force
of which seemed to shake the ground. Some fell and were trampled in the
crush; others madly clutched one another, friend or foe, with the
ill-aimed ball-sticks, inflicting a snapping hurt like a bite,--a wound
by no means to be despised. One, an expert, sent the ball with an artful
twirl through the air toward the Ioco goal, and in the midst of a shout
that rent the sky the whole rout of players went frantically flying
after it, whirling with an incredible swiftness and agility when it was
caught midway, and hurled back toward Niowee with a force as if it had
been flung from a catapult. Here and there individual players in the
frenzied chase made wonderful records of leaps in their efforts to catch
the ball, springing into the air with a surprising strength and
elasticity, and a lightness as of creatures absolutely without weight.

A good match they were playing; for more than half an hour neither side
was permitted by the other to score a single point. The ball seemed for
a time as if it were awing forever, and would fall to the ground no
more. The casualties were many; almost always after one of those sudden
rushes together of both factions that had a tremendous momentum as of
galloping squadrons, the ground would show as the moving masses receded
half a dozen figures prone upon the course; one with a broken arm
perhaps; another badly snapped by the inartistically plied ball-sticks
of friend or foe and crawling off with a bloody pate; sometimes another
lying quite still, evidently stunned and to be hastily dragged off the
course by spectators, before another stampede of the ball-players crush
the life out of the unconscious and prostrate wight. Nevertheless only
the normal interest, which however was very great, appertained to the
match until at a crisis a strange thing happened, inexplicable then, and
perhaps never fully understood.

The ball was flying toward the Niowee goal and the whole field was in
full run after it. The blow that had impelled it had been something
tremendous. A shout of triumph was already welling up from the throat of
all Niowee, for to prevent the scoring of a point in its favor it would
seem that there must be a thing afoot whose fleetness could exceed the
speed of a thing awing.

Amoyah, the deftest runner of all the Tennessee River country, was
foremost in the crown of swift athletes; presently he was detached by
degrees from it; now he was definitely in advance; and soon, spurting
tremendously, he had so neared the Niowee goal that the ball just above
must needs pass over it if a spring might not enable him to capture it
at the last moment. As agile as a deer, and as light as a bird, he
leaped into the air, both arms upstretched, holding the rackets aloft
and ready. He was a far-famed player, and even now the Ioco spectators
were shouting, Amoyah needs must win!

A mysterious silence fell suddenly. They all saw what had happened.
There could be no mistake. The rackets parted at the propitious moment
to receive the ball. The netting closed about it. And then, as if it had
met with no impediment whatever, the ball passed through the stanch web
of thongs and over the poles, and falling to the ground counted one for
Niowee.

The spectators from that town in their astonishment forgot to shout. The
onrushing crowd of players, bearing down upon Amoyah, having intended to
force him to drop the ball, which he had seemed predestined to catch, or
to throw it so ill as to deliver it into the power of Niowee still to
secure the point, could not arrest their own momentum, and went over the
startled and dumfounded player in a swift dash, leaving him prone upon
the ground. He was on his feet in an instant, his physical faculties
rallying promptly, but so bewildered and doubtful that he had but one
definite mental process, the resolve to regain for Ioco the point he had
so mysteriously lost. Twice afterward his fine playing focused the
attention of the crowd. Twice their plaudits of his skill rang through
the vibrating air. Then the ball, hardly checked by the web of his
racket, passed through the ball-sticks, and all realized their
bewitchment.

Amoyah heard the gossip afloat concerning the matter before he had well
quitted the course. The Great Bear had torn the net of the ball-sticks
with his claw, one brave was telling another as he passed, because
Amoyah had unveraciously boasted that he had walked by invitation in the
procession of the bears during their annual march with their shadows at
their hidden mysterious town in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Amoyah paused, tired, excited, panting, and critically examined the web.
Surely enough the interlacing thongs had parted in twain in two straight
lines, invisible save on close inspection, as deftly and as evenly
severed as if cut with a keen knife.

It was late in the day. The sun was now on a westering slant. The
parties of spectators were breaking up, some to journey homeward, others
going into the town with friends. The place that the crowd had occupied
had that peculiarly dreary aspect characteristic of a deserted pleasure
ground. Trampled heavily it was, and the charred remnant of a fire
showed black here and there; broken bits of food were scattered in
places where feasting had been; a great gourd that had held some gallons
of water lay shattered on the ground at his feet; a group at a distance
were doubtfully retracing their steps, searching for something they had
lost; at the farthest limits a wolf like a dog, or a dog like a wolf,
was gnawing at a bone, and snarling as he gnawed. It was all frowzy,
jaded, forlorn.

Somehow suddenly he had a sense of freshness, an illumination, as it
were a vision, of the early morning light striking through a network of
bare trees upon the shimmering reaches of a river. And there on the bank
lay his ball-sticks,--quite good and sound then, he would have staked
his life. And now a picture was before him,--being a man of fancy, he
thought in pictures,--a picture of old Cheesto the Rabbit holding the
ball-sticks half hidden in the folds of his great fur robe and wading
out into the ice-cold water to restore them. And old Cheesto, he
reflected, was one of the cheera-taghe of Ioco, and could work a spell
quite as well as the Great Bear, who had gone to bed for the winter two
weeks ago, and had not heard of ball-sticks within the memory of
man,--perhaps not since he was a Cherokee himself, and playing with the
rest on the course at Tennessee Town.

In fact, old Cheesto, in common with many men not Cherokees, cared
little for the public weal when it interfered with private interest. But
he had not realized how much he had jeopardized the success of Ioco Town
in cutting the netting of the ball-sticks. He had imagined the
incompleteness of the racket would merely show Amoyah as incompetent,
render his play futile and ineffective, and discredit him with both
friend and foe. Never, however, had the play of any one man been so
important and conspicuous as his to-day when the bewitched ball-sticks
became the salient feature and the living tradition of the match between
Ioco and Niowee. For despite these points, thus lost by supernatural
agency to Niowee, the bewitchment of the ball-sticks only served to
illustrate the superior skill of the Ioco team, and to embellish their
victory.

Amoyah had nothing but his imagination to support his theory, but it
seemed singularly credible to Altsasti, to whom he rehearsed it, finding
her seated on the ground before the door of her winter house in great
dreariness of spirit, that he should in playing so well have won nothing
and merely jeopardized the game.

"I am afraid of that Great Bear," she declared, eying the ball-sticks
askance as he came up.

Then revealing his theory of the spell that old Cheesto had wrought upon
him in Tus-ka-sah's interest, Amoyah proposed a counter-spell which
would defeat Tus-ka-sah.

"But Cheesto can still send you trouble if you have a wife," she argued.

"Ah, no," the specious Amoyah replied. "Everybody knows that a man's
wife makes him all the trouble that he needs."

To save him from these woes devised by others Altsasti undertook to give
him all the trouble he needed. But he seemed quite cheerful in the
prospect, and as she cooked the supper within doors he sat at the
entrance, much at home, singing, "_Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a,
Ha-hoo-jah!_"

Tus-ka-sah upbraided the magician with the result of this victory, by
which he was defeated. And the wise man threw up eyes and hands at his
ingratitude.

"I set the Great Bear after Amoyah for you! I made the Eeon-a acquainted
with his boastful lies, and he bewitched Amoyah's ball-sticks that his
fine play might come to nothing."

Very little to the purpose, the disaffected man of facts reflected,
remembering the impression produced by his rival's display of skill.
Somehow Amoyah seemed beyond the reach of logic. "Why did you not
instead bewitch the woman?" Tus-ka-sah asked.

But this wiliest of the cheera-taghe shook his head.

"If she had been a _mere_ woman," he said. "But a widow is a witch
herself."

"_Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!"_ sang Amoyah at the door of
the winter house.

Eeon-a, the Great Bear, made no sign and slept in peace at his town
house in the mountains.

And since then, as always before, under the first icy moon of the winter
the company of bears with their feather-crested shadows take up their
mysterious march seven times around the "beloved square" of their
ancient secluded town in the Great Smoky Mountains, which it is said may
be seen to this day--by all who can find it!




THE VISIT OF THE TURBULENT GRANDFATHER


It was long remembered in the Cherokee nation. Their grandfather came to
the Overhill towns on the banks of the Tennessee River in a most
imperious frame of mind.

"Give me a belt!" he cried in irrelevant response to every gracious
overture of hospitality. For although presents were heaped upon him, the
official belt of the Cherokee nation was not among them, and he cast
them all aside as mere baubles.

Even the clever subterfuges of that master of statecraft, the half-king,
Atta-Kulla-Kulla, might not avail. "_N'tschutti!_" (Dear friend) he said
once in eager propitiation; "_Gooch ili lehelecheu_?" (Does your father
yet live?) He spoke in a gentle voice and slowly, the Delaware language
being unaccustomed to his lips. "Tell the great sakimau I well remember
him!" And he laid a string of beads on the arm of the quivering Lenape,
for their grandfather was of that nationality.

But what flout of Fate was this? Not the coveted string of wampum, the
official token, its significance not to be argued away, or overlooked,
or mistaken--but instead a necklace of pearls, the fine freshwater gems
of the region, so often mentioned by the elder writers and since held to
be mythical or exaggeration of the polish of mere shell beads till the
recent discoveries have placed once more the yield of the _Unio
margaritiferus_ of the rivers of Tennessee on metropolitan markets.

A personal gift--of the rarest, it is true--but a mere trifle in the
estimation of Tscholens, in comparison with that national recognition
which he craved and which a tribe of warriors awaited.

The irate grandfather flung the glossy trinket from him down among the
ashes of the fire, which glowed in the centre of the floor of the great
council-house of the town of Citico, one of the dome-shaped buildings,
plastered as usual within and without with richly tinted red clay. The
flicker from the coals revealed the rows of posts that like a colonnade
upheld the roof; the cane-wrought divan encircling the apartment between
these columns and the windowless walls; the astonished faces and
feather-crested heads of the conclave of Cherokee chiefs from half a
dozen towns as they clustered around the fire and stared at Tscholens.

The grave emotion in his face dignified its expression despite its
savagery. Paradoxically the grandfather was young, slender, and, rated
by any other standard than that of the Cherokees, an unusually tall
people, would have been considered of fine height. His muscular arms
were bare except for his heavy silver bracelets; a tuft of feathers
quivered high on his head; his leggings were of deerskin, embroidered
with parti-colored quills of the porcupine, and his shirt was of fine
sable fur. His voice was sonorously insistent.

"_N'petalogalgun_!" (I am sent as a messenger) he declared urgently.
"Give me a belt."

He turned his flaming eyes directly upon Atta-Kulla-Kulla, himself in
the prime of life now, in 1745, who it seemed must act definitely under
this coercion. He must either refuse to testify to the truth, which he
knew, or involve his people, the Cherokees, in a quarrel which did not
concern them, of which a century was tired, between the Lenni Lenape and
the Mengwe.

So long ago it had begun! The Mengwe, hard pressed by other nations and
long at war with the Lenape, besought peace of this foe, and that they
would use their influence with the others. Usually women, prompted
always by the losing side, protested against the further effusion of
blood and went with intercessions from one faction to the other. This,
in view of the number and devious interests of the warring forces, was
then impracticable, and therefore the Mengwe besought the Lenape to act
as mediator for the occasion. Only so noted a race of warriors could
afford this magnanimity, the Mengwe argued. It might impair the prestige
of a less high-couraged and powerful tribe. And with these specious
wiles the cat was duly belled.

But alas for the Lenape! Magnanimity is the most dangerous of all the
virtues--to its possessor! Presently the Mengwe claimed to have
conquered the Lenape in battle, and cited the well-known fact that they
had inaugurated peace proposals. As the Mengwe confederation grew more
powerful they assumed all the arrogance of a protectorate. They sold the
lands of their dependents. They resented all action of the Lenape on
their own account. If the Lenape went to war on some quarrel of their
making, they had the Mengwe to reckon with as well as the enemy. As the
years rolled by in scores, this fiction gradually assumed all the
binding force of fact, till now it was felt that only by the avowal of
the truth by some powerful tribe, both ancient and contemporary, such as
the Cherokee,--who, although allied neither linguistically nor
consanguineously, by some abstruse figment of Indian etiquette affected
an affiliation to the Lenape and called them "grandfather,"--could their
rightful independence be recognized, reestablished, and maintained.
Therefore, "Give me a belt!" cried Tscholens pertinaciously, offering in
exchange the official belt of the Delawares, or, as they were called,
Lenni Lenape.

Nothing less would content him. He hardened himself as flint against all
suave beguilements tending to effect a diversion of interest. He would
not see the horse-race. He would not "roll the bullet." He would not
witness the game of chungke, expressly played in honor of his visit. He
even refused to join in the dance, although young and nimble. But it
chanced that the three circles were awhirl on the sandy spaces
contiguous to the "beloved square" when the first break in the cohesion
of his pertinacity occurred. The red sunset was widely aflare; the dizzy
rout of the shadows of the dancers, all gregarious and intricately
involved in the three circles, kept the moving figures company. These
successive circles, one within another, followed each a different
direction in their revolutions to the music of the primitive flute,
fashioned of the bone of a deer (the tibia), and the stertorous
sonorities of the earthen drums; and as the fantastically attired
figures whirled around and around, their dull gray shadows whisked to
and fro on the golden brown sand, all in the red sunset glow.

Tscholens, quitting the council-house, glanced but indifferently at them
and then away at the lengthening perspective of the azure mountains of
the Great Smoky range. The harbingers of the twilight were advancing in
a soft blue haze over the purple and garnet tinted slopes near at hand,
their forests all leafless now, although the autumn had lingered long,
and the burnished golden days of the Indian summer were loath to go.
Lights were springing up here and there in the town as the glow of the
hearths of the dwellings, where supper was cooking, flickered out to
meet on the threshold the rays of the departing sun, which seemed to
pause there for a farewell glance in at the open door. In the centre of
the "beloved square" the fire which always burned here was slowly
smouldering. It flung a red reflection on the front of the building
devoted to the conferences of the aged councilors, painted a peaceful
white and facing the setting sun. At this moment was emerging from it a
figure which Tscholens had not before seen.

A man so old he was that even the Indian's back was bent. His face was
of weird effect, for amid its many wrinkles were streaks of
parti-colored paint such as he had worn more than three quarters of a
century earlier, when his fleet foot and the old war-trace were
familiar. In common with all the Cherokees, his head was polled and bare
save for a tuft, always spared to afford a grasp for any hand bold
enough and strong enough to take the scalp; but this lock, although
still dense and full, was of a snowy whiteness, contrasting sharply with
the red paint and belying the warlike aspect of the red-feathered crest
that trembled and shivered with the infirmities of his step. A heavy
robe of fur reached almost to his feet, and a mantle, curiously wrought
of the iridescent feathers of the neck and breast of the wild turkey,
bespoke his consequence and added to the singularity of his aspect; for
Indians seldom attained such age in those wild days, the warriors being
usually cut off in their prime. It is to be doubted if Tscholens had
ever seen so old a man, for this was Tsiskwa of Citico, reputed then to
be one hundred and ten years of age.

The step of the young grandfather, sauntering along, came to an abrupt
halt. He stood staring, exclaiming to the Cherokee warrior Savanukah,
"_Pennau wullih! Auween won gintsch pat_?" (Look yonder! Who is that who
has just come?)

It was an eagle-like majesty which looked forth from the eyes of Tsiskwa
of Citico, as he seated himself on the long cane-wrought divan, just
within the entrance of the cabin on the eastern side of the "beloved
square." Time can work but little change in such a spirit. An eagle,
however old, is always an eagle.

The sage lifted one august claw and majestically waved it at the young
Delaware _illau_ (war-captain) standing before him, while Savanukah
turned away to join the dancers. "Lenni Lenape?--I remember--I remember
very well when you came from the West!"

Tscholens was not stricken with astonishment, although that migration is
held by investigators of pre-Columbian myths[11] to have occurred before
the ninth century! It was formerly a general trait among the Indians to
use the, first person singular in speaking of the tribe, and to avoid,
even in its name, the plural termination. Tsiskwa went on with the tone
of reminiscence rather than legendary lore, and with an air of bated
rancor, as of one whose corroding grievance still works at the heart, to
describe how the Lenni Lenape crossed the Mississippi and fell upon the
widespread settlements of the Alligewi (or Tallegwi) Indians--considered
identical with the Cherokee (Tsullakee)--and warred with them many years
in folly, in futility, in hopeless defeat.

He lifted his eyes and gazed at the sun. A curve of pride steadied his
old lips. His face was as resolute, as victorious, in looking backward
as ever it had been in vaunting forecast. His was the temperament that
always saw in prophecy or retrospect what he would wish to see. And that
sun, now going down, had lighted him all his life along a path of
conscious triumph.

And then, he continued, the Lenni Lenape, after years of futile war,
combined with the Mengwe,[12] and before their united force the Cherokee
retired into the impregnable stronghold of their mountains, their
beautiful country, the pride of the world!

He waved his hand toward the landscape--lying out there in the lustre of
its exquisite coloring, in the clarified air and the enhancing sunset;
in the ideality of the contour of its majestic lofty mountains; in the
splendor of its silver rivers, its phenomenally lush forests, its rich
soil--pitying the rest of the world who must needs dwell elsewhere.

"And here," he went on, "the European found me two centuries ago."

He proceeded to narrate the advent of De Soto and his followers into the
country of the Cherokees, embellishing his account with unrecorded
particulars of their stay, especially in their digging for gold and
silver, in which enterprise he himself seemed to have actively
participated--only some two centuries previous!

Tscholens, listening, looked about absently at the "beloved square,"
which was vacant, with its open piazza-like building on each of the four
sides. Two or three men were talking in the "war cabin," painted a vivid
red. On the western side of the square the roof of the "holy cabin"
showed dark against a lustrous reach of the shimmering river; despite
the shadows within the broad entrance, the "sacred white seat" and the
red clay transverse wall that partitioned off the _sanctum sanctorum_
were plainly visible, but all was empty, deserted--the cheera-taghe had
departed for the night.

As Tsiskwa paused to cough, the Delaware, suddenly taking heart of
grace, observed that it had always been the boast of the Lenni Lenape
that they were the first tribe to welcome the European, the Dutch, to
the land that they now called New York.

Whereupon Tsiskwa retorted in a tempest of racking coughs that, whoever
welcomed the Europeans here or there, it was no credit that the Lenape
should be so forward to appropriate it! The white people were not the
friends of the red man. They wanted the whole country. Finally they
would have it.

"_Mattapewiwak nik, schwannakwak_!" (The white people are a deceiving
lot!) said Tscholens, seeking some common ground on which they could
meet with a mutual sentiment.

And at once Tsiskwa was all animation and as aggressive as at twenty.
Well, indeed, might the Lenape say that! They were forever an easy
prey--not only of the astute Europeans, but of the simple Indian as
well. For a hundred years they had been the dupe of the Mengwe! As the
mind of Tsiskwa dwelt on the various subtleties of the diplomatic
attitude of the Mengwe toward the Lenape, its craft so appealed to him
that his lips curved with relish; a smile irradiated his blurred eyes
and intensified his wrinkles; his cough, shaking the folds of his outer
fur garments above his wasted chest, mingled with his gay chuckle of
merriment, as young as a boy's, while he cried, "Iroquois!
Iroquois!"--the characteristic exclamation of the Mengwe confederation,
whence they take their modern and popular name, and signifying, "I have
spoken! I have spoken!"

At the familiar and detested sound the Lenape suddenly smote his breast
with his braceleted arms, and a strong cry involuntarily broke from
him--so poignant, so bitter, so shrill, that it sounded high above the
bleating flute, the guttural drone of the drum, the vibratory throb of
the dancing feet, and brought the pastime to a sudden close. In another
moment the "beloved square" was filled with crowds of the Cherokees and
their huddling shadows, all a medley in the last red suffusions of the
sinking sun. To the tumult of eager, anxious, polite questions,
Tscholens faltered to Savanukah, who had hastily returned:--

"_N'schauwihilla! N'dagotschi! Lowanneunk undchen_!" (I am fainting! I
am cold! The wind comes from the north!)

He looked ill enough, but Savanukah's sharp eyes scanned suspiciously
the aged countenance of Tsiskwa of Citico. Tsiskwa was, however, the
image of venerable and respected innocence. His aged lips mumbled one
upon the other silently. He hardly seemed to take note of the tumult.
When the afflicted "grandfather" was being led away from the scene,
Savanukah loitered to ask, with well-couched phrase and the show of deep
reverence, what had been the tenor of the discourse, and it was with a
galvanic jerk that the old man appeared to gather his faculties
together.

"Of what did he talk?" Tsiskwa fixed august eyes upon Savanukah as he
repeated the query. "Am _I_ to remember of what young men talk?--the mad
young men?--mad, mad--all quite mad!"

For not to Savanukah, surely, would he confess; and although because of
this reticence that discerning party believed that Tsiskwa had wittingly
wounded their emotional "grandfather" in his tenderest pride till he
roared like a bull, Savanukah afterward had cause to repudiate this
opinion in a conviction which was less to the credit of the acumen of
Tsiskwa than a full confession of his breach of etiquette in tormenting
his young "grandfather" might have been. At the time Savanukah felt a
certain, malicious pride in the old man's keenness and poise and
capacity, and he said apart to the inquisitive bystanders that, as might
have been expected, the big bird, Tsiskwa-yah, had pounced upon the
little bird, Tscholen-tit--for the name of each signifies a bird in
their respective languages, and the suffixes imply great and small. And
mightily pleased was Savanukah with his own wit.

That night came a sudden change. A keen frost was falling soon after the
sun went down, for the wind was laid, and such a chill glittering white
moon came gliding out of the mists about the dark Great Smoky domes that
it seemed the winter incarnate. All adown the desert aisles of the
leafless woods the light lay with a flocculent glister like snow, so
enhanced was its whiteness in the rare air and the blackness of the
forest shadows--spare, clearly drawn, all filar and fine like the
intricacies of a delicate line engraving. Something that the daylight
might have shown, blue and blurred, was about the mountains; it followed
the progress of that wintry moon westward. Presently, drawn up from
across the ranges, it proved to be a purple cloud, and despite the broad
section of the heavens still clear and the glittering whorls of the
constellations, that cloud held snow.

As the loitering southern winter had been long in abeyance, many of the
Cherokees of Citico Town were still in their airy summer residences, but
in one of the conical "winter houses," stove-like, air-tight,
windowless, plastered within and without with the impervious red clay of
the region, after the fashion of the great rotunda, Tscholens, in view
of his sudden seizure and complaint of the gentle breeze of the south as
freighted with the chill of the north, was consigned to rest. Half a
dozen Cherokee braves were detailed to accompany him, nominally as a
guard; but, there being no menace, this was in recognition of his
importance and distinction, his escort of Delaware Indians having been
billeted about in the town. There was no chimney, and although the fire
which burned in the centre of the clay floor exhaled but little smoke,
it hung in the air for the lack of the means of escape, and seemed to
add to the warmth which the fuel sent forth. Now and again the
superfluity of ashes encroached on the live coals. Whereupon one or
another of the occupants of the restricted apartment, silent and
recumbent upon the cane divan, which served now as bed and extended all
ground the room between the walls and the row of posts that upheld the
roof, would reach out a long stick, furnished for the purpose to each
sleeper, and touch off the incumbering ash from the glow of the embers.
As the night wore deeper into the dark hours these intervals of waking
were rarer.

Tscholens, muffled in bed draperies of otter furs and feathered mantles,
his cane-wrought couch softened with panther and wolf skins, heard the
wind going its rounds, and he realized that the direction of the
currents of the air had veered and it came straight from the north. With
the mere suggestion his heart sank. How should he return whence it
came?--baffled, denied, empty-handed!--from these specious Cherokees,
who yet called the Lenape "grandfather."

The young war-captain had divined since he had been among them that the
Cherokees were making ready for war against the British government; they
would attack the South Carolina colonists, and for this reason, if for
no other, they would do nothing to anger the Mengwe, the Iroquois, whom,
however, they had often fought: for they loved war--they loved war!

Gradually the room grew less warm. A sudden stir sounded under the
divan, and a dog presently crept out to the fire, stretching lengthily
and yawning widely as he went. He bestowed himself in an upright posture
by the coals and looked down with drowsy gravity at the glow. His
pendant ears, his long, pointed muzzle, his upright, rotund body, and
his pose of solemn pondering made a queer shadow on the wall. He was no
Cherokee, so to speak, but was the property of a French officer, and,
following his master here from Fort Toulouse, _aux Alibamons_, had been
left in the care of a Cherokee friend to await his owner's return from a
mission to Fort Chartres and other French settlements "in the Illinois."
The dog spoke any language, it might seem; for when one of the braves,
half-awakened by his loud, unmannerly yawn, called out a reproof to him
in Cherokee, he wagged his tail among the cold ashes till he stirred up
a cloud of gritty particles; then he made his way across the room to the
speaker, wheezing and sniffing, and bantering for a romp, till he was
caught by the muzzle and, squeaking and shrilling, thrust under the
divan anew.

Once more silence, save for the patrol of the wind again on its rounds.
Once more the flare of the fire, dying gradually down to a smouldering
red glow, akin to the smothered red tone of the terra-cotta wall. Once
more the hot, angry eyes of the young war-captain, staring hopelessly,
sleeplessly into the red gloom and the dull mischance of the future,
sequel of the past.

Suddenly a thought struck him. It seemed at first to take his breath
away. He gasped at the mere suggestion of its temerity. Then it set his
blood beating furiously in his veins. After a space, in which he sought
to calm himself, to still his nerves, to tame his quivering muscles, he
rose slowly to a sitting posture, then stepped deftly, lightly to the
floor. Standing motionless, he glanced keenly about in the dull red
gloom. All silence--no stir save the regular rise and fall of the
breathing of the slumbering Indians. Nevertheless, with his keen
perceptions all alert and tense, he felt an eye upon him. He looked back
warily over his shoulder through the lucid red gloom, like a palpable
medium, as one looks, through a veil or tinted glass.

It was the eye of the dog! The animal lay under the couch, his muzzle
flat on the clay floor. A serious yet doubtful vigilance was in his
aspect. Tscholens was already at the exit, which was a narrow winding
passage serving as a wind-break, and with a sudden turn leading to the
outer world. He heard the abrupt patter of the dog's feet on the clay
floor, and a drowsy voice calling to the animal in Cherokee, admonishing
him to be still. Tscholens waited without, and, as the dog issued and
with half-aroused suspicions sniffed dubiously around him, he stooped
down and patted the creature's head. It was well, after all, that he
should follow; the noise of the dog's exit and return would serve to
cover his own absence.

He sought craftily to make friends with the dog. "_Mon chou! Mon
cochon_!" he said, aping the endearments addressed to dog or horse which
he had heard from the French officers at Fort Chartres, where he had
recently been. Then suddenly in agitation: "_Tais toi! Sois sage_!"

For the animal was indeed no Cherokee. At the sound of his native
tongue, as it were, he demonstrated how little he cared to be in his
skin, for his joyous bounces almost took him out of that integument.
Luckily his gambols were noiseless,--for the ground was covered with
snow.

Tscholens stood for a moment motionless, his brain still afire with the
imminent emprise, but his hot heart turning cold, and failing; for the
snow--oh, treacherous cloud!--the snow would betray his steps and the
trail disclose the mystery.

"Oh, _Lowannachen_!" (Oh, north wind!) he moaned, holding up both hands
outstretched to the north. "Oh, _wischiksil! Witschemil_!" (Oh, be thou
vigilant! Help me!)

Then suddenly lowering his head, he sped like the wind itself through
the town, along the river bank and into the sacred precincts of the
"beloved square." Ah! here he had stood this evening with what different
hope and heart. Here in front of the eastern cabin he had sat beside the
wily Tsiskwa of Citico, who might hardly make feeble shift to sway a
reed, and yet with sharp sarcasms had stabbed him again and again to the
very heart.

"_Pihmtonheu_! Oh, _pihmtonheu_!" (He has the crooked mouth! Oh, he has
the crooked mouth!) Tscholens muttered between his set teeth as he
crossed the open space and paused before the western "holy cabin."

But for his rage, perhaps, but for his smarting wounds, Tscholens might
have labored with some deterrent sense of sacrilege. But no! With one
elastic bound he leaped upon the "holy white seat," whence he surmounted
the tier of places still behind and higher; then he lightly swung
himself down into the intervening space in front of the inner partition
formed by a red clay wall.

A momentary pause--a monition of caution. He looked back over his
shoulder at the pallid world without, visible across the barrier of
seats through the broad entrance of the loggia-like place. With the
reflection from the drifts on the ground and the tempered radiance of
the moon behind the tissues of cloud, the scene seemed more wan, more
illumined with ghastly light, because of the density of the gloom
wherein he stood. The conical-shaped winter tenements had each a thatch
of snow; the great circular council-house, with its whitened dome,
glimmered as stately as some marble rotunda, on its high mound, distinct
against the blurring blue shadow of the night and the gray clouds and
the bare boughs of the encompassing forest. No living creature was to be
seen, save the dog that had followed him, and that had paused to
investigate some real or fancied find beneath the snow,--a bone,
perhaps, flung out from the feastings of overnight; perhaps some little
animal, young or hurt, whelmed in the drift. Now the dog thrust down a
tense, inquiring muzzle, sniffing tentatively, cautiously, and again he
plied alternately his forefeet and his hindfeet, digging out the snow
from the quarry; then once more, with a motionless body and a straight,
quivering tail, he applied his sensitive nostrils to the examination.

Tscholens with gratification noted his absorption. This was indeed well.
The animal's persistent following further might have hampered his plans
and revealed his intrusion. The next moment, as the _illau_ turned to
his purpose, densest night seemed to have encompassed him. The shadows
cloaked all, save only the blank wall of clay and, down close to the
ground, an arched opening into the _sanctum sanctorum_,--an opening so
limited that it might barely suffice to admit a man's body, creeping
prone upon the earth, and so whelmed in night that it seemed to give a
new and adequate interpretation of the idea of darkness. Could he hope,
all unaccustomed here, to turn in that restricted space to retrace the
way? Could a ray of guiding light be caught from without across this
high, guarding barrier of tiers of seats? And what perchance might lurk
within instead of the object of this search?

At the mere thought of this object of search all fear, all vestige of
anxiety vanished. Tscholens felt his heart beat fast. His blood throbbed
in his temples. He dropped upon his knees--a sinuous, supple motion, a
vague rustle, and he had passed into the unimagined dark precincts
beyond the aperture.

Absolute quietude now reigned in the "holy cabin." The darkness filled
it with a solemnity and awe that made a compact with silence and
accounted the slightest sound, the softest stir, as a sacrilege.

When an owl--a tiny thing, the familiar little "wahuhu" of the
Cherokees--flitted down with its noiseless wings from out the sky and
sat, a mere tuft of feathers and big round eyes, on one of the eaves,
its shrill cry and convulsive chatter smote the night with a sudden
affright--all the breathless listening spaces of the "beloved square"
seemed to shiver at the sound, and the keen sleety lines of snow were
tremulously vibrant with it as the flakes came slanting down once more
from the north.

For as Tscholens plunged out from the sanctuary his first consciousness
of the world without was the chill touch of the falling snow on his
cheek, its moist, icy breath on his lips beating back his own quick,
agitated respiration. The little "wahuhu," all startled by his sudden
exit, rose with a sharp, cat-like mew from the eaves above his head,
dislodging a drift upon his hair, and fluttered away to a branch of a
tree, still gazing after him as he sped swiftly, joyously, to the winter
house where he lodged,--the descending snow would soon fill the trace of
his light footsteps and none be the wiser.

All danger of discovery, however, was not over-past. One of the braves
in the winter house experienced a vague intimation of an entrance into
the building, that peculiar chill which accompanies even to the warmest
fireside an intruder from the outer air. It seemed explained when he
roused himself and saw standing by the fire the French officer's dog,
now gazing at the glow with meditative eyes, now diverted to
industriously licking his sides. As the long cane of the waking Indian
threw off the summit of the ashes and touched up the embers to a more
cordial warmth, the dog, always relishing companionship, repaired to the
side of the divan, and the young Cherokee, pushing him off, noticed the
dripping sides of the animal where the snow had melted on the hair.

"It must be raining," he said to himself, all unaware that aught had
entered except the dog, coming and going after the manner of his
restless kind. The incident recurred no more to his mind save for a
vague recollection of his error when he perceived in the morning that it
was snow that had fallen in the night and not rain.

A new sensation pervaded the town upon its awakening. The "grandfather"
announced the termination of his visit.

"_N'matschi_!" (I shall go home) he said. And in explanation of this
sudden resolution, "_N'matunguam_." (I have had a bad dream.)

Now a dream among the Indians was of hardly less significance than among
the Hebrews of old. It was sufficient justification for the undertaking
of any enterprise or for any change of intention. Thus the departure of
the Delaware delegation was shorn of all surprise or imputation of
discourtesy. The head-men among the Cherokees felt it very definitely a
relief to be freed from the importunities of their "grandfather."

"Good speed to the journey of the _illau_ Tscholens!" Atta-Kulla-Kulla
said that evening after the departure, as the head-men of several towns
sat discussing the matter around the council-fire in the great
state-house of Citico.

"A turbulent 'grandfather' has a stormy voice and makes the heart of a
young man like me very poor for fear!" the aged Tsiskwa coughed out, and
they all greeted the great man's jest with a laugh of appreciation, and
felt it was well that one so old could at once be so sage and so merry.
But there came a time when they were of a different mind.

A most important crisis had supervened in the policy of the Cherokee
Indians toward the British government when their attention was diverted
from their projected demonstration against the South Carolina colonists
by a sudden attack from their ancient enemy, the Mengwe (the Iroquois,
as the colonists called them). It was an altogether unprovoked attack,
it seemed. The martial Cherokees, however, always eager to fight,
demanded no explanations, but at once took the war-path with a great
array of their brisk young braves, and because of this interruption, it
was said, the war of the Cherokees against the British was long delayed.

When at last the _casus belli_ of the Iroquois was disclosed it struck
the Cherokees of Citico Town like a thunderbolt. The Cherokee nation,
said the Mengwe, had presumed to recognize the independence of the Lenni
Lenape, whom they knew to have been conquered by the Mengwe more than a
century earlier.

This, of course, elicited from the Cherokees a denial of any such
recognition. Whereupon the Lenni Lenape themselves produced in
counter-asseveration the official belt of the Cherokees, given in
exchange for their own, and brought to the hand of their chief sachem by
their young _illau_ Tscholens, from Citico Town, the residence of the
Chief Tsiskwa.

A deep amazement fell upon the Cherokees of Citico--the sort of
superstitious consternation that a somnambulist might feel in
contemplating in broad daylight the deeds he had wrought in
sleep-walking. As to the rest of the nation, it was in vain that Tsiskwa
denied; for there were many confirmatory details in support of the
incontestable fact of the official belt openly shown in the possession
of the Lenni Lenape. The gossips recapitulated the long and solitary
audience with Tsiskwa to which Tscholens had been admitted--that strange
wild cry with which it had terminated seeming now a cry of joy, not
pain; and this interpretation was borne out by the obvious affectation
of illness by which he had sought to hide the true import of the
interview. More than all, the matter was put beyond reasonable doubt by
the discovery of the official belt of the Delawares in the _sanctum
sanctorum_ of the "holy cabin" in the "beloved square" among the
treasures of the blended religion and statecraft which pertained to the
government of the Cherokees. That Tscholens could have surreptitiously
exchanged the belts, as Tsiskwa of Citico, dismayed, overwhelmed, yet
blusteringly contended, was held to be preposterous; for there was not a
moment, sleeping or waking, when the Delawares were not in the company
and close charge of the Cherokees, who must needs have been cognizant of
any such demonstration.

Only one explanation was deemed plausible: the old man, doubtless in his
dotage despite his seeming mental poise, had lost sight of the political
significance of the bauble; he had bestowed it after the manner of the
presents that all were unofficially heaping upon the "grandfather," and
had mechanically, unthinkingly, received in exchange the Delaware belt.

After one reeling moment of doubt the town of Citico recovered its
balance and loyally supported its prince, but the rest of the nation was
unanimous in the acceptance of the popular interpretation.

How far extended the influence of this recognition by the Cherokees of
the independence of the Lenni Lenape it is impossible to say, but it is
well known that they acted independently in the American phase of the
Seven Years' War and fought on behalf of the French, and in the
Revolution they took the part of the Americans against the British,
contrary to the policy of the Mengwe. About the time of the treaty of
the United States with the Indians in 1795, the Mengwe, who had been
greatly cast down by the defeat of their allies, the British, came
forward of their own accord and desired publicly to acknowledge the
independence of the Lenni Lenape.

The masterly political machinations of Tscholens and the mystery in
which they were enveloped did not permanently impair the cordial
relations existing between his tribe and the Cherokees, for so late as
1779 a delegation of fourteen Cherokees is chronicled as appearing in
the country of the Lenni Lenape at their council-fire, to condole with
them on the death of their head-chief; but neither before nor since is
there any record of another visit of the turbulent "grandfather" to the
banks of the Tennessee River.




NOTES


1. _Page_ 6. The annals of the southwestern settlements commemorate many
instances of daring hearts in delicate frames, and the pioneer woman who
perhaps under softer and safer circumstances would have screamed at a
mouse often shouldered a rifle and bravely joined the frontiersmen in
the defense of the stockade against the most cruel, most wily, most
warlike savage foe that ever a civilized force encountered. Courage, of
all the qualities of the moral panoply, is the least to be reckoned with
by logic. Perhaps after all it is not inherent, even in the nobler
organisms, but evolved by a conscientious sense of responsibility and
the dynamic potencies of emergency. La Bruyere says: "_Jetez-moi dans
les troupes comme un simple soldat, je suis Thersite: mettezmoi a la
tete d'une armee don't j'aie a repondre a toute l'Europe, je suis
Achille_!"

2. _Page_ 114. The chungke stone of this favorite game of the southern
Indians bears a certain resemblance to the ancient discus of the Greek
athlete. This, it will be remembered, fashioned of metal or stone,
circular, almost flat, was clasped by the fingers of one hand and held
in the bend of the forearm, extending almost to the elbow. The genuine
chungke stone is solid and discoidal in shape, beautifully polished,
wrought of quartz, or agate, the most distinctive being concave on both
sides, beveled toward the flat outer edge, and having a depression in
the centre of both surfaces for the convenience of holding it with the
second finger and thumb, the first finger clasping the periphery. Its
usual dimensions are about six or eight inches in diameter. There are
several varieties of these archaic relics, some flat, others lenticular
or of a wedge-shell shape, and others, still, concave on one side and
convex on the other. An absolutely spherical stone, bearing the
extraordinarily high polish that distinguishes these unique objects,
found in an ancient mound and supposed to have relation to the same or a
similar game, calls to mind the globular quoit of the classical athletes
and that "enormous round" described by Homer, "Aetion's quoit"--to hurl
which bowl they vie, "who teach the disk to sound along the sky."

The exquisite finish of the chungke stone was compassed without the aid
of a single tool, merely by the attrition of one stone upon another,
"from time immemorial rubbed smooth upon the rocks, with prodigious
labor," resulting in an object of such symmetrical beauty that even in
the museums of the present day, out of which it is rarely seen, it
challenges admiration. Antiquaries variously contend that it was hurled
through the air and that it was bowled on the edge along the ground, its
equilibrium being so perfect that on a level space it will roll a great
distance, falling only when its impetus is expended.

The chungke stone is often confounded with the Indian quoit, likewise
circular and fashioned of smoothly wrought stone, but with an orifice in
the centre, rendering it in effect a ring to be flung over a stake at a
distance, or to be caught on the point of a lance.

It has been inferred that Adair is mistaken in his assertion that by the
Indian law the chungke stones were exempt from burial with the effects
of the dead, since certain of the most perfect specimens known to modern
archaeological collections were found in the exploration of mounds in
the valley of the Tennessee River. By many these mounds are supposed to
be prehistoric, and the game is doubtless of an unimaginable antiquity.
As late as his day, among the Cherokees; 1736, the stones were kept with
the "strictest religious care," and were the property of the town where
the game was played.

Adair, despite his roving life, had evidently scant sympathy with
athletics. He may have been growing old and indolent when he speaks of
the game as a "task of stupid drudgery" and opines that instead of a
sport it might "with propriety of language" be described as "running
hard labor." Other eye-witnesses, however, vaunt the great beauty and
grace of the game. Captain Bernard Romany chronicles with relish the
dexterity requisite, the great strength and skill displayed by the
participants in the violent exercise, although demurely moralizing the
while on its perilous fascination to both players and spectators, by
reason of the inordinate temptation presented by its doubtful chances to
the reckless gambler. Lieutenant Timberlake alone calls it
"_nettecawaw_."

As there are moot points concerning the stones themselves and the
conduct of the sport, so the chungke spears differ in the accounts of
the early adventurers in this region. The length is variously given as
eight, ten, twelve feet. The shape is sometimes represented as a lance
or pole heavy in the centre and tapering at both ends to a blunt point,
and others describe an implement resembling a magnified golf club of the
present day.

3. _Page_ 114. This choice decoration, popular though it was, could not
be attained without a penalty commensurate with its valuation. It is
stated by early travelers among the Indian tribes that thirty days were
required to properly heal an ear thus distended _a la mode_. The
patient, if one so prideful might be so called, could only have one ear
in the painful process at a time, in order that he might be able to lie
in sleeping on the other side until such time as his embellished ear
should be again serviceable for this prosaic purpose, and permit the
like decoration of the opposite member.

4. _Page_ 142. An illustration of how the Choctaws profited by these
earnest labors may be given in the fate of a chapel erected for their
benefit at Chickasaha by the French and placed in charge of a Jesuit
missionary. The Choctaws so far accepted Christianity as to be able to
travesty the services and mimic the priest with surprising humor and
verisimilitude when the English came in, and were wont to go to the old
chapel for this profane exhibition to the mingled delight and
reprobation of the military new-comers. The chapel was soon afterward
destroyed, but Captain Romans records that in 1771 he saw the cross
still standing on the site, a melancholy memorial of futile missionary
endeavor.

All the Indians, however, were temperamentally averse to the services
and tenets of the Christian religion, and Timberlake gives an instance
among the Cherokees in 1760 in which a missionary was balked by a unique
interruption. "Mr. Martin, who having preached Scripture till both he
and his audience were heartily tired, was told at last that they knew
very well that if they were good they would go up; if bad, down; that he
could tell no more; that he had long plagued them with what they no ways
understood, and they desired that he would depart the country."

The epitome of theology thus deduced was so far a just conclusion. But
doubtless the Indians labored greatly with imperfect comprehension.
Humboldt describes a service among a South American tribe, in which a
missionary preaching in Spanish was at his wits' end to make his
audience differentiate between _infierno_ and _invierno_. They persisted
in shivering with horror at the picture of the hell of his warnings in
which the wicked were supposed to be subjected to everlasting winter.
One is tempted to think that the end might have justified the means if
the good padre had fallen in with the prejudice against the rainy season
and adopted, in lieu of the fire-and-brimstone of Scripture, as a future
state of punishment, the icy Ninth Circle of Dante's Inferno, where

    "_Eran l' ombre dolenti nella ghiaccia,
    Mettendo i denti in nota di cicogna_."

5. _Page_ 151. The cultivation of personal pride was an essential
element of training among the Indians. They held the lower ranks of
white people in great contempt, and Timberlake records that in some
athletic diversions at which he and other members of the Virginia
regiment were present they refused to play or to hold conference with
any of the troops except the officers.

6. _Page_ 179. The primary and somewhat complex significance of the word
_ada-wehi_ is suggested by the idea of sorcery,--a man, or animal, or
even element endowed with uncontrolled superlative and supernatural
powers. It has been stated that since the introduction of Christianity
and the printing of the New Testament in the Cherokee typographical
character the word has been utilized with its subtleties of
signification to express spirit or angel. In this story, however, the
scene of which is laid in a period long previous to the conversion of
the tribe, or even the accepted date of the invention of the Cherokee
alphabet, the word is used in its early and original sense to denote a
magician of special and expansive gifts of sorcery.

7. _Page_ 186. Although this officer's name was regularly incorporated
into the Cherokee vocabulary as a synonym of disaster, he seemed to
revolt at the unhappy plight of the people whom in the discharge of his
duty he had succeeded in reducing to so abject a condition of despair
and woe, and has left on record expressions of compassion incongruous
with his deeds and his position as a professed soldier of long
experience. He had served in Flanders and Ireland in his youth as
captain in the Royal Scots before he first came to America as major in
Montgomerie's regiment of Highlanders.

Some adequate idea of the desolation and destitution of the Indians may
be gleaned from the reports to the British government: "The Cherokees
must certainly starve or come into terms, and even in that case Colonel
Grant thinks it is hardly in the power of the provincials to save them.
He proposed in a few days to send for The Great Warrior (Oconostota) and
The Little Carpenter (Atta-Kulla-Kulla) to come and treat for peace, if
they choose to save their nation from destruction. Till he receives
their answer he will endeavor to save the small remains of the Lower
Towns. In the mean time Colonel Grant intends to put Fort Prince George
into repair, and to wait there or at Ninety-Six till he receives orders
from Sir Jeffrey Amherst."

The idea of the pangs of hunger and the sight of starvation and
deprivation may have been the more repugnant to Colonel Grant since he
was himself famous as a _bon vivant_ and gourmet. Indeed, even yet, in
turning old pages we come upon records of his dinners. Bartram, the
Philadelphia botanist, whom the Muscogee Indians quaintly called
_Puc-Puggy_ (the Flower Hunter) details the great size of a rattlesnake,
"six feet long and as thick as the leg of an ordinary man" which he
chanced to kill in his bosky researches near Fort Picolata in Florida,
and not the least surprising feature of the incident was a message from
the commandant inviting both combatants to dinner, "Governor Grant being
very fond of rattlesnake flesh." This officer, at that time Royal
Governor of East Florida, was holding a congress with the Creek Indians
hard by the fort, having come from St. Augustine with a detachment of
its garrison for the purpose. Bartram, dining in company with Grant that
day, saw his enemy served up in several different styles,--and he, too,
must turn softhearted!--he could not partake of the dish,--and "was
sorry after killing the serpent, when coolly recollecting every
circumstance of it." However, neither the rattlesnake nor the Cherokees
were in condition to profit by these belated graces of magnanimity.

Through Grant's scattered correspondence there is a flavor of "vivers."
Frederick George Mulcaster, still with the garrison of St. Augustine, in
a letter addressed to Grant, then in Boston, laughingly alludes to his
constant good cheer. "Captain Urquhart writes to his brother officers
here that '_General Grant lives like a General_!'" And later, in piteous
contrast, "His Excellency (the new Royal Governor) gave a dinner
yesterday to the officers of the Fourteenth and some others. It is the
only dinner he has given since the one he gave to John Stuart (famous as
the survivor of Fort Loudon) upon his arrival here,"--a matter of two
months. He further notes as a point of interest, "Your black man,
Alexander, was with me this instant to inquire after your health, and
has loaded me with _beaucoup de complimens_. He wishes much to come to
make your bread." Doubtless it was well made, for Grant, prospering,
went on from dinner to dinner, from promotion to promotion, attaining
the rank of General in the army and great corpulency, representing
Sutherlandshire in the British Parliament many years, and dying at the
age of eighty-six at his birthplace, Ballindalloch, in the north of
Scotland.

8. _Page_ 212. The "Annual Register" in giving among State Papers the
text of a treaty between Governor Lyttleton of South Carolina,
Captain-General, etc., and Atta-Kulla-Kulla, "deputy for the whole
Cherokee Nation," dated at Fort Prince George, Dec. 26, 1759, adds in a
note: "Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the Little Carpenter, who concluded this treaty
in behalf of the Cherokee Indians, was in England and at court several
times in the year 1730."

9. _Page_ 215. The oratorical gifts of this Indian (under the name
Chollochcullah, supposed to be a phonetic variant of Atta-Kulla-Kulla)
are thus described in _The Gentleman's Magazine_ for October, 1755,
chronicling the details of an earlier diplomatic occasion: "The speaker
rose up, and holding a bow in one hand and a sheaf of arrows in the
other, he delivered himself in the following words, with all the
distinctness imaginable, with the dignity and graceful action of a Roman
or Grecian orator, and with all their ease and eloquence."

10. _Page_ 231. Their tribal name, "men of fire," and their great
veneration for that element have given rise to the conjecture that the
Cherokees were originally fire-worshipers, as well as polytheistic. The
interpolation of the intensative syllable "ta" is, according to Adair, a
"note of magnitude," and the title of their prophets, whose functions
are blended as priests, conjurers, physicians, and councilors,--the
cheera-taghe,--signifies "men of divine fire." But Adair protests that
the theistic ideals of the Indians were wholly spiritual, and that they
had no plurality of gods. They paid their devotions merely to the "great
beneficent supreme holy spirit of fire, who resides as they think above
the clouds," and he argues plausibly that if they worshiped fire itself
they would not have willfully extinguished the sanctified element
annually on the last day of the old year throughout the nation, the
invariable custom, before the cheera-taghe of each town kindled the
"holy fire" anew, this being one of their exclusive functions. It may be
that in their ancient rhapsodies (many of which Mr. James Mooney has
collected for the Smithsonian Institution) addressed to bird or flame or
beast the Indians adopted a poetic license no more significant of
polytheism than the flights of fancy of many Christian poets in odes to
the moon, to Fate, "to the red planet Mars," to the "wild west wind."
Mere impersonation and invocation in apostrophe and paeans are not
necessarily worship. Doubtless these spells and charms often arose from
a superstitious half-belief, an imaginative freak, such as possesses the
civilized visionary who shows a coin to the new moon to propitiate its
fancied waxing influence in behalf of a balance at the banker's, or the
Christianized Scotch Highlander of even the early nineteenth century who
threw a piece of hasty pudding over the left shoulder on the anniversary
of _Bealdin_ (the Gaelic for no other than Baal) to appease the spirits
of the mists, the winds, the ravens, the eagles, and thus protect the
crops and flocks. There is a thin boundary line as difficult to define
as "to distinguish and divide a hair 'twixt south and southwest side,"
between true belief and feigned credence.

The veneration of the ancient Cherokees for the element of fire, in
addition to their name, its careful conservation throughout the year,
their addresses to its spirit, _Higayuli Tsunega, hatu ganiga_ (O
Ancient White, you have drawn near to listen), is farther manifested by
its traces found in the exploration of burial mounds, intimating a
ceremonial introduction of the element at the remote period of
interment,--if, indeed, the construction of these mounds can he ascribed
to the Cherokees. Those on which their town houses were erected at a
later date, the clay-covered rotunda forming a superstructure looking
like a small mountain at a little distance, according to Timberlake,
wherein were held the assemblies, whether for amusement or council or
religious observances, served also as a substitute for the modern
bulletin-board. Two stands of colors were flying, one from the top of
the town house, the other at the door. These ensigns were white for
peace, and exchanged for red when war impended. "The news hollow," as
Timberlake phrases the cry, sounded from the summit of the mound, would
occasion the assembling of all the community in the rotunda to hear the
details from the lips of the chief. How much more the: "death hollow,"
harbinger of woe!

11. _Page_ 323. They are hardly to be regarded as myths perhaps, rather
as dislocated relics of fact. In treating of the "Origin of American
Nations," Dr. Barton says: "These traditions are entitled to much
consideration, for, notwithstanding the rude condition of most of the
tribes, they are often perpetuated in great purity, as I have discovered
by much attention to their history." It is generally accepted that the
first historical mention of the Cherokees occurs under the name of
_Chelaque_ in the chronicles of De Soto's expedition in 1540 when they
already occupied the Great Smoky Mountains and the contiguous region,
but the Indians themselves had a tradition, according to Haywood's
_Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee_, which was recited
annually at the Green Corn Dance, in which they claimed that they were
the earlier mound builders on the upper Ohio, whence they had migrated
at a remote date. They can be identified with the ancient Talega or
Tallegwi if the records of the _Walam Olum_ (painted sticks) may be
believed, the wooden originals of which are said to have been preserved
till 1822 and considered inexplicable, till their mnemonic signs and a
manuscript song in the Lenni Lenape language, obtained from a remnant of
the Delaware Indians, were translated by Professor C.S. Rafinesque "with
deep study of the Delaware and the aid of Zeisberger's manuscript
Dictionary in the library of the Philosophical Society."

In this, a dynasty of Lenni Lenape chiefs and the events of their reigns
are successively named, and from the first mention of their encounter
with the warlike Tallegwi or Cherokee to the discovery of Columbus there
is necessarily implied the passage of many centuries. Even the time that
has elapsed since the Tallegwi were overthrown by them is estimated as
somewhat more than a thousand years, thus placing this defeat in the
ninth century. Professor Cyrus Thomas in "The Cherokees of Pre-Columbian
Times" states that he thinks it would be more nearly correct to credit
the event to the eleventh or twelfth century. He quotes in support of
his theory from the _Walam-Olum_ as translated by Dr. Brinton, who
giving the original in parallel pages, with the mnemonic signs, does not
use in the English version the Indian names of the chiefs.

This record of the _Walam-Olum_ is really very curious. After passing
the account of the Creation, the Flood, the Migrations, and entering
upon the Chronicles, the _Walam-Olum_ reads much like a Biblical
genealogy, save that in lieu of scions of a parent tree these are
military successors, war-captains. The following quotations are from the
version given by Squier:

     47. _Opekasit_ (East-looking) being next chief, was sad
     because of so much warfare.

     48. Said let us go to the Sun-rising (_Wapagishek_) and
     many went east together.

     49. The Great River _(Messussipu)_ divided the land and
     being tired they tarried there.

     50. _Yagawanend_ (Hut-Maker) was next sakimau, and then
     the Tallegwi were found possessing the east.

     51. Followed _Chitanitis_ (Strong Friend), who longed for
     the rich east land.

     52. Some went to the east but the Tallegwi killed a
     portion.

     53. Then all of one mind exclaimed war, war!

     54. The _Talamatan_ (Not-of-themselves) and the Nitilowan
     all united (to the war).

     55. _Kinnehepend_ (Sharp-looking) was their leader, and
     they went over the river.

     56. And they took all that was there and despoiled and
     slew the Tallegwi.

     57. _Pimokhasuwi_ (Stirring About) was next chief, and
     then the Tallegwi were much too strong.

     58. _Tenchekensit_ (Open Path) followed and many towns
     were given up to him.

     59. _Paganchihilla_ was chief,--and the Tallegwi all went
     southward.

After the earliest mention of the Tallegwi in verse 50 of the First
Chronicle there are about fifty chieftains enumerated, and characterized
with their successive reigns before the entrance of the white
discoverers of the continent at the end of the Second Chronicle. In this
it is stated at verse--

     56. _Nenachipat_ was chief toward the sea.

     57. Now from north and south came the _Wapagachik_ (white
     comers).

     58. Professing to be friends, in big birds (ships). Who
     are they?

And with this dramatic climax the ancient picture record closes.

What is known as the Modern Chronicle, a fragment, begins with the
answer, "Alas! Alas! we know now who they are, these _Wapinsis_ (East
People) who came out of the sea to rob us of our lands."

And that the modern chronicle shall be certainly correct the successor
of _Lekhibit_ (the compiler of the ancient story) is assisted by
critical philologists, and Rafinesque takes issue with Holm touching a
Swedish suffix in an Indian name. "Mattanikum was chief in 1645. He is
called 'Mattahorn' by Holm, and 'horn' is not Lenapi!"

It is difficult to adjust one's credulity to accept as history this
singular Indian picture-record. Its authenticity is supported by the
great scope of the system and the reputed subtlety and close accuracy by
which abstract ideas, the origin of things, the powers of nature, the
elements of religion, could be expressed and read by those conversant
with the mnemonic signs,--as easily, Heckewelder says, as a piece of
writing. The noted antiquary Squier, however, who in this connection has
lauded Rafinesque's industry, scientific attainments, and eager
researches, states that since writing in this vein he has seen fit to
read this author's _American Nations_ and finds it "a singular jumble of
facts and fancies," and adds that it is unfortunate that the manuscript
in question should fall in this category. To praise, even with
qualifications, the author without reading all his work on the subject,
while certainly more amiable, is hardly more conducive to an impartial
estimate than to disparage on hearsay, according to that travesty of
critical judgment: "'_Que dites-vous du livre d'Hermodore?' 'Qu'il est
mauvais,' repond Anthime ... 'Mais l'aves-vous lu?' 'Non.' dit Anthime.
Quen'ajoute-t-il que Fulvie et Melanie l'ont condamne sans l'avoir lu,
et qu'il est ami de Fulvie et de Melanie_?"

In contrast with this method the caution and critical scrutiny with
which Dr. Brinton, in his work on "The Lenape," deliberates upon the
question of the authenticity of the _Walam Olum_ are indeed marked. He
carefully examines all the details both favorable and adverse, and
finally adduces the evidence of the text itself. The manuscript
submitted by him to educated Indians of the Lenni Lenape is pronounced
to be a genuine oral composition of a Delaware Indian in an ancient
dialect, evidently dictated to one not wholly conversant with, all the
terminal inflections of the words, which occasional omissions form the
chief defect of the curious "Red Score."

12. _Page_ 324. Some authorities hold that the _Talamatan_
(Not-of-themselves) mentioned by the _Walam-Olum_ were the Hurons who
allied themselves with the Delawares against the Tallegwi, and that
Heckewelder is mistaken in stating that these confederates were the
Mengwe. This story, however, follows the account of the war and the
subsequent subjection of the Delawares as given by Heckewelder.



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