Chapter XXII 396

A SPECTRE OF POWER

I

IT so chanced that Eve, with all her primeval curiosity, dwelt in

the Cherokee town of Great Tellico. Hence came disaster. To the

inquisitiveness of the woman it was always imputed, although the

undisciplined heart of man, the turbulent impulses of ambition, and the

serpentine supersubtlety of a covetous political scheme were potent

elements. Little, indeed, such as she might seem concerned with matters

of high import. From afar, unindividualized among scores of the other

subservient Cherokee women standing on the banks of the glittering

Tennessee River, she had watched the approach of the herald of the

embassy. A Choctaw Indian he was revealed as he ran holding broadly

outstretched in each hand the great white wing of a swan, streaked with

symbolic lines of white clay. The headmen of Tellico, the warriors

of note, and the “beloved men” swiftly assembled in the “beloved

square” to greet the arrival of the ambassador himself, and with no

presentiment of personal significance in the event, she beheld the

entry of the splendidly bedight Choctaw chief, Mingo Push-koosh.

Through the forests he had elected to come, and as he advanced with

that wonderful, running gait of the Choctaw Indian, who could outwind,

it was said in that day, a swift horse, he sustained impassively the

eager, fixed gaze of the hundreds of Cherokees assembled in his honor.

The iconoclast, who was not born yesterday, was here and there in the

crowd, and had a word of covert scoffing at his neglect of the great

advantages of water carriage afforded by the numerous fine rivers of

the Cherokee country; for the Choctaws had but little familiarity with

navigation, owing to the few and very limited streams of their own

region, and notoriously, of all nations of Indians, they could not swim.

Envy, however, could hardly spare a fling at so imperious a figure as

the Mingo presented as he stood in the “beloved square” and delivered

in rapid, fervid, poetic diction his oration of greeting to the headmen

of Tellico. The afternoon sunlight glittered on the silver wrist-plates

on his muscular, bare arms, his gorget and “earbobs” of the same metal,

and a half dozen strands of the glossily white, fresh-water pearls of

the region, exceedingly large and regularly shaped, which hung about

the neck of his white, dressed doeskin hunting-shirt. His head was not

polled after the fashion of the Cherokees, and his hair grew thick

and long. A great cluster of scarlet flamingo feathers stood high in

the midst of the straight, black locks, and he wore a broad, silver

band on the backward slant of his forehead, artificially flattened

thus in infancy, according to the tribal custom. His leggings and

moccasins were also scarlet. He bore no arms except a pair of handsome,

silver-mounted pistols in his embroidered belt.

The gentle breeze carried his full, rich, guttural tones to the

uttermost outskirts of the crowd, and suddenly it was swayed by a new

sensation and a straining of necks to see. For although the Choctaws

beyond all tribes were most addicted to the punctilio of ceremonial

observances, and scorned and resisted innovation, the voice which

followed his words, substituting the familiar Cherokee equivalents,

was the voice of no Indian interpreter. It was suave and fluent and

easy of comprehension, but now and again an idiom occurred, a method

of construction essentially French. For beside the Mingo, and in front

of his escort of a dozen Choctaw braves, stood a glittering object, a

white man, a French officer in full uniform, and with his hair curled

and plaited and powdered.

The headmen of Tellico, all decorously listening to the ambassador,

all respectfully gazing upon his bright animated face, as he declaimed

his plea for welcome and his pleasure in beholding them, could not

altogether cloak their surprised interest and covert glances at this

resplendent apparition in the lowly functions of an interpreter. It

was a relief when Push-koosh openly alluded to his companion, and he

himself repeated in Cherokee the explanation of his appearance in this

capacity, and they were free to let their eyes rest unrestrainedly upon

him.

In his clear, ringing, military enunciation, he stated that the

official Choctaw interpreter with whom they had set forth on the long

journey from Fort Condé de la Mobile had sickened by the way, and

sinking very low they had been obliged to strangle him, death being

inevitable. But they had left his body on a scaffold out of reach of

wild animals, whither the official “bone-picker” should be sent on

their return to the southern country to perform the last sad rites

of the Choctaw religion (which seems to have had few rites other

than these frightful funeral observances). For these reasons they

were fain to crave the indulgence of the great Cherokee chiefs for

appearing without that essential functionary, an interpreter, since

the lieutenant, Jean Marie Edouard Bodin de Laroche, was but scantily

acquainted with the charming Cherokee language, so musical and of so

elegant a construction, and Mingo Push-koosh, to his infinite regret,

had of it no knowledge save a few scattered phrases.

The discerning and thoughtful Tanaesto, standing in the group of

brilliantly arrayed Cherokee headmen, silently eyeing them both, noted

naught significant in the face of the Mingo as the untoward fate of the

strangled interpreter was recounted. This assistance in shuffling off

the mortal coil would have been to the Choctaw a matter of course and

a national custom. But Tanaesto knew that the white man was not used

to so summary a disposition of the inconvenient dying. He was subject,

like all the Catholic French, to many stringent religious restrictions,

chiefly pertaining to the precise method in which he might take life,

and although he looked as stanch as steel, and as glittering, his

face was young and bland and as unmoved as if he were reciting a

fiction,--which indeed he was! The heart of Tanaesto weighed very light

with the thought,--there had been no interpreter to die.

“My brother,” he said in a low voice to Colonnah, to test his joyful

suspicion, “why does a French officer speaking but indifferent Cherokee

come to us with a Choctaw embassy without an interpreter from the

governor of Louisiana?”

The wary Colonnah replied instantly. “That the Choctaw embassy may go

back no wiser in certain things than the French officer may desire.”

The disclosure of a scheme within a scheme was thus promised. The

series of notable successes which the Cherokees had achieved in 1760,

in their war against the British, had been nullified in the campaign of

the succeeding year by the inability of the French to convey to them

adequate ammunition at the crisis of their final defeat. Doubtless

some new plan was now imminent, some fresh attempt in contemplation

to aid them to throw off the British yoke. Tanaesto’s heart leaped at

the thought, although a solemn treaty of peace had just been signed at

Charlestown with the Royal Governor of South Carolina, and a deputation

of Cherokee chiefs now, in the early spring of 1762, were on the way

to England as guests invited to visit his majesty King George in

London.[1]

The craft of the Indians rendered craft difficult to disguise, and

Tanaesto could but wonder if Mingo Push-koosh knew or suspected aught

of the limitations of his powers or the secrets of his mission thus

withheld from him.

His fine voice died away at last on the bland air; the oratorical

display in which the Indians all delighted and the Choctaws so much

excelled had been elaborately exploited; the stir of the wind, the

lapsing currents of the river, were barely audible in the silence that

seemed still to vibrate with the pulsings of his eloquent periods.

Then another voice arose, deep, full, impressive, as Moy Toy, the great

chief of Tellico, pronounced the stereotyped sentences of welcome and

protestations of a desire of friendship.

The Choctaw responded sonorously, “_Aharattle-la phena

chemanumbole!_”[2] (I shall firmly shake hands with your discourse.)

Whereupon Moy Toy, with eagle feathers upon his head and a splendid

garb of feather-woven fabrics, advanced and grasped with both hands the

Choctaw’s arm around the wrist; then seized him anew about the elbow;

and again with the like fervent pressure around the arm close to the

shoulder, as being near the heart. He drew back from the visitor for

one silent moment. Then he waved a great fan of eagle feathers above

the head of the ambassador, the plumes stroking him gently, and his

formal reception was complete.

The Choctaw turned smilingly to the crowd, which was presently in

motion dispersing along the river bank and among the scattered

dwellings of the town. The official group of headmen had broken up

into informal knots, and among them Push-koosh moved with a suave but

princely arrogation, as tolerating the adulation which was equally

his custom and his expectation. He had several claims to special

consideration, of none of which was he oblivious, and all of which

exerted a marked influence upon his personality. He enjoyed a certain

distinction because of his well-known acuteness, his employment in the

French interest, his war record, and his undoubted courage, which was

the more noted because the Choctaws were not always considered brave;

for although fighting furiously in defense of their own territory,

they were accounted half-hearted and even timorous in invasion and

aggression. Moreover, he had much family influence, having four elder

brothers, all noted warriors, who championed his every plan and took

that prideful, solicitous, censorious, half-paternal account of

him characteristic of the fraternal senior, and often resented and

ill-requited by the sophisticated Benjamins even of civilized tribes.

To this simple trait of family affection is doubtless due the name by

which he was known; for throughout his life and to the day of his death

he was called Push-koosh, “Baby.” If he had any other name, it is not

of record in the history of his times, in which, although cruel as

death, hard as steel, and cunning as craft itself, this Choctaw warrior

always incongruously appears as “Prince Baby,” Mingo Push-koosh.

The suavity and politic amiability of the carriage of the French

toward the savage, which had so marked an influence on the earlier

stages of the development of this country, were never more definitely

illustrated than in the face of the young officer, Laroche. Its

intelligence, its alertness, the military arrogance in the pose

of the head, rendered the sudden, bright softness of his smile as

flattering as a personal tribute. From an athletic point of view,

his slender, erect, sinewy figure coerced the respect of his hosts,

and in securing their friendship and confidence, he had a great

advantage in his very tolerable command of the Cherokee language. His

linguistic accomplishments were already considerable, but before he

left Fort Condé de la Mobile, he was set to work under the instruction

of the official interpreter, by the order of his superior officer,

and he had acquired a colloquial facility as a military duty with

the diligence which he would have manifested in mastering military

theories and tactical problems. He talked continually, with much ease

and good-fellowship, and a sort of elastic, volatile gayety. But he

showed a deeply emotional impressionability. He manifested great and

genuine pleasure in the aspect of the country. He gazed long and

silently upon the azure summits and infinite lengths of the Great Smoky

Mountains, as they received the last suffusion of the red, western

sunlight like a benediction, and glowed to purer, higher, finer phases

of color, becoming densely purple, then delicately amethystine, then

all transparent and roseate. As they grew so crystalline of effect as

to realize to the imagination the splendid jeweled luminosities of the

Apocalyptic jasper, he caught his breath, exclaiming, “_Nanne-Yah!

Nanne-Yah!_” (The mountains of God!) He declared to his entertainers

that in Old France he was born near mountains such as these (for he

was not of the Canadian French, who since the days of Iberville had so

heavily recruited the ranks of the soldiery in Louisiana), and that he

had no doubt that this mutual nativity to the heights was the reason

why he already felt toward them as to brothers. Yet he was not bent

upon flattery; for he was alone with Push-koosh when he said again and

again, as they walked beside the Tennessee River, and he noted the

swift flow of its currents all bedight in red and gold under the sunset

sky, “_Ookka chookoma intaa!_” (How the beautiful water glides

along!)

He broke presently from the pensive contemplation of its charms

and stopped short with a crisp ringing cry, “_Holà! là! là!_”

Push-koosh, glancing about for the cause of this excitement, perceived

at a little distance some Cherokee youths, who were leaping from the

heights of a craggy eminence and diving into the rippling depths with a

temerity and facility alike admirable. But Push-koosh had no affinity

with amphibian traits, being himself, in common with the rest of his

tribe, unable to swim. He resented the interest and approval which the

Frenchman accorded the divers, sundry of whom were now breasting the

current with great speed, strength, and skill, and declared that it was

beneath his ambassadorial dignity to waste the time in watching a half

score specimens of the Cherokee Ka-noona (bullfrog), as they called the

creature in their jargon, swim a race. He could not wait for this! Did

the officer not see that the fires of split cane were already alight

in the great state-house, whither they must at once repair to drink of

the cacina (“the black drink”) with the headmen, as became visitors of

distinction? Nevertheless, as they resumed their progress, Push-koosh

himself, with the interest which a man of an active, outdoor life must

needs feel in athletic feats, glanced again and again over his shoulder

at the expert divers.

“I wonder they don’t drown!” he said at last sincerely. Then perhaps

equally sincerely, “I wish they would!”

“_Mon tendre Bébé!_” cried the mercurial Frenchman in delight.

The incongruity daily illustrated between the cruel, savage traits of

the chief and his gentle, infantile sobriquet was of an unceasing and

engaging drollery to Laroche’s mind, and doubtless often proved of

service in keeping amicable relations between them.

Wending their way through the scattered dwellings of the town, and

skirting the rows of log cabins on each side of the “beloved square,”

they approached the state-house or rotunda hard by, built on the summit

of a high, artificial mound of earth. The circuit of the fifteen

Cherokee towns[3] burned by Colonel Grant, commanding the British

forces, in the punitive measures following his victory at Etchoee

the previous year, the Indians being powerless to resist, as their

ammunition was exhausted, did not extend so far as Tellico Great, and

therefore its aspect was as before the war, save indeed for the tokens

of the prowess of the Cherokees themselves--the great dismantled Fort

Loudon, still standing a massive, lonely shadow in the distance, which

they had blockaded and reduced, massacring the garrison, and here

and there down the river the stark chimneys of the burned dwellings

of the murdered British colonists. A white glimmer stole out of the

tall, narrow portal of the conical state-house, which showed dark and

solid against the ethereal shadows of the atmosphere. For the blue

dusk had fallen on the enchanted land. The wooded mountains loomed dim

and sombre on the clear horizon; the encompassing primeval forests

were thronged with glooms; the river was now a gray shadow, and now

an elusive, silver glister; the many lowly roofs of the dwellings of

the Indian town were dully glimpsed here and there in the light that

flickered out through the open doors from hearthstones all aglow;

and as the officer paused on the high mound at the portal of the

state-house, and looked back over the clare-obscure of the unaccustomed

scene, he caught the scintillations of a star a-glitter in the pallid

expanse of the pearly skies. It was like a signal to him. Aldebaran!

how long since he had seen it, poised over a craggy mountain summit,

sending its brilliant, red lustres down through the fringes of the

evergreen pine. Not thus, not thus had he seen it since the star and

he were together at home! It was like the sudden greeting of a friend

in a far and foreign land. He responded instantly as to a personal

appeal. He turned suddenly and airily kissed his hand, the brilliant

star shattered into a thousand stars among the tears in his eyes.

Push-koosh, accustomed to ebullitions of his emotional, susceptible

nature, gave him but one glance of superficial surprise, and together

they entered the dome-like building. The red clay walls of its interior

were illumined by the white light of the burning split canes, while the

dim, blue scene beneath the home-star lay outside in the darkness.

Only for one moment did Laroche realize the poignancy of exile,

although the homesick pang for the recollection of his kindred and

his far-distant birthplace was supplemented by another hardly less

acute, with a spurious domiciliary sense, for the scenes at the

fort, his quarters, the presence of his brother officers. The more

valid cause of troublous thought and sense of solitude,--that he

was apart from them all, alone among wild and bloody savages, the

Choctaws of the French alliance hardly less to be feared in their

alert dissimulation and treacherous habit than the open ferocity of

the Cherokees of the British faction, the only man of his country in

a hundred miles of these dense and sombre wildernesses, in a torn

and distracted region subject to a national enemy,--these practical

considerations did not smite him at all. Even his æsthetic griefs

were all forgotten in another instant, and with his swift, volatile

transitions he was absorbed in the interior of the building. It was

large enough to accommodate an audience of several hundred people, and

ample illumination was afforded by the split cane, which, arranged in

lines and serpentine convolutions along a low mound of earth in the

centre of the clay floor and burning only at one end, was consumed

very gradually, and would furnish light for a considerable time. The

cane gave out but little smoke, ethereal, hazy, vaguely blue, mounting

into the shadowy vault of the lofty dome above the heads of the crowd.

Around the interior of the building, some four feet distant from the

wall and supporting the unseen timbers of the roof, was a series of

columns, and in the space between this colonnade and the wall was a

continuous divan or bench, deftly made of cane, artificially whitened,

and extending all around the circular structure. Here on the further

side, opposite the door, were seated the headmen of the town, while

those of lower grade were ranged according to rank, to the right and

to the left. The more insignificant or younger tribesmen stood in the

open spaces nearest the entrance, and seated on the floor on either

side of the narrow portal were groups of women, admitted in lenient

indulgence of feminine curiosity.

The two strangers were conducted as visitors of distinction to seats,

one on either side of Moy Toy. The barbarous Choctaw, with his quick,

racial adaptation to all the minutiæ of ceremonial, peculiarly

elaborate in its observance, with his grace, his fitting words, his

proud yet affable demeanor, was hardly more acceptable to the Indian

scheme of etiquette than the Frenchman, foreign, white, strange,

though he was. There was something about this officer that appealed

singularly to the vivid imagination of the Cherokees,--the silken

softness of his courtesy, his easily stirred and obvious sentimental

emotions, his volatile pleasure in the passing moment, his quick

changeableness in every current of the air, and yet incongruously, a

certain bellicose keenness, and steadiness, and hardness in the glance

of his bland eyes. He was like a military butterfly, if one could

but attribute the potentiality of danger and venom and antagonism

to so aerial and brilliant a flutterer. His very gestures riveted

their attention as he expressively shrugged his shoulders or lifted

his eyebrows in gay surprise, or contracted them in frowning doubt.

These eyebrows were dark and distinctly marked, and he had long, dark

lashes, but his eyes were of a light brown tint such as gravel shows

when clear water runs above a sunlit channel. He wore his own light

brown hair in lieu of a fashionable wig, but the long queue and the

curls on the temples were heavily powdered, which was of complimentary

significance; for it was by no means the habit of the French officers

to submit to the _gêne_ of such vanities while on the march in

the wilderness, although in New Orleans the Marquis de Vaudreuil had

long sought to maintain some state, since indeed he had first succeeded

Bienville as governor of Louisiana, and fostered manners of ceremony,

as he afterwards did in Canada, whither he was now transferred. The

suggestion that Laroche was charged with a secret mission within a

mission added importance to his personality, which Push-koosh obviously

resented, now and again assertively flaunting his few Cherokee phrases,

even in addressing his _quasi_ interpreter, and more than once

essaying some very queer French. The men looked at the officer with

intense curiosity, and the women, as ever addicted to novelty, with

open-eyed admiration, as he smoked the “friend-pipe” while he sat

beside Moy Toy, who in his finest otter-skin robe was all a-glitter

with many swaying fringes of “roanoke,” with a broad, gleaming collar

of white swan’s down, and with streaks of white clay across his

forehead. If Laroche dreamed of the approaching ordeal, he awaited it

with the calm of a philosopher and the courage of a soldier.

Presently there entered two “beloved men,” each bearing a conch shell

high in the right hand. They first crossed the apartment, one going to

the right, the other to the left, singing mystic words in a low tone as

they came; then once more taking a transverse course, they met in front

of Moy Toy and the two guests of distinction, to whom they presented,

with both hands, the two shells full of the so-called consecrated

beverage. As these were lifted, with both hands, to the lips of

the guests, the two “beloved men” broke forth with a sonorous bass

note, “_Yo!_” then with a tenor effect they sang the syllable,

“_He!_” prolonged to the utmost possibility of holding the breath,

during which sound the visitor must continue to drink the cacina. It

required, perhaps, all the strength of mind and stomach which the

French officer could muster, but he did not desist nor lower the shell

till the gasping “_Wah!_” placed a period to his torments.

Others then partook of the black drink in turn, and presently amidst

the wreaths of blue smoke and the white flare of the burning cane,

while the earthen drums began to beat sonorously, sinuous, leaping

shadows were flung across the hard, clay floor and on the red walls of

the circular building; for the eagle-tail dance was in progress in the

presence of the honored guests, the great fans of feathers waving high

in the uplifted hands of the agile warriors, as they sprang elastically

into the air, exhibiting many intricate steps and difficult attitudes.

These solemn politico-religious ceremonies of welcome concluded,

the Cherokees gave themselves over to various devices to amuse and

entertain their guests, for this was a characteristic trait of their

hospitality. There would be horse-races on the morrow and dances

again, but without significance either political or religious, and

long and elaborate feastings, for they could set forth a table with

“fifty different viands.” The Cherokees had not at this period begun

the downward course,--the relinquishment of their national customs,

primitive manufactures, religion, method of government, habits of

extreme cleanliness,--the wholesale degeneration which seems inevitable

before new standards, new customs, new religion, a new nationality, can

be adjusted to a people in a state of transition. The night being as

yet but little spent, one of their ancient pantomimes[4] was essayed

for the entertainment of the guests; and during its performance the

frequency of the ringing laugh of the French officer, and the grunt of

approval of the Choctaw chief, brought the same expression of gratified

complacency and chastened thankfulness to the anxious faces of Moy

Toy and the other headmen of Tellico Great that sophisticated hosts

now wear upon the success of an entertainment upon which important

interests depend. It began with a surprise. Suddenly a bulky shadow

fell within the doorway,--the women clustering about the entrance

shrieked in a sort of delighted affright and scuttled aside. The

heavy, guttural laugh of the Indian--a merry soul at his sports--fell

iteratively on the air. A bear had entered, clumsy, heavily shuffling,

snuffing tentatively about, evidently to be imagined as ranging the

woods, and with now and then a glance over his shoulder to see another

bear ponderously lumbering in. So close was the imitation of the ursine

gait and ungainliness, so crafty the disguise in the beast’s paws and

hide, distended to full proportions by concealed wooden hoops, that

one might have believed the manifestation genuine but for a lamenting

“stage-whisper,” as it were, delivered in plaintive Cherokee, touching

a bit of the burning cane which had lodged upon the slant of a too

inquisitive snout nosing about the fire. It was hastily brushed off

by one of the young tribesmen of the audience, all of whom laughed

gleefully at the mischance and the helpless plight of the singed Bruin.

And now entered two hunters in full sylvan array. The bears skulked,

chiefly among the audience; the nimrods stalked them; the bears fled;

the hunters pursued; the beasts turned at bay,--when the hunters

themselves fled frantically, amidst howls of derision from the younger

people. This mockery seemed to restore the nerve of the hunters,

who presently returned to the effort and with such ardor that they

finally “treed” the bears, who nimbly climbed the sleek, round columns

that supported the roof of the edifice. Thence they were pulled down

forcibly, first by one foot, then the others; at last all fell, hunters

and bears together, in an undiscriminated heap on the floor, where

after a terrific mock struggle, the bears were dispatched by the

expedient of cutting their throats, with a vast effusion of blood and

howls of remonstrance from the beasts, expressed in excellent Cherokee.

The two vanquished animals as early as practicable crept out of their

skins, left weltering in the blood on the floor, and mingled with their

admirers in the audience, laughing a great deal and discussing the

play:--how the struggle might have been prolonged but for this and

that; how one bear, according to his own account, need not have been

killed at all, so expert a beast was he, except that he had yielded

himself at last a sacrifice to the popular entertainment; and how one

hunter could have easily slain this same boastful bear at the very

outset by a single blow on the head, to which his more than bearish

awkwardness exposed him, but was moved to spare him and thus extend his

career, also from the disinterested motive of promoting and conserving

the sport of the indulgent audience.

It was all indeed very cleverly done, as even Laroche thought, who had

seen pantomimes in Paris, and Push-koosh manifested as much hilarious

good will as the Choctaw “Prince Baby” ever permitted himself to

experience. The French officer, however, despite his absorption in

the histrionic display, had not been unmindful of the notables in the

audience either in Paris or here. More than once to-night his gaze

was caught by a pair of eyes large and gentle, luminous as a deer’s

and as untamed in expression, appropriately set in the face of one of

the Cherokee women. She was hardly in her first youth, although she

seemed singularly fresh, alert, spirited, enjoying the pantomime with

childish delight. She was evidently not less than twenty-two or three

years of age, and he being rather elderly himself,--some twenty-eight

years,--thought this well advanced in life and an age of wisdom. She

was slender and, like all the Cherokees, of notable height, and when

the crowd was out of the state-house he saw her again, glimmering with

willowy grace in the moonlight. The distorted, gibbous sphere of pearl

was high above the violet mountains and the gray and misty valleys, and

he thought the woman beautiful and picturesquely placed in the solemn

and splendid environment of the ranges, for he was accustomed to the

bizarre details of savage raiment. The skirt of her tunic-like garb

of white, dressed doeskin reached a trifle below the knee, and she

wore the long, white, doeskin buskin, fitting closely, that came half

as high; around each leg, below the knee, was tied a soft, dressed

otter-skin, hung with glittering, metal “bell buttons,” that tinkled as

she walked. Her hair, anointed and glossy in the moonlight, was tied

and dressed high on the head, and was stuck full of the quills of the

white pigeon. Her head was clearly defined against the dark blue of the

instarred sky, as she threw it backward and gazed at the moon as if to

verify some calculation of time, its light full in her lustrous eyes.

Then she turned, and running swiftly past, disappeared in the violet

shadows.

He did not soon think of her again. She was only a picturesque element

in this state of quaint barbarity, a momentary incident in the scenes

of an evening overcrowded with impressive grotesqueries. He had no

idea to whom Mingo Push-koosh alluded when he said suddenly, “_Eho

in-ta-na-ah!_” (The woman has mourned the appointed time!)

The two French emissaries were alone now; they had been conducted to a

building called the stranger-house, designed for the accommodation of

casual guests, and which was assigned to them to be their headquarters

during their stay. It too was furnished with the row of cane divans

around the walls, which served as benches during the day and as beds

at night. The house was the usual cabin of the Indians, built without

nails, or a hinge, or a bit of metal in any sort, yet “genteel and

convenient and so very secure, as if it were to screen them from an

approaching hurricane,” says an old British trader, who lived for

many years in one of them. The posts were of the most durable wood

and deeply set in the ground, the timbers were accurately fitted to

one another, the wall plates, rafters, and eave boards had been all

stanchly bound together with the elastic splints of white oak or

hickory, and with strips of wet buffalo hide, which tighten and harden

as they dry. A partition separated the room from another, wherein was

disposed the Choctaw escort. Within and without, the building was

whitewashed with the coarse, marly clay of the region, and the walls

sent back with responsive, silver glimmers the moonlight, falling

through the narrow door and into the face of the officer, who had

stretched himself at length in full uniform on the divan, to rest a bit

before divesting himself of his military finery and disposing himself

to slumber. The ceremonies and excitements of the evening, following a

day of exertion and hard marching, had resulted in making his eyelids

heavy.

“_Omeh!_” (Yes!) he assented, hardly hearing the remark, and

answering at random.

Push-koosh sat upright on the opposite side of the room as if he could

know no fatigue, and gazed loweringly across at the Frenchman.

“_Che-a-sa-ah!_” (I am displeased with you!) the Choctaw hissed

out. “What makes your lying tongue so strong?”

The French lieutenant roused himself. “_Mon cher enfant_,” he

declared, “I know you consider a lie no disgrace, it being your daily

food, but I have told you once, and I tell you again, that if you throw

it into my teeth I will beat that flat head of yours flatter than it

is!”

“You don’t even know of whom I am speaking--you answer like a child!”

said Push-koosh in a mollified tone.

Something had come to him out of the night, the moonlight, the soft

lustre of dark eyes,--something as intangible as the flickering

illusions of the heat lightning, as inexplicable as the fleeting wind,

as tenuous as the wing of a moth,--a fancy!--and he must needs talk of

it. Therefore he would concede. He would forego his resentment for this

cavalier inattention. He smiled as if he had been in jest.

“_Unta?_” (Well?) said Laroche interrogatively.

“_Eho in-ta-na-ah!_” Push-koosh repeated.

The versatile Frenchman was sore smitten with sleep. “What woman?” he

said drowsily. “What mourning?”

“Her husband is dead! The Muscogee killed him three years ago!” said

Push-koosh, with stalwart satisfaction in the fact. “And she has

mourned the appointed time. You could have seen, but that you are a

blind French mole, that her hair is no longer flowing loose, but is

anointed and tied and dressed full of white quills!”

Sleep suddenly quitted its hold on the French lieutenant. He lifted

himself alertly on one elbow and looked animatedly at Push-koosh.

“_Eho chookoma!_” (The beautiful woman!) he cried with enthusiasm.

“Not so much of a mole as you think! _Pas si bête, mon bijou. Pas

cette espèce de bête!!_”

He shook his wise head with emphasis and laid himself down again.

Push-koosh glowered at him with a sudden, angry fear. This fervor of

admiration on the part of the French lieutenant boded ill to that

ethereal fancy which had fallen about the Choctaw chief as lightly as

a gossamer web of the weaving spider, and now held him like a network

of steel chains. He said abruptly, with seeming irrelevance and his

infantile candor, “I wish you had killed yourself last week!”

For the mercurial Frenchman had often seizures of deep despondency, in

which he sometimes announced with sincerity that he designed to place

a period to his existence. Such a crisis had supervened on the journey

hither, in which, however, Push-koosh was concerned as little as might

be. True, there had been some peculiarly irritating incidents in their

relations; they baited each other, and bickered on slight occasion, and

argued violently on untenable grounds, for which neither cared an iota,

and conducted themselves generally as young men do when constrained

to work together with but scant personal sympathy. But Laroche’s

discontent had a far more serious source. He was disappointed of the

distinction which he had hoped to attain in this mission.

Apart from the diplomatic and secret details with which he was

intrusted, and the check that he was expected to maintain upon the

loyalty, or rather the suspected disloyalty of Push-koosh, whose

personal presence was necessary to reconcile certain ancient enmities

between the Choctaws and Cherokees, and thus facilitate and set forth

the special values of the French alliance, Laroche was charged with

an affair of professional importance which Push-koosh imagined was

the only reason that he had been ordered to accompany the Choctaw

embassy,--so crafty were the methods of the French with the crafty

savages. Laroche’s open instructions contemplated the investigation

of certain obstructions in the _Rivière des Chéraquis_ (since

called the Great Tennessee), which had hitherto proved an insuperable

bar to the continuous transportation of goods from New Orleans to the

Cherokee Nation by means of that great waterway. Not trinkets, the

Indians craved, not paints, nor beads, nor even cutlery, but those

costly treasures of arms, powder, and lead which the Cherokees valued

beyond all things, because without constant and adequate supplies of

such munitions of war they could never hope to take the field again,

eventually throw off the yoke of the British, and keep foothold on the

land which was their own, and which they loved with all the fervent

devotion of the mountaineer to his native heights. Therefore they

had hitherto listened to the counsels of the French, who were now

especially eager to meet all expectations, perhaps because they were

still involved themselves in hostilities with the English elsewhere,

perhaps because they still cherished that old scheme of so many

visionaries--from the logical plans of Iberville, futilely projected

so long ago, to the subtle intrigues of the German Jesuit, Christian

Priber, only twenty-five years previous--to invade the Carolinas and

Georgia at the head of twelve thousand warriors of confederated Indian

tribes.

But the transportation of supplies to the Cherokees by pack-train

overland was impracticable, since the intervening country was held by

the hostile Chickasaws, ever devoted to the British, and the French had

still a lively recollection of their defeats by this intrepid tribe at

the towns of Ash-wick-boo-ma, where D’Artaguette met his cruel fate,

and Ackia, the scene of the discomfiture of Bienville. Therefore in the

Cherokee War, a large pettiaugre laden with warlike stores was sent up

the Mississippi from New Orleans, armed with swivel guns to repress the

Chickasaws, who in flying squads nevertheless harassed the progress

of the boat by a sharp musketry delivered from the river bluffs.

This danger passed, the expedition failed for a different reason. It

returned bootless, having abandoned the attempt on account of the

insurmountable obstructions to navigation in the Cherokee River.

The French authorities at New Orleans had good reason to doubt the

report of the extent of these difficulties, for hitherto their boats

had ascended occasionally to Great Tellico,--perhaps in a different

stage of the water. They ordered a survey of the locality with a view

of such removal of the reefs as might afford a practicable channel

at all seasons,--a second earnest effort to meet the needs of the

Cherokees, with a systematic and continuous supply of stores, being in

contemplation.

Laroche, who had served as a lieutenant of engineers as well as of

artillery, had been charged with the duty of removing the obstruction

if practicable, and a pettiaugre laden with such means as were deemed

fitted to further this design had been dispatched up the Mississippi

and Ohio in advance of the expedition overland from Fort Tombecbé to

meet him at the point where the navigation of the Cherokee River became

difficult. The young officer had expected to encounter some reefs, a

goodish stretch of rapids perhaps, a few dangerous, troublesome rocks.

He found vast whirlpools, and endless vistas of maddened waters,

and shoals, shoals, shoals,--twenty miles of muscle shoals, three

miles wide. Even Push-koosh had cried out in amaze at the phenomenon

of the turbulent rapids, declaring that the devils, the _hottuk

ookproose_, were dancing under the waters, for he had heard for ten

miles the devil’s own song that they sung, _tarooa ookpro’sto_

(the tune of the accursed one).

As Laroche realized the total impossibility of the undertaking, and

saw vanishing all his hopes of distinction in this valid and valuable

service, he forthwith sat down on a rock beside the rioting waters,

bowed his head on his hands, and cried out to a “_juste ciel_”

that this was really too strong, that there was no use in trying to

live any longer, and that he was minded to kill himself.

Suicide is always more or less fashionable among Frenchmen. Perhaps the

passionate grief of his utterance was not wholly devoid of intention.

But as he lifted his dreary eyes, the animated interest and curiosity

to see him take his life which the face of Push-koosh expressed

effectually deterred him. The spectacle would be too delightfully

gratifying to the Choctaw! The humor of the situation appealed to the

mercurial French lieutenant, and the pendulum swung back again.

The thought of self-destruction had not recurred to his mind until

to-night, when Push-koosh mentioned his bootless threat.

“But why, _mon pauvre Bébé, mon petit chou_,--why should you wish

that I had killed myself?” Laroche demanded.

Push-koosh hesitated. He felt that his jealousy was a derogation, and

was glad that his hasty words had not betrayed it to the officer, whom

he esteemed a dull, inattentive fellow at best, continually occupied

with his little idols, which he carried in a box and would let no one

else touch,--his spy-glass, his spirit-level, his quadrant, and his

compass, which last he declared knew the north, and without which he

could not draw a map, as Push-koosh could on a gourd or a bit of bark

or a stretch of clear sand,--he knew little, very little, that French

officer, Laroche!

“_Unta--Illet minte!_” (Well--Death is coming!) the Choctaw said

casually, as if he spoke generally and at random.

“Not yet! not yet!” cried the officer, remembering the diabolic tumult

of the waters. “Let the devils dance! I can be merry too! I have a

scheme to outwit them. A great thing, my Baby, to outwit the devils!”

Twice he paused to think of it in laying aside his sword and drawing

off his coat. Push-koosh made no move toward preparing for slumber.

Long after the lieutenant was still, quite still, beneath the

delicately dressed and softened panther skins that sufficed for bedding

on the elastic cane-wrought mattresses, Push-koosh sat upright on the

couch on the opposite side of the room gazing steadfastly at him,--the

long, thin figure suggested beneath the folds of the drapery of the

primitive bed; the white powdered hair that had lost much of its frosty

touches streaming backward, long, loose, the ends slightly curling;

the eyes meekly closed; the moonlight in the white, tired, sleeping

face, youthful, but grave, pensive, saddened vaguely. That was the

way, perhaps, he would have looked had he taken his life as he had

threatened. And Push-koosh, still intently eyeing him, wished again

that he had.

II

TOWARD dawn the frogs, antiphonally chanting down by the water-side,

ceased their chorusing clamors. Now and again a croaking voice sounded

raucously alone,--then came silence. The moon was all solitary in the

“beloved square,”--not even an errant gust of wind to bear her company.

In broad, still, white effulgence the radiance rested unbroken on the

sandy stretch and the dark, narrow row of cabins, devoted to public and

official business, on each side of the quadrangular space. The more

remote dwellings cast shadows wherever the boughs of the overhanging

trees left the ground clear. Here too was silence, save in one hut

whence issued the voice of a wakeful infant, as boldly bawling as if it

were some cherished scion of civilization. Gradually, insensibly, the

world took on an aspect of gray dimness. The mountains looming around

began to definitely darken. The stars had all grown faint; for the

sun would not await the moon’s descent, and presently, driving hard,

his chariot was on the steep eastern summits; the song of birds, the

trumpet-blast of the wind, the whispering voice of rustling pines, the

dash of glancing waters, and human cries of joy and cheer were elicited

as if these matutinal sounds partook of the quality of light.

The French officer, dead beat, still slumbered, but Push-koosh rose,

stretched himself, and still arrayed in his splendid ambassadorial

attire went out into the freshness of the dawning day and the renewing

possibilities of the world. A man who hoped to make naught of dancing

devils should have been earlier astir.

There was a scene of activity down at the river bank. The pettiaugre

of their expedition, which had been brought to the Muscle Shoals of

the Cherokee River laden with powder to aid in the removal of the

barriers to free navigation, had been steered with great difficulty

and at considerable risk through the rapids, repeatedly grazing the

bottom, although it was a much smaller craft of the kind than was usual

for the conveyance of freight. Proceeding thence up the stream, it had

succeeded in passing safely the “whirl,” the “boiling pot,”--known

now to modern engineers as the “mountain obstructions,”--and albeit

somewhat the worse for the hard wear of its experiment, it had finally

reached the smoother waters of the Little Tennessee, and continuing a

placid progress along its curves, was coming in to land at the town of

Great Tellico.

It was the intention to present the cargo as a token of amity from

the French governor to the town of Tellico, such being Laroche’s

instructions from Kerlerec in case the powder could not be used in the

removal of the reefs.

Only a few of the Cherokees were on the bank, and in obedience to their

signaled advice, the Choctaws on the pettiaugre had sheered off from

the shallows, where a landing had been at first contemplated, and where

the craft would have gotten aground at an inconvenient distance from

the shore, to seek a deeper haven indicated by the Cherokees, who, as

they ran up and down, gesticulated violently in the sign language, and,

in lieu of comprehensible, articulate phrases, uttered wild cries,

curiously unmusical, like the voice of the dumb.

There on the bank was Eve (her Indian name was Akaluka, which signifies

“a whirlwind”). Overpowered with curiosity as to the arrival of the

boat, she had repaired to the scene. Being as elaborately appareled as

on the preceding evening, it is fair to conclude that the two handsome

strangers had not been altogether forgotten. They were now, however,

far from her thoughts. Like a frugal female, she was wholly absorbed

in anxiety,--not lest an awkward landing should endanger or submerge

many pounds of precious gunpowder, a princely gift from the French

government to its secret friend, the important municipality of Great

Tellico, especially at that time and in this region, but there were in

the cargo sundry trifles originally intended as presents to individuals

for the personal propitiation of certain warriors, and she was

solicitous as to the fate of one of these gauds. It was a scarf of thin

silk, a deep red, with a golden glimmer of broidery, and it had fallen

over the gunwale as the Choctaws, no great boatmen at best, awkwardly

shifted the cargo in the imminence of the peril of the precious

freight. All unheeded, the scarf, escaping from its flimsy wrapping,

was now floating away to deck the insensate wave.

Standing on the peak of a high rock, and distinct against the blue

sky, like some delineation in white crayon, arrayed in her white,

dressed doeskin garb, her white buskins, the white quills in her black

hair, she shrieked again and again to the laboring Choctaws, as they

wearily trimmed the boat, seeking to acquaint them with their loss,

and adjuring the rescue of the property. They heard her, doubtless;

but if they understood they did not heed. Their freight of gunpowder,

meaning much to the Cherokees of valiant alliance, and even the hope

of emancipation from the rule of the hated British, and always to all

Indians the equivalent of money, of food, of life itself, rendered

infinitely unimportant the gewgaws of the cargo, such as the red scarf

so rapidly floating away on the steel-gray water. Flesh and blood could

no longer endure the harrowing sight,--at least the flesh and blood of

Eve. She suddenly held up both arms above her head, the palms pressed

together; she brought them downward in a great, sweeping curve, as she

bowed forward, and with an alert spring plunged from the crag into the

deep water far below.

Push-koosh noted the resounding plash and held his breath for a moment,

so daring the feat seemed to the unaquatic Choctaw. He watched half

skeptically the successive silver circles elastically expanding over

the spot where the gray water had closed over her head, as if he

scarcely expected to see it rise again. Presently he caught a glimpse

of it, very black and glossy still, but far out toward the middle

of the river. She was swimming strongly in the silver gray floods

and approaching the red scarf, that had now a wanton wind astir in

its folds and threw up a curving edge like a sail. She carefully

intercepted its course on the current, and holding it aloft out of the

water, began to swim with one hand, still strongly and deftly but more

slowly, toward the pettiaugre.

Push-koosh’s dark, sombrely lustrous eyes followed her with admiration.

This method of progression seemed no longer the exercise of frogs. She

lifted her head and her body half out of the water as she swam almost

under the bow of the pettiaugre, and held the scarf aloft that one of

the Choctaw boatmen might take it. The one nearest at hand desisted

from his work and looked over the gunwale at her in surprise. Then

suddenly he lifted his head, for a sharp halloo came from the bank.

He understood the words shouted to him, recognized the authority of

Push-koosh, and giving the woman only a shake of his head, by way of

refusing to receive the bauble, fell once more to working the boat,

and Akaluka, with the rescued scarf still in one hand, was obliged to

paddle smartly to keep from being drawn under the pettiaugre by the

suction, as the craft once more drove swiftly forward, cleaving the

sunlit waves.

There was nothing further for the Cherokee girl but to swim for the

bank. She was bewildered, a little startled, full of wonder, for she

had just perceived the presence of Push-koosh upon the scene. She

laid her course for a point distant from the rock upon which he had

been standing while shouting his command to the boatman to refuse to

receive the scarf, but when, still swimming with one arm and holding

the delicate fabric out of the water with the other, she came alongside

a ledge above a deep, still pool, he was here, waiting for her, and

gazing down at her.

She threw her head far back as, all clad in white, she lifted her

body half out of the water, and looking up at him held up her arm and

offered the scarf.

He made no motion to take it. “_Ook-kak!_” (Swan!) he said.

“_Che awalas!_” (I shall marry you!)

He said no more, and walked away instantly. She scrambled out of the

deep water and stood on the rock, looking after him for a moment with

the scarf still in her hand. Then with it still in her hand she ran

home,--ran so fast, that with the wind and the sun and the speed, her

hair and garments were almost dry when she reached her house, and but

for the trophy there would have been little to confirm the details of

this strange event when she recounted it to the man who said afterward,

“You must blame the woman!”

Now this personage was one of the “mad young men” of the Cherokee

Nation who always craved war,--which, however, seems to be the

normal attitude of mind of the young officer even of civilized

armies and accounted sane. He perceived propitious signs in the

evidently impending proposition of a Choctaw-Cherokee alliance. This

combination aided by the French government would indeed be able to

strike a crushing blow to the British power in the Indian country. The

experiment was obviously to be made. Intermarriages would strengthen

the Choctaw-Cherokee bonds of amity. “You love the present,” he said in

definite affirmation.

But Eve, ever the woman, tossed her head. Was there no man in all

the Cherokee Nation to marry her, she asked in laughing mockery and

coquettish humility, drawing the scarf back and forth through her

hands, and looking far more beautiful than her wont with that curious

embellishment of beauty which a realization of admiration confers,--no

man at all, that she must needs marry a foreign Choctaw who spoke no

language that a sensible person could understand, and who lived far

away, who could say--indeed, where?--in the moon, perhaps!

Whereupon this mad young warrior, who was of her own kindred, the house

of Ahowwe, the Deer family, told her that she spoke as a fool, since

she was already committed, for she had taken the Choctaw’s present, a

sign that she loved it, which was according to inflexible etiquette an

acceptance of his suit.

Then she grew grave and a little frightened, and very voluble. She

explained that she had had no intention of taking his present, and had

kept it only because he would not receive it again, and she had no

words that he could understand. But she would not marry a man to whom

she could not speak her mind (one of the noblest prerogatives of a

wife) and live with him in the moon!

As she said this, she looked upward with her great, dark, liquid eyes

to the moon, still white in the western sky, but lace-like, tenuous, a

most unsubstantial presentment of a dwelling-place.

The young man of the house of Ahowwe would not follow her wandering

gaze as they stood together under a tree in front of her house,--no

longer her dead husband’s war-pole marked its entrance, the peeled

sapling, on the boughs of which the weapons of the warrior were hung

until the stake rotted in the ground and fell. The young kinsman was

experiencing a sudden and extreme agitation because of her perversity,

for if it became necessary to explain the misunderstanding to the

Choctaw at this crisis, before the proposals of the French authorities

were made to the headmen of Tellico, it would doubtless greatly

anger Mingo Push-koosh, and might frustrate the full disclosure of

the measures of his embassy. Essential details might be perverted or

entirely withheld in malice or revenge. And thus the French alliance,

long sought by both nations, might fall to the ground. It was a

complicated train of reflection that he followed, but he said quite

simply, and with a cheerful air, that after all it was no great matter.

To be sure she should have laid the scarf at the feet of the Choctaw

chief, as he did not receive it when offered, to show him that she did

not love his present and that his suit was rejected. But it was likely

that Mingo Push-koosh had half forgotten it by now; he was of so great

esteem in his own country, a prince and a most valiant red warrior! He

was even sent to the Cherokee nation by the great French father with a

splendid French officer as his interpreter! Such a man as that would

not care--he had too much to think of. He himself, her young kinsman,

would make it all right. He would see Mingo Push-koosh and return the

scarf, and explain that she was only one of those stupid people who

did not understand aught, and he would also lie and say that she was

shortly to be married to a man who had no war-title and had never taken

but a single scalp. Mingo Push-koosh would not care for her after such

a description as that!

As he offered to lay hold on the scarf she drew back, shook her head,

breathed very fast, and finally burst into tears. Whereupon this wise

young man, who was only called “mad,” demanded of her in affected

surprise why she wasted her tears. Surely she did not want to live in

the moon and marry a Choctaw chief, even though he had achieved the

distinction of a dozen “warrior’s marks” for his prowess in battle!

Why did she not give up the scarf?--he, her kinsman, would return

it for her, and the great chief would not care; for he would tell

Mingo Push-koosh of a handsomer squaw than she, and younger by four

years, more appropriate to make a splendid marriage such as this.

Then Eve gave herself to argument, as she always does, and smartly

demanded to be told the name of this squaw more beautiful than she,

and most pertinently required of him to disclose the reason, since her

attractions were so easily eclipsed, that the two strangers, the French

officer as well as the Choctaw chief, must always gaze at her in the

merrymaking last night,--why did not their eyes seek those younger and

more beautiful squaws, as all were present? She declared, moreover,

that she would not give her scarf to him. He doubtless desired to

make himself fine in it for the horse-races (in fact, it had never

been designed as a gift to a mere woman, but as propitiation for some

goodly warrior, to rivet his affections to the French interest, and to

be worn as a sash, or scarf, or turban, or in any way that his savage

fancy for decoration might dictate). As to the scarf, she averred that

it was hers, and she would keep it, and she would hear no more of his

sharp speeches, which made her heart very heavy. The day was wearing on

and her work was awaiting her. So she seated herself on the protruding

roots of the great tree in front of her dwelling, giving the final deft

touches to a large mat which she had been weaving.

The “mad young man” flung away, secretly satisfied, but with a

discontented and affectedly scornful mien, after the manner of his

kind, and meeting presently a congenial spirit he paused to detail the

demonstration of the Choctaw chief and its reception by the woman. The

listener, too, was of the Deer family, and not insensible of the value

and distinction of the proposed matrimonial alliance. But he forthwith

freely stigmatized the ambassador as a “mad young man” to be thinking

of women and marriage in a crucial national crisis such as this. As

he contemplated the political juncture, he could not sufficiently

applaud the wisdom of the other’s course in preventing the return of

the scarf and the consequent affronting of the Choctaw chief, for

since the present had been received his suit was accepted according

to etiquette. They agreed that she must marry him,--as at heart she

was no doubt willing to do, but must needs affect reluctance after the

tiresome fashion of women, and talk about living in the moon! And with

a scoff at such feminine follies, which they declared made their hearts

weigh[5] very heavy to contemplate, these “mad young men” separated,

each going his own way cheerfully,--neither of them being threatened

with a doom of living far away, among strangers in a foreign tribe, in

a speechless marriage.

As Akaluka sat under the tree and worked at her mat her own heart grew

heavier still, and in fact she hardly knew what to make of it. Now

and then the realization of the admiration of her suitor brought a

curve of pride to her lips, and then her eyes would fill with tears in

doubt, and dismay, and anxiety,--all those troublous vacillations of

sentiment which a woman naturally experiences in such circumstances;

for she was, perhaps, not the first woman, and certainly not the last,

who has accepted a suitor without intending to marry him, and cannot

perceive definitely how to recede from an engagement that has become

unexpectedly binding.

The man in her thoughts suddenly passed,--the Choctaw chief with

the French officer. Both paused as their eyes fell upon her. She

was tremulous, perturbed, appealing as she looked up from her lowly

posture. A mottling of darkness and sunlight was about the verges of

the shadow of the great, wide-spreading tree, but only a dim, green,

subdued atmosphere where she sat and in her white attire and with

her fishbone needle in her hand wrought an added embellishment of

embroidery in the borders of her painted mat.

Both men perceived her agitation. The officer, unaware of the incident

of the morning, did not comprehend it. With that suave Gallic civility,

always solicitous of the _entente cordiale_, he exclaimed aloud

in Cherokee his admiration of the fabric. It was one of those carpets,

described as “two fathoms long,” woven of the wild hemp, and painted

with indelible dyes and designs of the figures of beasts and birds,

always the same on both sides. Laroche expressed an interest in the

plan of its barbaric decoration and effort at delineation, while

Push-koosh stood and silently looked on. Here Laroche traced out a lion

(the panther or American cougar), which evidently signified strength,

and here were feathers, many and various, so dexterously imitated that

he declared they seemed real, which suggested softness, and love,

and nesting,--the symbolism was of the guardianship of home,--truly

an appropriate mat to lay before a hearthstone! Secure in his

interpretation, he looked straight at her with a smile in his handsome

brown eyes. She must needs speak in response; yet with Push-koosh

loftily looking on she sought by her phrase to include them both as,

gazing up, she faltered that she had kept it quite smooth despite its

complicated design,--it was quite smooth to walk upon.

It was too pretty to walk upon, the Frenchman declared in facile

compliment, and as she drew out the roll flat, to exhibit its

smoothness of texture, he dropped on one knee and tried its sleek,

evenly wrought fibres with his hand. But Push-koosh, turning away,

walked across it with a lordly air like a husband, and as the Frenchman

rose from his kneeling posture and joined him, Akaluka looked after

them both, with the fishbone needle motionless in her hand, extended to

the limit of its hempen thread, and destined to be very idle that day.

She was best accustomed to the attitude of mind of the Indian,--and

yet the Frenchman, how quick of interpretation he was!--how well he

understood all things! Strange, strange, that there should be such

difference in men! She would not have been afraid to go with him--to

the moon.

They conducted themselves at the horse-races that day like other “mad

young men;” they shouted, and bet more than they could afford to lose,

and argued much, and talked very loud, and were tumultuously and

heavily self-important. But that afternoon, seated in secret conclave

on buffalo rugs on the floor of the council-house, with half a dozen

chiefs of the towns of the vicinage summoned to join Moy Toy and the

headmen of Tellico at the conference, they seemed to have experienced

a sudden recurrence to sanity, a lucid interval, and each deported

himself much like a man of this world.

These deliberations, although expected to result in a treaty, were not

conducted as a formal council, since the will of the Cherokee nation

could only be expressed in a general congress, and much consideration

must needs precede so important a step as a renunciation of the

British alliance and firmly grasping the hand of the great French

father. The pipe was solemnly smoked, and although none arose as usual

in addressing the assembly, their habitual courtesy to one another

in council was observed, each speaking in turn, and punctiliously

refraining from interruption. When a subject was mentioned on which the

speaker desired a categorical reply from any one present, he handed

that person a small stick, at the end of the paragraph as it were, to

keep the remark in mind, and then went on to the other heads of his

discourse. When he had finished all he had to say, specific responses

to the details of his speech were made in turn by those to whom he had

handed sticks.

As Moy Toy thoughtfully canvassed the advantages proposed by the French

alliance, he remarked that Atta-Kulla-Kulla--a noted chief not present

at this time--had always advocated adherence to the British treaty,

since the trade which it provided and protected, albeit a monopoly,

afforded the Cherokees a means to keep under arms and adequately

supplied with ammunition, which was essential for hunting, and also in

view of war; even to enforce against the British with the arms they

themselves had supplied the observance of every jot and tittle of the

compact with the Cherokees. This advantage the French did not furnish

to the Indian tribes under their control.

He paused and solemnly handed a stick to Push-koosh, and then another

to Laroche.

It was the fashion, he continued, among the “mad young men” of the

nation, to comment upon Atta-Kulla-Kulla’s desire to avoid causes

of war with the British, calling him “an old woman;” but the great

chief was a wise man, for the object of prime importance was to keep

the warriors of the tribe under arms in the European fashion, since

bows and arrows were of no avail against powder and lead, and on the

supply of guns and ammunition actually depended the continuance of the

national existence of the Cherokees.

Push-koosh held his stick, attentively listening as Laroche interpreted

these words, and in answering said that it was even for such reason

the French father furnished the Choctaw tribe fully with arms and

ammunition only in times of war against a common enemy--so that, on

other occasions, their own “mad young men,” caviling thus at the

superior wisdom of their elders, might not have the means of embroiling

themselves and thrusting nations into hostilities when the great

warriors and “beloved men” were all for peace. But for chiefs and

headmen the armories of the great French father were always open.

He deftly touched the handsome pistols at his belt with a casual

gesture, and hardly seemed to listen to the voice of the French officer

repeating his words in Cherokee.

The Indian councilors experienced a tumult of excitement, which their

faces, however, stolidly repressed when Laroche, replying without

regard apparently to the presence of the Choctaw, said, as he held

his stick in his hand, that it was by no means the intention of the

French authorities to ignore the different status of the Cherokees

from the tribes under their control. The Cherokees, as the French

government well understood, were in effect an absolute integer in the

sum of nations, a free, independent, unified people, and they would be

armed and equipped in accordance with that fact. Whereas the Choctaws,

and Choccomaws, and others were nearly akin to the Chickasaws, all

sub-tribes of the Chickemicas of old; and although the Chickasaws,

always adhering firmly to the British and inimical to the French, had

often warred bitterly against their kindred Choctaws, still in view

of ties of consanguinity, similar customs, and above all a common

language, a friendly compact between them at some period, while not

probable, was eminently possible, especially when promoted by the

machinations of the British. Under these circumstances the French

father felt indisposed to keep the Choctaws fully under arms while

their brothers, the Chickasaws, held the knife at his throat. Surely

the great and wise chiefs could perceive a reason for a difference in

his attitude toward the Cherokees.

The great and wise chiefs could and did! They were also moved by a

recollection that the most notable of the Choctaws, the great chief

Shulashummashtabe (Red Shoes), long entertained designs to detach his

whole tribe from the interest of the French, being instrumental in

their defeat at the battle of Ackia, where he stood aloof with his own

command of Choctaw braves while the French troops charged to the cry of

“_Vive le roi_!” and afterward he fled in a simulated panic. He

later openly deserted to the English, and a reward being offered for

his head by the dear French father, he was treacherously slain by one

of his own tribe, during the governorship of the Marquis de Vaudreuil.

The Cherokee chiefs in council felt much as if they were treading on

mined ground, as they listened to the French officer’s voice while he

rendered into Choctaw his long speech for the benefit of Push-koosh;

for as the ambassador was blandly smiling, they must needs be sure that

the interpretation tendered him was to an entirely different effect.

The Indians were so crafty that they seemed to love a device for its

own shifty sake. They secretly admired this keen double-dealing of

the French authorities, without reflecting that a two-edged blade is

made to cut both ways. With a heightened sense of the sagacity of the

French officer, they all bent an attentive ear to his account of the

obstruction to navigation in the _Rivière des Chéraquis_ and his

disappointment to find that it was not to be overcome in the manner

expected by the French governor Kerlerec,--in fact it was there for all

time.

Mingo Push-koosh had been himself disappointed, both as a soldier and

a statesman, but his mien had an element of pride as he said that the

variegated merchandise--_al-poo-e-ack_--could not be forwarded.

Perhaps he resented the fact that he had been forced to discuss the

clipped-claw condition of the unarmed Choctaw tribe, whom Kerlerec had

nevertheless the art so to propitiate that he was called preëminently

the “Father of the Choctaws.” Mingo Push-koosh was evidently secretly

triumphant in the realization that the French alliance which he

possessed so easily, and the Cherokees coveted so strenuously, was

not to be had by them; for without the privileges of trade and a base

of supply, the Cherokees must adhere to the repugnant treaty with the

British to be able to keep under arms at all, even in war with other

tribes.

Moy Toy’s countenance fell.

“_To e u_?” (Is this true?) he asked sternly, as if he suspected

dissimulation, for from time to time there had been traffic more or

less by way of the Cherokee River.

“_To e u hah_!” (It is true indeed!) replied the French officer

definitely.

The chiefs looked from one to another silently, their countenances

expressing much that their pride would fain have hidden. If this

were true, a species of vassalage was the best hope of the free and

independent Cherokee people. Laroche begged to be permitted to explain

his views in reference to the obstructions to navigation.

Canoes, he went on to say, could pass of course, a few light craft

occasionally, perhaps even large pettiaugres at long intervals in

some especially favorable stage of the water, but for the free,

systematic transportation of the fleets of a great and continuous

trade, the passage was forever impracticable. In the distant future

the difficulties of navigation might be nullified by the construction

of a parallel artificial channel (he could find no Cherokee equivalent

for the word “canal”), the method of which he alertly explained with

that relish of technical details characteristic of the very young

in science,--all as carefully heeded by the Indian statesmen as if

entirely comprehensible. But at present he desired to lay before the

wise chiefs a plan of his own, which, should it meet their approval, he

would elaborate and submit to the governor at New Orleans.

There was an interval of silence as he arranged his thoughts. The

anxious, deliberative faces of the chiefs all turned toward him, their

eyes keenly studying his expression of countenance, seemed oddly

incongruous with the puerile decoration of beads and great earrings,

and feathers poised upright on each polled head. The vague light of the

smouldering council-fire flickered upon them; the sombre interior of

the windowless building was but dimly glimpsed in the deep red glow;

the glare from the brilliant day outside filled the narrow portal as

with some transparency, some illuminated segment of a painted landscape

unnaturally bright,--an emerald mountain aglow, a silver shimmering

river, a bit of sapphire sky, intense. Voices, faint in the distance,

of jovial intimations, came from where the young people were dancing

in three circles after the races and the feastings. The sound was

far alien to this atmosphere of thought and anxious care, this dim

council-house, where were concocted the measures of statecraft that

kept the people free and happy. Even Push-koosh, whom the envious

shadows could not bereave of the brilliant effect of his white raiment,

asserted albeit in the dimness, his glossy pearls, the glitter of his

silver ornaments, did not heed the joyous clamor. As to Laroche, he did

not hear it at all.

It was not to be contemplated, he said, that this perverse obstruction

to navigation should withhold the Cherokee nation from firmly

grasping the hand of the French father who loved them; but since it

was absolutely impracticable to send valuable cargoes of arms and

ammunition, as well as cloths, cutlery, tools, and paints, all those

necessities of the Indian trade, so expensive and difficult to be

obtained, through those twenty miles of roaring rapids, to say nothing

of the whirlpools further up the current, the merchandise might be

thence transferred, under strong guard, by land with pack-horses to

the comparatively near point of the reopening of easy navigation, were

there a barrier town settled at each extremity of the overland route to

receive and distribute the goods by the various waterways throughout

the Cherokee nation.

“_Seohsta-quo_!” (Good!) cried Moy Toy of Tellico.

The others in great excitement but in definite order, observing

their usual courtesy in deliberation, with much rapid bestowal of

sticks, bespeaking categorical answers on the various details,

began the discussion of this bold project,--the extension of their

settlements for more than a hundred miles rather than fail to secure

the advantage of the French alliance. The details of the diplomatic

scheme illustrated the Frenchman’s fertility in device, and Push-koosh

was not slow to perceive that Laroche presently had both hands full

of sticks, while he himself held but two, evidently tendered only as

an afterthought and _pro forma_. The Indian statesmen wished to

hear the French officer speak. The coherence and cogency of his plan

commended it. Indeed, afterward they contemplated the removal of the

town of Tellico Great itself, one of the “seven Mother Towns” of the

Cherokee nation, far enough down the Cherokee River to be within easy

access of the large French pettiaugres. Even as it was, the nation

subsequently extended its frontier on this basis, and a series of new

towns was settled below the “mountain obstructions,” the “whirl,” the

“boiling pot,” and still beyond, near the upper end of the Muscle

Shoals, serving as the “barrier towns” of the tribe. The Cherokees

craftily explained to the English the necessity for this move by

the statement that the site of some of their upper towns had become

infested with witches!--it may safely be presumed that they were

British witches!

The questions relative to the proposed new location,--the number of

warriors requisite for the barrier towns; the possibility that, if

supported by a sufficient force of braves in the neighborhood, the

French government would settle a garrison at the Muscle Shoals; the

number of horses and men necessary for the pack-trains and the guard

for the overland transportation; the most desirable point for the

resumption of the water carriage of the merchandise up the Cherokee

River, and thence by way of the Eupharsee (Hiwassee), the Tennessee,

the Agiqué (French Broad), throughout the Cherokee country; the

measures to be taken for the protection of French traders and their

mercantile assistants against the British,--all these points Laroche

intelligently discussed, continually receiving and returning sticks,

while the transparent landscape in the doorway shimmered to a change:

the blue sky grew red, the green mountain turned purple, the silver

river dulled to steel, and a star began to flicker in the west.

Moy Toy would have talked on through the descending darkness,

regardless of the night and the dying of the last ember of the

council-fire, save for the admonition of one of the minor chiefs,

on whom the duty of caring for the creature comforts of the guests

had devolved, and who contrived to intimate presently that it was

long since the strangers had eaten and drunk. On this account the

council was adjourned, Moy Toy still wearing a thoughtful aspect and

meditatively saying, “We will talk of this again to-morrow.” And as

they left him in the gloom of the state-house, and began the descent of

the steps of earth that led down from the high mound, they heard him

still mechanically repeating in the solitary darkness, “We will talk of

this again to-morrow.”

Now Push-koosh, like some other infants, even when not Choctaw chiefs

nor warriors, was of a proud, implacable, and pompous self-opinion.

It required little to wound his vanity and nettle his temper, but

indeed he had ample cause for affront in that this officer had talked

unceasingly in his presence to the Cherokee chiefs without pausing

to translate what was said, although in their excitement no one had

noticed the fact. At first Push-koosh had essayed to speak in Cherokee,

but his knowledge of the tongue would not sustain the subtleties of

his meaning. He had even humbled himself once to seek recourse in the

sign language, comprehensive enough for all needs, but every eye was

fixed upon Laroche, every ear intent. He felt his pride touched that

this absorbing interest, which the chiefs had manifested in diplomatic

matters, sprang from naught that he had disclosed in his ambassadorial

capacity,--in fact he did not even know the subject of their excitement

or its importance. He thought it derogatory to his position to inquire

of Laroche, or to seem to realize that he had been overlooked--he, the

head of the embassy! But the incident roused him to the assertion of

his own importance.

He saw, with pleasure in the contrast, that Laroche was exhausted by

the mental stress of the discussion, while he had been refreshed by

the long hours of rest in the quiet seclusion of the state-house.

When they were seated in one of the piazza-like cabins at one side

of the “beloved square,” where the banquet had been spread after the

races, Laroche was still absorbed and silent, ate little, and drank

only of the decoction from the “flint corn” made by boiling the grain

and straining the result, the beverage when cooled said to have been

refreshing and nutritive and “much liked even by genteel strangers.” A

fire was alight in the centre of the “beloved square,” but the other

public buildings were all vacant, and their open piazza-like fronts

showed dark and deserted in the deepening dusk. The festivities were

over for the nonce; the Indian guests from the neighboring villages

had departed; the strangers’ share of the evening banquet, with which

the merrymaking in their honor had ended, having been reserved for

them till the close of the protracted session of the council. The town

seemed drowsy, already half asleep; only a few occasional passers set

the echo of a footfall astir; an owl was hooting in the woods; a vague

sense of dreariness had descended with the twilight, and suddenly

Laroche became cognizant, with a start as if he had seen a ghost,

that there was a presence at the meal of which he had been hitherto

unaware,--Akaluka herself, meekly seated by the Choctaw chief while he

silently ate and drank.

There was a bold, open triumph in the face of Push-koosh, as he noted

the manifestation of surprise. He looked at the French officer as

arrogantly as if he had already that luxuriant Gallic scalp hanging to

his favorite pipe. Perhaps he himself had never seemed so assertive, so

lordly, as in the blended light of the bland moonrise and a flickering

pine torch with which the table was lighted by the old woman who

served it,--his strings of pearls, his glittering pistols, his white

and scarlet garb, the red flamingo feathers in his hair, the broad

silver band across his forehead, his perfect physical condition; while

Laroche, pale from mental exertion, the mathematical calculation, the

evolution of plans of public polity, the arrangement of intricate and

antagonistic details in the problems of the Indian trade, wiped his

forehead, felt his eyes ache, and was too tired to eat.

These plans were the more precious since they were suddenly beset with

a new danger; he realized the menace, although he did not appreciate

that he himself was an element in it; he did not know how admiringly

the girl had gazed at him the previous evening at the pantomime, while

Push-koosh, who could have killed him for it, gazed at her. Even

Push-koosh had noted his unconsciousness of this fact,--but Laroche had

not been equally oblivious of her attractions. “_Eho chookoma_!”

quotha. She might now gaze at her peril,--and so might he! Laroche had

not noticed this evening the Choctaw as he beckoned the girl to sit

beside him as he ate, but he knew enough of Indian etiquette to be

aware that this is the method by which the suitor formally recognizes

and emphasizes the fact that his addresses are accepted.

Laroche had learned that this woman was the sister of Moy Toy, and

while a Choctaw match for her might be approved by him as a means

of strengthening the alliance between the tribes, still there was

of necessity great doubt as to the completion of this national

compact, the Choctaws and Cherokees having many ancient enmities to

reconcile, and the offer of intermarriage must needs be approached with

precaution. And above all things at some future day! To hamper at this

crisis so important and promising a negotiation between the French

government and the Cherokee nation, so difficult of arrangement, with a

nettling trifle like this,--a personal matter of so alien and doubtful

a character,--Laroche trembled with impatience at the very thought.

He was once more all alert. When Push-koosh rose at last from the meal

and flung casually away, taking his path along the river bank where a

cool breeze was stirring, the lieutenant followed. For although the

woman must sit beside her suitor when he eats if he beckons to her,

still the match is not yet irretrievably made. He must needs give

her the foot of a deer as an admonition how brisk she must be on his

errands, whereupon she must bake and offer him a cake of rockahominy

meal, as token of willing subservience. He must also break an ear of

corn in half, and in the presence of witnesses give her one portion,

retaining the other himself, which completes the symbolic Indian

marriage ceremonies.

“Push-koosh,” said Laroche gravely, as he approached,--the Indian

slackened his pace, welcoming from his position of vantage as an

accepted suitor the prospect of a quarrel with a jealous lover,--“the

commandant did not send us here to make love to women!”

Push-koosh turned to glance aside at him. “Take care that you don’t do

it, then,” he admonished the officer.

“Our mission is a matter far too important to jeopardize with such

considerations,” declared Laroche. He slipped his arm through the

Choctaw’s in a friendly way and detailed at length his scheme, his

clever scheme, apologizing that he had not interpreted it at the

council. “But it was not a part of our instructions,--only a plan of my

own.”

“You did not want my suggestions,--I do not want yours,” retorted

Push-koosh, deeply angered to perceive the importance of the

discussion, through which he had sat silent, carried on over his head.

“But you can see surely that there must be no talk of women and

marriage till all this is settled,--wait till you come again,” urged

Laroche, holding his temper well in hand.

“_Eho chookoma_!” quoted Push-koosh significantly. “Meantime there

might be another man!”

That fatal “other man”--was ever a lover’s dream which he did not haunt?

“But, _Bébé_, Push-koosh,” argued the Frenchman suavely, “what

would you do hampered with a Cherokee wife if, after all, this tribe

continues to adhere to the British, and should take part in their war

with the French and their Choctaw allies?”

Push-koosh, animated with the jealous conviction, yet full of triumph

in the fact, that the French officer was himself in love with this

charming swan and therefore sought to interpose obstacles, retorted

as if to strike him to the heart, “Do?--comply with the tribal

custom! _Kill her!_ In the last war with the Muscogee, did not

the Choctaw braves who had married Muscogee wives kill the women and

their children, they being also Muscogee, for the children inherit the

nationality of the mother? I should, of course, kill her!”

He had turned to face the officer, who stood for one moment speechless,

realizing the strange world in which he was living, the curious medley

of devil and man, of savagery and civilization.

The moon was well up over the river, and where the light struck with

full effulgence the water was all a shining violet hue; the banks were

of an invisible green, too dark for color, but somehow still sensibly

verdant. All along the shore the frogs were piping, hardly noticed;

for in the budding rhododendron close at hand a mocking-bird sang with

wonderful _élan_ and elasticity, the multitude of exquisitely

sweet notes springing one from another with a definite effect of

rebound.

“Push-koosh,” the lieutenant said at length, “_mon Bébé

bien-aimé_, you always betray your tender infant heart!”

He seemed to laugh, but his hand trembled on the hilt of his sword,

as he stood as if irresolute and gazed at Push-koosh with a threat in

his intent eyes hardly less fierce than the look with which only last

night Push-koosh had menacingly, nay murderously gazed at him while he

slept. Suddenly the officer turned aside, and alone took his way back

to the Indian town.

Yet Laroche did not love the woman. Perhaps he was merely civilized by

virtue of his nationality and his religion; for although as a soldier

he would have coolly taken the life of a man and an enemy, he felt all

a coward in the secret danger that menaced the Cherokee girl, unaware,

doubtless, of her peril. He himself was not unaware of it, and therein

he perceived an irksome responsibility. The Cherokees were so far in

advance of the other Indian tribes in point of character, sentiment,

civilization, that Laroche doubted if this mode of ridding one’s

self of a wife, who, through no fault of her own, but for political

reasons, had incurred disfavor, would suggest itself to them more

readily than it had to him. With their evident intention to accept

the proffer of the French alliance, it was more than likely that the

Cherokee authorities, with their characteristic lack of foresight,

would treat the match with the Choctaw chief as if the compact with

the French were already made fast. Yet should it fail,--and from

Laroche’s post on the seamy side he saw many a rent in the web of the

probabilities,--Push-koosh had said it,--he had decreed her fate.

Laroche had so longed for the success of his scheme! It was so great,

so clever, so promissory of personal and professional advancement! He

felt that he would hardly hazard an item of its development for his

own life,--much less then for the life of a creature like this--hardly

more human than a deer! Besides, why should he interfere?--all might

yet go well with the alliance. When he began to argue thus, he suddenly

stopped short. Would he weigh a human life in the balance of his

personal interest--become, albeit indirectly, accessory to a murder

of the innocent? He grew a trifle pale at the thought and devoutly

crossed himself. He would assume no such responsibility. He would keep

no such secret. And then he began to see the matter in the light of

an official duty. He represented the French interest, and should the

Cherokees ever learn that he had been cognizant of this threat and had

withheld it from them, it would alienate them, as naught else could,

from the power that so earnestly sought their conciliation. In every

point of view he determined that he would not hesitate. He would lay

the matter before Moy Toy, as in civilization he would instantly report

a threatened murder to the police.

Now Moy Toy was a man of family affection. Years earlier, in 1730, he

had given indications of this fact when a Cherokee delegation, favored

by royal invitation, were on the point of setting forth to visit

King George II. in London; Moy Toy, although he was to be the chief

delegate, at the last moment relinquished the distinguished opportunity

because his wife had fallen dangerously ill and he could not leave

her. Therefore he remained at the little Indian village, while several

other chiefs made the wonderful journey to England, and had audience

of the sovereign at his palace, and were the recipients of innumerable

presents and attentions, being the lions of the day.

He now took instant alarm at this menace to his sister, and to

Laroche’s surprise presently summoned to his aid and counsel the other

chiefs of Tellico Great. The Indian scheme of succession follows

the collateral female line, and therefore Moy Toy’s possible future

nephew would inherit his office as chief of Tellico Great, to the

exclusion of his own son. Hence his sister was a personage of as

much consequence in Tellico Great as a mere woman could be, and the

council agreed that in view of this circumstance they would not trust

the Franco-Choctaw-Cherokee alliance until it was an accomplished

fact. Yet even now it was in jeopardy, for Mingo Push-koosh, the

French ambassador, bearing also the assurances of the Choctaw nation,

angered with so good a reason might work mischief. And then began the

accusation of the woman!

Why had she kept his present, and involved them in all this difficulty?

the sage councilors assembled in the state-house demanded of her when

summoned before them. For this very reason, she declared, had she kept

his present, although not loving it, for the young men had said that

she must not on any account anger the Choctaw ambassador of the great

French father. Then poor Moy Toy, roused from cogitation on such deep

and intricate problems as had occupied the day, to fill the dark hours

of the night with vacillations and agitations touching the political

effects of so ill-starred a flirtation, asked her bitterly had she

no more sense than to listen to the “mad young men!” Whereupon she

protested with tears that the “mad young men” had but spoken the words

that even now were on his own sage lips,--the ambassador must not be

angered!

With daylight came new resolutions. Moy Toy, arguing that the

ambassador was not empowered to treat for a Cherokee wife, and to exact

compliance with his demand as a condition of his mission, concluded

that he sustained no official affront in the ceremonious return of the

scarf with an intimation that so great and flattering an intermarriage

could only be made after the compact with the two tribes.

Now it is possible that Push-koosh might have acquiesced with

appropriate docility in this obviously just reasoning of his elders,

requiring, however, promises of Moy Toy on his sister’s behalf,

conditioned on the completion of the tribal compact, had it not been

for his jealousy of the French lieutenant. Akaluka, again summoned, was

also at the state-house, wild-eyed, tremulous, visibly terrified, eager

to return the present, which, having been made acquainted with her

possible fate, she was far indeed from loving.

As the Choctaw ambassador received the scarf which she tendered

him, the cogent reasons for delay that had been urged, the political

interests involved, so prominent in the apologies of the Cherokee

chiefs,--all were merged in a sense of sustaining the curious disgrace

of a personal and public rejection in the presence of a rival,--for

Mingo Push-koosh caught the eyes of the French lieutenant fixed

hopefully upon him.

Why then, the Choctaw asked quite calmly, had she received the present

if she did not love it? Why had she sat beside him as he ate? For

himself,--neither did he love the present!

He held up the gauzy red scarf and with sundry swift passes of a scalp

knife severed the fabric into dozens of shreds, sent lightly flying

about the state-house like a flock of redbirds. Then whirling on his

heel, he quitted the council-chamber and followed by all his tribesmen

ran across the “beloved square” to the river bank, where the pettiaugre

lay defenseless at his mercy. All the kegs of the precious powder were

emptied into the stream before his design was dreamed of, and still he

deemed he had sufficient margin for a running start from the pursuit

he expected, for he paused in the woods to hang up the “war-brand.”

This being, however, in a secluded place, it was not early discovered,

and the first intimation that the Cherokees received of the depth of

his resentment was the massacre almost to a man of a peaceful party

of their tribesmen, offering no resistance, taken wholly by surprise,

owing to the pacific character of the Franco-Choctaw mission to Great

Tellico. This exploit achieved, Mingo Push-koosh and his escort,

adorned with scalps and singing war-songs, made good their escape, with

the wonderful Choctaw speed in marching, leaving the deserted Laroche

alone and at the mercy of the frantic and infuriated Cherokees.

III

LAROCHE, abandoned thus among the Cherokees, was in the extremity of

peril. Apart from their spirit of tribal cohesion, the strongest of

national sentiments, all those more intimate ties of family affection,

of municipal unity, and of neighborly custom, in which they were

peculiarly bound, were insistently asserted in the calamity, as the

massacred braves were all of Tellico Great. When the gory figures of

the unarmed, unpainted youths, still limp and warm, not yet stiffened

into the starkness of death, were borne into the precincts of the town,

the wailing of the women and children, and the hoarse cries of fury and

despair and grief of the men, filled all the bland, sunlit spaces of

the morning, and were a heavy burden to the air.

It was with no definite sense of the wisest course that Laroche had not

moved from the portal of the great state-house whence he had beheld

Mingo Push-koosh, followed by all his braves, rush across the “beloved

square” to the pettiaugre and accomplish the destruction of the powder.

He was stunned, bewildered, as by the fall of a thunderbolt. Only

afterward he realized that he had no choice. The craft still lay at

her moorings, but his single strength could not have sufficed to float

her, even if in the confusion he had escaped. He had a shrewd surmise

of the secret source of the wrath of the Mingo, and he doubted if the

jealousy of the Choctaw, once unleashed and dipped in blood, were less

formidable than the wild frenzy of the Cherokees. Moreover, at their

freest pace, speeding for their lives, he knew that he could never have

sustained the gait of the marching Choctaws, and must eventually have

fallen by the wayside or lagged to certain capture.

He began to appreciate, as he stood, an aspect in the accident of his

posture which his craft recognized as savoring of more wisdom than

he could have attained by his own mental processes. His isolation

implied that he was no accessory to the crimes in which the mission had

terminated. The desertion of him by the Choctaws augured scant value

of his functions in the embassy, and still less friendship for him

personally,--his safety, indeed, they disregarded. He began to hope

preposterously, as his heart swung into more normal palpitations, that

his nationality, his secret mission within the Franco-Choctaw mission,

his obvious freedom from any conspiracy with the Indian ambassador who

had so conspicuously abused his trust, might serve to protect him.

Then he perceived suddenly that he was arguing from the probabilities

on a civilized system of ratiocination. For himself, he did not love

the spectacle of suffering nor the smell of blood, albeit so skilled in

the designing of lines of _tenailles_ and _en crémaillère_,

in which men were to lay down their lives in much agony. His own

development of barbarity was on a different basis and had a vocabulary

quite distinct and scientific, his jargon of _trou-de-loup_ and

_cheval-de-frise_ and _chausse-trappe_; and he watched with

a very definite sentiment of reprehension and mental disapproval, as

well as a deep and numb despair, the approach of a half dozen fierce,

lowering-eyed braves, full-armed, who stood for a moment looking up at

him and then seated themselves, obviously to remain, at the base of the

mound, assuming the functions of a permanent guard.

In fact, Laroche had been unobserved at first in the clamors and

confusion of the disaster, the departure of the horsemen on the heels

of the flying Choctaw pedestrians, the ghastly return of the young

Indians of the massacre, who had gone forth with all the imponderable

lightness of life and joy in the morning and now were brought back

in weight with death and woe. The first vague suggestion of the

alleviation of the public calamity came with the stern thought of

vengeance and its opportunity. In that moment the eye of one of the

headmen chanced to be lifted to Laroche. The guard was dispatched in an

instant, and whatever might have been the issue of an effort to escape,

the possibility was now gone forever. He began to perceive that they

would take no thought of an absence of conspiracy. He was one of the

embassy--its accredited interpreter; he was also a Frenchman, and the

Cherokees were still in open alliance with the British. Moreover, he

was in their power, and _blood for blood_ was ever the Cherokee

rule.

For a time he made no effort to appeal to his guards, even by a glance

or a gesture. Hour after hour passed away. He heard the vague sounds,

in the distance, of the chanting of the funeral songs; he perceived,

undistinguished, colorless, meaningless, like shadows through a

dark glass, the passing of the funeral processions here and there

around the houses of the dead. Again and again there smote on the air

wild outbursts of the protesting woe of the mourning, the note of

incredulity, the appeal against injustice, and that pathetic plaint of

a heart all bruised and tender--and yet in a sense he heard naught. He

was conscious of a degree of quietude when the actual details of the

interment were in progress within the houses, for with the Cherokees

the dead were always buried deep, deep under the floor of their own

homes, and a sense of extreme fatigue ached in his muscles. He realized

how long he had maintained a standing posture there without a motion--a

sentinel who habitually mounted guard his eight hours out of the

twenty-four would hardly have been capable of such resolution. As his

eye met that of one of the guards, he saw in the inexpressive face of

the Indian a sort of appreciation of his strength of will that coerced

the endurance of the flesh, and at last he spoke:--

“Moy Toy cannot think me to blame--why does he guard me here?”

They all gazed at him with a sort of concentrated fury. The racial

hatred against the white man--ineradicable, unappeasable, now

and again only pretermitted for a time in favor of some special

individual--showed in their strongly marked, savage features, with the

primitive passions of the rule of force and the thirst for revenge

painted upon them in a breadth of expression that pigments could not

emulate.

“Blood for blood,” one of them said, and spat upon the ground.

“If I were one of the Choctaws--yes! But I am French. I have done

naught. They have deserted me. I am entrapped here. It would please

them that you should shed my blood.”

There was a momentary silence under this logic. Then another of

the Indians, always of a far greater intellectual pride than might

be readily imagined, and keen and quick in argument, came to the

spokesman’s rescue. He was the man whose eyes had applauded the

prisoner’s endurance--a mere tribesman, of the rank and file only; he

had a broad, animated countenance, a high, aquiline nose, a long, upper

lip, and a distinct accentuation of the lines of his features. He wore

the scanty raiment of the lower grades of the Indian, but the careful

and elaborate tattooing of blue, red, and green indelible paints

disposed about his limbs, in which he must have spent much arduous

labor, had almost the effect of long and elaborately embroidered hose

and gloves. He had a shirt of buckskin, devoid of beads or ornaments,

save a fringe about its edge, but which seemed remarkably plain in

contrast with the decorations of his arms and legs. He leaned upon

a gun of very doubtful intentions, unlike the smart, British “Brown

Bess,” with which the tribe, however, was generally armed. With

a vivacious air, he demanded of the Frenchman if he had forgotten

“Ablaham” so soon.

“Abraham?” said Laroche vaguely.

“The white man’s poor memory! It was his treaty he forgot, usually, but

now he had forgotten too his religion. He had forgot Ablaham--the great

white chief whom he was telling Moy Toy about yesterday!”

Laroche remembered, with a pang as for a folly, an effort at the

conversion of the ignorant savage. Yesterday--only yesterday!--he had

sought to explain to Moy Toy the plan of salvation and to enlist his

interest. He laughed aloud in bitter mirth--a short, hollow note,

and then must come contrition and a mutter of prayer. Abraham and

Isaac--how far away they seemed!

“But, my friend,” he said, “the injunction to shed innocent blood was

for a purpose--to test the faith of the great chief; and the blood of

the innocent was not exacted. I have done nothing. I only am deserted,

caught here as in a trap.”

“Likewise was the ram whose blood was shed,” declared the specious

Indian, his eyes flashing fire,--“caught as in a trap by the horns in a

thicket. And the ram had done nothing.”

The Frenchman was fairly silenced; the others, hardly comprehending

the discourse, not having burdened their minds with Abraham and his

experiences, conceiving him to be an Indian agent, or in some other

position near the governor of Louisiana, Georgia, or South Carolina,

only discerned from the facial expression of the two men that the

Cherokee’s keen wits had come off victorious in the encounter, and

despite their gloom, they made shift to smile at each other in

ostentatious amusement, and in derision of the purblind white man.

Laroche’s anxiety and apprehension were hardly assuaged by the

recollection of the blood-offerings among the religious observances of

the Cherokees, intimately connected with their system of government and

warfare, which had recalled strongly to his mind associations with the

Mosaic dispensation. Many minute requirements and ceremonies savored

of the Hebraic ritual, and in their distortions had impressed him as

survivals of actual customs, and were thus more significant than the

legends found among the tribes betokening Scriptural suggestions and

supposed to be the result, _disjecta membra_, of the teachings

and traditions of Catholic truths which Cabeza de Vaca left among the

Southern Indians.

Laroche sought to compose his mind. He was a soldier, and would muster

all a soldier’s courage,--a Christian, whose hope was in no help of

man. He would calm himself and await the worst or the best, as God

should choose to send it, with the serenity of one whose life is,

after all, not his own. As he stood there in the wide glare of the

sun, it seemed to have grown speedily and strangely very hot. His

eyes were on the mountains far away, that through the silvery, vernal

mists, forever shifting, belied their stanch and massive solidities

by a shimmer like some wavering, blue sea; not a breath of air was

in the deep, green shadows of the darkling ranges close at hand; the

river, a wide blade of steel without flaw, bore the polish of a mirror

and a blinding glitter. Suddenly a cold chill struck through him. At

first it crept along his spinal column, slight, insidious, vaguely

shivering; then in its icy thrall he shuddered again and again; the

drops that fell from his brow upon his hands were ice cold, and as he

looked down, wondering, at his long, thin fingers he saw that they were

blue under the nails to the first joint. Some change in his face had

attracted the attention of the Indians. They were all gazing up at him

in surprise, as shudder after shudder went over his features, pallid

even to blueness. He instinctively put up his hand to his brow, and he

found that even to his cold fingers its touch was like marble. He was

obviously very near death, done with the world and with worldly pride,

but he was still a soldier, and his pulses beat to a martial point of

honor. He could have died with shame, albeit the spectators were but

savages; for he thought this manifestation purported the subjection of

fear, and that thus the staring Indians recognized it.

Averse as they were, they accounted him no coward. In truth, his

stanch, compact physique and his bold spirit promised good sport at the

torture, and they had discussed with one another from time to time the

various details of the anguish which his strength and courage would

enable him to sustain, and which sometimes weaker and fainter hearted

men eluded and despoiled by dying prematurely. They could hardly

explain the change in his complexion and expression of countenance, and

only wondered while they looked, and presently it passed away, leaving

the flesh of a ghastly, uniform pallor, flabby and listless.

But Laroche had hardly recovered his normal temperature. He was

suddenly weak and tremulous. He could no longer sustain the standing

posture. In another moment he would have fallen. With his winning

affability and gay grace, that became his ghastly, stricken face as a

wreath of flowers might a death’s head, he remarked that since they

were all sitting he would take the liberty of sitting too, and ran down

two or three of the grassy steps of the mound and there dropped upon

the turf, half reclining, one elbow on the step above him, supporting

his head in his hand, and with his limbs stretched out at length

across the stairs below. The Indian guard at the foot of the mound

did not stir, save that the acquaintance of “Ablaham” placed a finger

ostentatiously on the trigger of his loaded gun. Laroche looked at him

with a laughing sneer that taunted him to do his worst. The slug of the

charge would have been too merciful.[6] There was no intention in the

threat, and the Indian laughed like a roguish child detected in a bit

of mischief.

The sky was reddening at last and Laroche, looking over to the far

west, felt as if that incarnadined glow in the heavens was rising

in his veins as the sun went down. It was not the red reflection on

his face, but the blood mustering close under the skin when he again

changed color. He felt it racing and rushing through his veins, ever

quickening, ever wilder.

His mood changed. He had been saying to himself that it was no

matter when or how painfully he died. He wished that he might see a

priest--the good Père François; he caught himself hastily, remembering

that piteous death of the father. Alas, when and how painfully have

died many, many of the Order of Jesus, here, there, in every clime!

He said to himself that he should be proud that it fell to his lot to

emulate the mortuary example of those undying missionaries, that yet in

the flesh died so hardily.

“_Quibus dignus non erat mundus_!” he declared in swelling phrase,

_ore rotundo_.

But with the sudden surging of his fevered blood he protested.

They,--God knew he wished to detract no whit from their credit,--but

they were spiritual-minded men, many convent-bred, ascetic, he had

almost said superstitious, solicitous for the martyr’s crown, with a

talent for dying, and a positive genius for remitting to everlasting

opprobrium throughout all the ages their misguided murderers.

He broke off from these reflections with a sudden, loud, hilarious

laugh that echoed far through the quiet town on whose death-stricken

ways the dusk was gradually descending, and brought his Indian guard

to their feet with an abrupt spring, staring at him with vague wonder

through the gloom.

His eyes, meeting theirs, were large, dilated, curiously bright. There

seemed no recognition in them. He did not answer when they spoke, but

shifting his posture slightly went on muttering to himself; his mind

thus beyond the control of his will, he formulated more candor than his

disciplined judgment was wont to recognize. They were spiritual-minded

men, he reiterated, the Jesuit martyrs. For himself,--he was a soldier,

not a martyr. Dying was the last thing a soldier should do,--and

once more his foolish, frivolous laugh rang through the melancholy

glooms of the bereaved town. He was not fitted to die thus,--the

prey of unreasoning devils called by complaisance savages, to whom

he had been sent on a mission of importance to French politics. His

grave, his honorable grave, awaited him on some stricken field of

battle. He had thought a hundred times how it might come,--in the

rebuilding of some destroyed bridge which the enemy--_peste_! he

always destroys the good bridges!--or perhaps in pushing a parallel

closer and closer to the lines of the doomed defenses,--a ball from

the _chemin convert_ of the fort might find a vital spot. Would

he shun it?--fear death?--“_Je te fais mes compliments_!” He

stood suddenly erect and saluted. Then he collapsed upon the ground.

A soldier’s hasty grave on the field of battle,--he coveted it. For

shrift,--the pressure of a good comrade’s hand might bid him Godspeed.

A soldier has few sins to confess. Little is required of him--he is

merely a soldier--all body and heart--a mere bit of a soul! But these

priests--these spiritual men--they who can profess so much, why should

they fail?

A light was presently glimmering in the dusk,--clear, luminous, a

pyramidal flare approaching rapidly, then pausing as in uncertainty,

flickering through the blue darkness, and once more drawing near.

“The lanthorns of the burial parties,” he said, contemplating with a

gentle melancholy the battlefield of his fancy. “Many a fine fellow

coming to-day that must be carried to-morrow.”

Then swiftly repeating a series of measurements and mathematical

calculations, he rose as the light paused at the foot of the mound and

the flare of the torch fell upon the face of Moy Toy, summoned hither

by the weird sound of that strange, hilarious laughter, and minded to

advance the hour for the prisoner’s torture and death, since he must

needs be so obtrusively merry in the face of their distresses and

disasters.

Laroche recognized him vaguely, but naught of the circumstances which

environed him. He lifted his voice as he pursued his train of remarks,

expressing the jumble of his ideas.

“Un bastion, Moy Toy, avec un ravelin,--et une fraise d’épine ne serait

pas inutile!--là,--là,--sur le bord de la rivière,--quatre-vingts

toises de distance,--pour enfiler les colonnes,--la fosse,--à la portée

du canon,--donnez dix-huit pieds de large au parapet,--et puis,--et

puis,”--

He ran down the steps and laid his hot hand upon the arm of the

Cherokee chief, who stared aghast at this manifestation of a strange

distemper.

It was well for Laroche that the Cherokees did not feel it incumbent

upon them to preserve the grace of consistency. If he had continued

in health, he would assuredly have been put to death with tortures,

in satisfaction of the iniquities of the embassy of which he was a

member, but his wandering mind, his evident delirium, precluded his

knowledge of his own fate, and thus robbed the torture of its choicest

delight, the fear and mental misery of the victim, as well as his

bodily agony. A postponement of the sentence was hastily agreed upon,

and the patient, still declaiming upon the advantage of one system

of fortification and contemptuously disparaging others, was gently

conveyed, for he could no longer walk, to the stranger-house which he

and Push-koosh had occupied, put to bed on the elastic cane-wrought

mattress, and the medicine-men were summoned to exorcise this strange

demon of fever which had possessed the guest.

The skill of these primitive people in the art of healing was said to

be very considerable. But in this instance the Cherokee physicians

found themselves at a loss. Laroche had duly absorbed the atmospheric

miasma of the swampy country near Mobile and New Orleans, which, had he

remained there, might have occasioned no trouble. But upon his sudden

removal it instantly manifested itself in a virulent type of malarial

fever, all its poison elicited by the pure, clear air of this mountain

region. Hence this salubrious clime has been called “the unhealthiest

country in the world” by suffering subtropical wights who would not be

at rest at home and could not be well elsewhere. This theory, exploited

long since those times, was not familiar to the two cheerataghe, who

rattled their calabashes at the fever demon with hearty good will.

They administered the varied decoctions of herbs famous as febrifuges.

They repeated aloud their ancient incantations, both mandatory and

contemptuous, bidding the malign spirit depart. They arrayed and

painted themselves in frightful guise to terrify the fever demon, and

decorated with buffalo horns and buffalo tails, they rushed roaring

from right to left in front of the bed, and when this proved futile,

from left to right. They subjected the patient to sudden immersion in

hot water, and then in cold, and again to a steaming process, placing

him in an oven-like structure of heated rocks, over which water was

poured,--all without avail. The Cherokee magicians began to look very

grave and ill at ease, for a dark cloud was ominously gathering on

the brow of Moy Toy. All at once Moy Toy had come to covet the life

of this man. It must be captured from death. He must be snatched from

the already open grave. Not for the satisfaction of exacting that

terrible penalty, as one of the treacherous Choctaw embassy; not for

the keen delight of the spectacle of his death by torture. Any unlucky

French wight captured from the Illinois country; or some helpless

English body, unknown or of scant note, wandering away from a kindly

colonial settlement and heard of never again; or even a stanch Indian

of one of the inimical tribes,--Muscogee, Tuscarora, Seneca,--any

mere man, in short, who had blood to spill, and bones to break, and

nerves to writhe might furnish this sport. With this man’s death

more was lost,--a subtle, keen brain, technical military knowledge,

practical military experience, a tongue of wondrous craft trained in

various speech, a secret cogent influence with the French authorities

at New Orleans,--all calculated to subserve the Cherokees, and this a

trifling kindliness would reinforce by the claims of gratitude, a claim

paramount in the Indian scheme of ethics.