When Ensign Raymond encountered the snow-storm he was already advanced
some two days’ march on his mission to Choté Great, the “beloved town,”
the city of refuge of the whole Cherokee nation. The tempest came first
in a succession of capricious flurries; then the whole world seemed a
maelstrom of dizzily whirling flakes. The young officer and his force
pushed on with mettlesome disregard of its menace, although for days
it persistently fell. Afterward it drifted with the wind into great
mounds, it obscured the trail, hid the landmarks, set many a pitfall
in the deep chasms and over the thin ice of unsuspected watercourses
in narrow and steep ravines. Night brought hard freezes; the thaws of
the rising temperature at noonday were resolved into ice at dusk, and
the trees, ceasing to drip, were hung with icicles on every bough and
twig. The great pearly moon, now and again showing above the mountains
through gusty clouds, revealed strange endless forests glimmering with
crystalline coruscations, despite the obscurity, as if endowed with
some inherent source of light. The bivouac fires made scant impression
on these chill primeval environments; the flare on the ruddy faces of
the young soldiers, with their red coats and their snatches of song
and their simple joy in the contents of their unslung haversacks, paled
as it ventured out amidst the dense mysterious woods. The snowy vistas
would presently grow dim, and shadows thronged adown the perspective.
Before the ultimate obscurities were reached, the vanishing point,
certain alien green glimmers were often furtively visible,--a signal
for the swift replenishing of the fires and a renewed flaring of
the flames high into the air, with great showers of sparks and a
fierce crackling of boughs. For the number of wolves had hardly been
diminished by the Cherokee War with the British, so recently at an
end, although the easily affrighted deer and buffalo seemed for a time
to have fled the country. The predatory animals had doubtless found
their account in the slaughter of the battle-fields, and Raymond’s
chief anxiety at night was the maintenance of the vigilance of the
fire-guard, whose duty it was to feed the protective flames with fuel.
To drive off the beasts with musketry was esteemed a wanton waste of
powder, so precious was ammunition always on the frontier. Moreover,
the bellicose sound of British muskets was of invidious suggestion
in the land of the sullen and smarting Cherokees, so reluctantly
pacified, and recently re-embittered by the downfall of secret
cherished schemes of the assistance of the French to enable them to
regain their independence. Now the French were quitting the country.
Canada was ceded; the southern forts were to be evacuated. The “great
French father” had been overpowered and forced to leave them to their
fate, and their treaties with the British, half-hearted, compulsory,
flimsy of intention, were to be kept or broken at the peril of their
national existence. They resisted this conviction,--so high had been
their hopes. They had long believed that a confederation of the Indian
tribes under French commanders would drive the British colonies of
the south into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. They had
grown heady with this expectation, and prophetically triumphant. They
were now desperate with the sudden dissolving of this possibility
forever,--vindictively inimical.
There was an incident of the march which might have seemed to an older
man than Raymond far more menacing than the wolves that patrolled the
camp. Nightly there came visitors to his fire, which was a little
apart from the bivouac of the rank and file, as beseemed a commander’s
dignity. The soldiers were wont to gaze askance at the guests across
the intervening spaces, as the fire threw their long shadows upon the
snow. Feather-crested shadows they were, but never the same. Each
night certain chiefs from the town nearest the end of the day’s march
appeared out of the darkness with protestations of welcome to the
vicinity, and sat with the giddy young commander beside his fire and
talked with faces of grave import, for the smattering of the Cherokee
language that Raymond had picked up was such as might suffice for
casual conversation. The soldiers wondered and doubted as they watched,
for their lives hung on the discretion of this light-pated youth. They
were brave men enough and versed in Indian warfare, but acquainted
too with Indian treachery. The war was over, both with the French and
the Indian tribes, but that gratuitous sacrifice of life, the death of
the few occurring in the interval between the negotiation of a treaty
and the slowly pervading news of the consummation of peace, has a
peculiar horror for every soldier. They put their own heads together
around the fire and questioned much what could these men, holding aloof
all day, coming darkly, dubiously with the shadows, have in traffic
with their “Babby” Ensign,--what subject of earnest persuasion. The
lengthened discourse would be drawn out long after tattoo had sounded,
and when the soldiers, constrained to keep to fixed hours, lay around
the glowing coals like the spokes of a wheel, they still furtively
watched the figure of the gay young commander, erect, alert, very wide
awake in his dapper trim uniform, and his blanketed feather-tufted
visitors, their eager faces shown by the fitful flicker and flare of
the ensign’s fire. An icy bough would wave above them, and so chill was
the intervening atmosphere that the leaping flames wrought no change
in its glittering pendants. A star would frostily glint high, seen
through the snow-laden branches of the pine. Sometimes the clouds would
part and the pearly moon would cast a strange supernal lustre on the
scene,--the great solitary mountains on every side; the long vacant
snowy valleys glimpsed through some clifty defile; the shadowy skulking
figures of wolves, primeval denizens of the wilderness; the bivouac of
the soldiers; and these incongruously colloguing figures beside the
officer’s fire.
The words of the visitors appeared destined to be in vain. For a head
which seemed so easily turned Ensign Raymond’s was curiously hard.
Not go to Choté? They thought it not worth the while?--he would always
ask with a note of affected surprise, as if the subject had never
before been broached.
For this was the gravamen of their arguments, their persuasion, their
insistence--that he should not go to Choté.
Was there not Nequassee, on the hither side of the tumultuous Joree
mountains? The head-men of the Cherokee nation would delight to meet
him there and confer with him on whatever subject the splendid and
brave Captain Howard might desire to open with them by the mouth of his
chosen emissary, Ensign Raymond.
It was diplomacy, certainly, but it jumped with Raymond’s adolescent
relish of tantalizing, to give them no intimation of the fact that he,
himself, had as yet no knowledge of the purpose of his embassy, his
instructions being to open his sealed orders at Choté. Thus he turned,
and evaded, and shifted ground, and betrayed naught, however craftily
they sought to surprise him into some revelation of his intent.
Only to Choté he must go, he said.
Two Indians who sat with him particularly late one night, head-men from
the neighboring town of Cowetchee, were peculiarly insistent,--first,
that he and his command should accept the hospitality of their
municipality, that he, himself, might lie in the comforts of their
“stranger house,” and then, since he could not so far depart from
his orders as to break up his camp--if he must repair to one of the
Overhill towns--how near was Talassee, just beyond a precipitous ridge
of the mountains, or Ioco, or Chilhowee, or Citico,--but not to Choté,
surely. So far,--nearly as far as Tellico Great! Not to Choté,--oh, no;
never so far as to Choté!
“But to Choté,” said Ensign Raymond, “to Choté must I go.”
They never looked at each other, these crafty sages of Cowetchee.
Only the suspicion bred of long experience could discern aught of
premeditation in their conduct of the interview. One conserved a
peculiarly simple expression. His countenance was broad, with high
cheek bones and a long flat mouth. He had a twinkling eye and a
disposition to gaze about the camp with a sort of repressed quizzical
banter, as if he found the arrangement of the troops and their
accoutrements, the dress and arms of the officer, the remnants of his
supper, the methods of its service, the china and silver, all savoring
strongly of the ludicrous and provocative of covert ridicule. He held
his head canted backward as he looked from half-closed lids, across
the shimmering heated air rising above the coals, into the young
man’s face, infinitely foreign to him. Youth is intensely averse to
the slightest intimation of ridicule, and Raymond, with his personal
pride, his impulsive temperament, his imperious exactingness, could
not have brooked it for one moment had he not early observed that each
demonstration was craftily designed to shake his equilibrium, and
preceded some cogent question, some wily effort to elicit a betrayal of
the purport of his mission to Choté, and only to the “beloved town.”
The other Indian was grave, suave, the typical chief, wearing his furs
and his feathers with an air of distinction, showing no surprise at his
surroundings, hardly a passing notice indeed. He was erect, dignified,
and walked with an easy light tread, different in every particular from
the jocose rolling gait affected by the Terrapin.
The giddy Raymond began to pique himself on his capacity to meet these
emergencies which obviously Captain Howard had not anticipated. They
invested the expedition with a subtler difficulty than either had
dreamed he might encounter. He flushed with a sense of triumph, and his
bright eyes were softly alight as he gazed on the glowing coals. He
bethought himself with great relish how these adventures would garnish
his account of his trip, and having naught to do with its official
purpose might serve to regale the fireside group, where a golden-haired
girl might be pleased again to call him “prodigiously clever.” He was
suddenly reminded of the string of pearls around her bare white throat
which he had noticed at the commandant’s table, with the depressing
reflection that Captain Howard came of well-to-do people while he,
himself, had little but his commission and his pay, and that Mervyn
was rich,--rich in his own right,--and would eventually be a baronet.
For here were pearls around the savage throat of the Terrapin,--pearls
indeed of price. A single gem of his string were worth the whole of
Arabella Howard’s necklace. These were the fine fresh-water pearls
from the _Unio margaritiferus_ of the southern rivers, and they had
a satin-like lustre and rarely perfect shape, which bespeak a high
commercial value. The Terrapin wore strings of shell beads, which he
appraised more dearly,--the wampum, or “roanoke” as the southern tribes
called it,--and which fell in heavy fringes over his shirt of otter
fur. He had a collar of more than two hundred elk teeth; his leggings
were of buck-skin and solid masses of embroidery. As Ensign Raymond’s
well-bred observation, that sees all without seeming to notice aught,
took in these details, he began to have an idea of utilizing the visit
of the Indians in a method at variance with their weary marching and
counter-marching upon the citadel of his secret,--the purport of his
mission to Choté, Old Town.
He meditated gravely on this, as he sat in his camp chair by the smooth
stump of a great tree, felled for fuel, on which had been laid his
supper, serving as table, and now holding the case-bottle of brandy,
the contents of which had been offered and sparingly accepted by the
Indians, for the chiefs were by no means the victims of fire-water in
the degree in which the tribesmen suffered.
“Tus-ka-sah,” Raymond said suddenly, “tell me your real name. I know
you are never the ‘Terrapin.’” For an alias was reputed to be the
invariable rule of Indian nomenclature. The Cherokees were said to
believe that to divulge the veritable cognomen divested the possession
of the owner, destroyed his identity, and conferred a mysterious power
over him never to be shaken off. Thus they had also war names, official
names, and trivial sobriquets sufficing for identification, and these
only were communicated to the world at large, early travellers among
the tribe recording that they often questioned in vain.
Tus-ka-sah’s real face showed for one moment, serious, astute,
suspicious, and a bit alarmed, so closely personal, so unexpected was
the question. Then he canted his head backward and looked out from
under heavy lowered lids.
“La-a!” he mocked. He had caught the phrase from English settlers or
soldiers. “La-a!” he repeated derisively. Then he said in Cherokee, “If
I should tell you my name how could I have it again?”
Raymond pondered a moment on this curious racial reasoning. “It would
still be yours. Only I should know it,” he argued.
“La-a!” bleated Tus-ka-sah derisively, vouchsafing no further reply,
while the other Indian knitted his perplexed brow, wondering how from
this digression he could bring back the conversation to the trail to
Choté.
“I know what your name ought to be,” declared Raymond.
Once more a sudden alarm, a look of reality flickered through the
manufactured expressions of the Terrapin’s face, as if the ensign
might absolutely capture his intimate identity in his true name. Then
realizing the futility of divination he said “La-a!” once more, and
thrust out his tongue facetiously. Yet his eyes continued serious.
Like the rest of the world, he was to himself an object of paramount
interest, and he experienced a corrosive curiosity as to what this
British officer--to him a creature of queer, egregious mental
processes--thought his name ought to be.
“It ought to be something strange and wonderful,” said Raymond,
speciously. “It ought to be the ‘Jewel King’--or,” remembering
the holophrastic methods of Indian nomenclature--“this would be
better--‘He-who-walks-bedizened.’”
The eyes of the Indian had no longer that predominant suffusion of
ridicule. They were large, lustrous, and frankly delighted.
“_Agwa duhiyu! Agwa duhiyu!_” (I am very handsome), he exclaimed
apparently involuntarily. He glanced down complacently over his
raiment of aboriginal splendor, passing his hand over his collar of
elk teeth and tinkling his many strings of shell beads, but it was
only casually that he touched his necklace of pearls. The gesture
gave Raymond an intimation as to the degree in which were valued the
respective ornaments. It reinforced his hope that perhaps the pearls
might be purchased for a sum within the scope of his slender purse.
How they would grace the hair of the fair Arabella, her snowy neck or
arm. To be sure, he could not presume to offer them were they bought
in a jeweller’s shop in London. But as a trophy from the wilderness,
curiously pierced by the heated copper spindle, by means of which
they were strung on the sinews of deer, the price a mere pittance as
for a thing of trifling worth,--surely Captain Howard would perceive
no presumption in such a gift, the young lady herself could take no
offence. Nevertheless, the pearls were rarely worth giving in a sort he
could not hope to compass otherwise, nor indeed she to own, for, but
for the method of piercing, rated by European standards their size and
lustre would have commanded a commensurate price.
“I should like to buy a jewel from the great chief,
‘He-who-walks-bedizened,’” said Raymond, his cheek flushed, his ardent
eyes afire. “There would be a peculiar interest to tell abroad that
this was the necklace of the ‘Jewel King.’”
The Fox flashed an aggrieved and upbraiding glance upon the Terrapin.
Had they come hither to chaffer indeed of beads, when the trail to
Choté lay open, and by the utmost arts the sages of all the towns could
not thence divert this wayward soldier?
“How much?” demanded “He-who-walks-bedizened.”
He pursed up his lips, canted his head backward, and set his eyes
a-twinkle under their lowered lids.
Raymond’s heart beat fast. He had all the sensitive pride of a poor
man, highly placed socially. He would not for all the world have
offered her the trifling personal ornament within his means,--such a
compliment as Mervyn might well have paid. He tingled with jubilance
at the thought of an actual munificence, which her father could not
appropriately forbid her to accept because it was an aboriginal curio,
costing so disproportionately to its beauty and value.
He laid a guinea on the table.
“La-a!” bleated the Terrapin, in the extremity of scorn.
Another guinea, and still another, and yet the Indian shook his head.
The Fox, albeit his eyes gloated upon the gold, as if it appealed to an
appetite independent of his individuality, growled out an undertone of
remonstrance which the Terrapin heeded no more than if he had not heard.
Money slips fast through the fingers of a poor man of good station, but
Raymond was schooled to a modicum of prudence by the urgency of his
desire to possess the gems. Realizing that the demands of Tus-ka-sah
would be limited only by his supposed capacity to pay and his
willingness to part with his gold, he called a halt lest these, being
over-estimated, frustrate the project that had become insistently,
eagerly precious to him.
“Let the great chief name the price of his necklace,” he suggested a
trifle timorously, fearing a sum beyond the possibility of his wildest
extravagance.
The eyes of both the Indians followed the gold pieces, as he swept them
from the table and into his purse, with a glitter of greed akin to the
look of a dog who gazes at a bone for which he is too well trained
to beg. Then Tus-ka-sah, with a slow and circumspect motion, took the
pearls from his neck and spoke with a deliberate dignity.
“When you return to your own country call all your people
together,”--Raymond hardly smiled at this evidence of the Indian’s
idea of the population of England, so heartily were his own feelings
enlisted in the acquisition,--“tell them this is the necklace of the
‘Jewel King,’ ‘He-who-walks-bedizened.’ Then name to them the pearls,
for they have true names,--these, the smaller of the string, are the
little fish that swim in the river, and these are the birds that fly
in the clouds. These twelve large ones are the twelve months of the
year,--this, the first, is the green corn moon; this is the moon of
melons; this the harvest moon; this the moon of the hunter.” As he told
them off one by one, and as Raymond leaned forward listening like a
three years’ child, his cheek scarlet, his dark eyes aglow, the wind
whisking the powder off his auburn hair despite his cocked hat, the Fox
watched the two with indignant impatience.
If the Terrapin observed the officer’s eagerness he made no sign,--he
only said suddenly:--
“And _all_ are yours--if--you go not to Choté.”
The young officer recoiled abruptly--in disappointment, in
mortification, in anger.
He could not speak for a moment, so sudden was the revulsion of
sentiment. Then he said coldly, “You trifle with me, Tus-ka-sah!”
He checked more candid speech. For prudential reasons he could not give
his anger rein. Harmony must be maintained. If cordial relations were
not conserved it should not be the ambassador of a friendly mission to
break the peace.
The Cherokees were as eager as he to let slip no chance. The Fox,
understanding at last the trend of his colleague’s diplomacy, uttered
guttural soothing exclamations. But Tus-ka-sah, perceiving the
reluctance of the officer’s relinquishment of the opportunity, the
eagerness of his desire, his angry disappointment, sought to whet his
inclination and made a higher bid. He took from some pocket or fold of
his fur garments a buck-skin bag and thence drew a single unpierced
pearl, so luminous, so large, so satin-smooth, so perfect of contour,
that Raymond, forgetting his indignation at the attempted bribery,
exclaimed aloud in inarticulate delight, for this indeed was a gem
which those who love such things might well fall down and worship.
It came from the Tennessee River. Tus-ka-sah made haste to recite its
history to slacken the tension of the difference which had supervened.
The jewel king of the mussels, he said, had worn it on his breast;
but when his shell, which was his house, was harried and his people
scattered, and he torn ruthlessly out, this treasure fell as spoils to
the victor. Only its custodian was Tus-ka-sah--this gem belonged to the
Cherokee nation--one of the jewels of the crown, so to speak. And it
too had a name, the “sleeping sun.” The chief paused to point from the
moony lustre of the great pearl, shown by the light of the fire, to the
pearly lustre of the moon, now unclouded and splendid in the dark vault
of the deep blue sky.
“The ‘sleeping sun’!” Raymond exclaimed entranced, remembering Arabella
Howard’s joy in the fancy, and thinking how the unique splendor of this
single pearl would befit her grace.
He had a prophetic intimation of the proffer even before it came.
“Since you scorn my necklace,” Tus-ka-sah said in Cherokee,
“this--this--the nation will give you if you go not to Choté, beloved
town.”
Raymond had never dreamed that his loyalty could be tempted by any
treasure. He did not pique himself on his fidelity. It was too nearly
the essence of his individuality, the breath of his life. An honest
man cannot levy tribute for his integrity--he feels it a matter of
course, impossible to be otherwise. Raymond was dismayed to find his
distended eyes still fixed upon the gem,--they had a gloat of longing
that did not escape the keen observation of the chiefs. For this was
unique. This was a gift no other could bestow,--it was indeed fit for a
princess.
He experienced a vague internal revolt against the authority of his
superior officer. Why did the instructions specify Choté? Any mission
to the head-men could be as effectively discharged at any of the
seven great “mother-towns.” As to the aversion of the chiefs to his
appearance in the “beloved town,” this was doubtless some vagary of
their strange savage religion against the errors of which it was
puerile and futile to contend. If they esteemed his presence at Choté
a profanation of the “ever-sacred” soil, why persist in intruding
logic upon their superstition--especially since compliance would be so
richly rewarded? Moreover, there were practical considerations in their
favor. Choté was yet distant half a hundred miles, perhaps,--a weary
march in this frozen wilderness for the already exhausted detachment.
Though seasoned to Indian warfare, they were new to the topography of
this particular region. Hard at hand was the lesser town of Little
Choté--thus even the casual talk of the troops could not betray him.
Captain Howard need never know that he had not penetrated to Choté
Great, “the beloved city.” He could open here his sealed orders,
accomplish every detail of his mission, he thought, and yet secure the
rich guerdon of his compliance with so simple a request.
Raymond rose suddenly to his feet, trembling in every limb.
Tempted--tempted thus by a bauble! Barter his honor for the lustres of
the “sleeping sun”! His face was scarlet. His eyes flashed. His lip
quivered.
“I am a poor man, Tus-ka-sah,” he said, “and stop me, my heart grows
very heavy for the sake of the ‘sleeping sun.’ I would give gold for
it, to the extent of my power. Gad, I would willingly be poorer still
for its sake. But you cannot bargain with me for my duty as a soldier.
Go to Choté, says my superior, and to Choté I go.”
He could hardly understand the deep disappointment expressed in the
faces of the Indians who consciously were trembling on the verge
of the accomplishment of their secret design. Tus-ka-sah first
recovered himself with a fleer at the confession of poverty, so
characteristically scorned by the Indians. “_Poor!_ La-a! _Poor!_” He
stuck his head askew with an affronting leer that made his grimace as
insulting as a blow. “For no poor man!” he added, bundling up his great
pearl into its buck-skin bag, with the air of indignantly terminating
the interview, as if he had received the proffer of a sum beneath
contempt for his valuable jewel.
Whether or not he would have devised some return to the negotiation,
a sudden accident definitely terminated it. At last the great flare
of the fire, the ascending column of heated air, began to affect the
snow congealed upon the boughs of the pine above their heads. The
thawing of a branch effected the dislodgment of a great drift that it
had supported in a crotch. The snow fell into the fire with a hissing
noise, and in one moment all was charred cinders and hot mounting
steam where once were red-hot coals and the flash of flames. Raymond
called out a warning to the fire-guard, who were presently kindling the
protective blaze at a little distance, and as his servant, roused from
sleep, began to shift his effects thither from the despoiled site of
his camp, he sat on the edge of the stump, listening to the growling of
the wolves which, encouraged by the obscurity, were now dangerously
near. He had not marked when nor how the two Indians had disappeared,
but they were gone in the confusion, and on the morrow he resumed his
march.