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."