So overwhelmed had been the wary Moy Toy’s brain by the surprise, the

fury, the grief attending the catastrophe of the massacre of his young

tribesmen, that these considerations were not even dimly presented to

his alert perceptions till the moment that Laroche dashed down the

stairs of the mound and impetuously flung himself into his host’s arms

with his delirious babble of military works and munitions of war. It

was at first but a vague impression, a doubtful suggestion. The crafty

Indian mind dwelt upon it in the days that came and went. Time seemed

to embellish, to perfect it. And now it had become the dearest boon of

fate, and the Indian could not, would not forego it. For this man could

design and build a fort that could withstand a British assault! He

could so dispose the Indian facilities as to enable them to defend it.

He could by reason of his connection with the French government secure

such munitions of war as would complete its armament. An impregnable

stronghold in the wilderness, with scientifically handled artillery,

could set at naught British aggression and hold the country.

Turned in whatever light, the idea presented a perfect symmetry.

It was like a many faceted gem. And thus the two magicians, men of

herbs and simples, found their equanimity shaken and their capacities

seriously hampered by the continual presentation of Moy Toy’s imperious

countenance at the door of the stranger-house, and the sight of his

agitation and anger that the cheerataghe had failed to exorcise the

demon of fever and work a cure. Therefore they besought him to leave

the sufferer to their ministrations; for his angry countenance caused

their hearts to weigh very heavy within them, and his sharp speeches

gave great offense to the demon of fever, who had never within all

their experience conducted himself in the wayward, troublous manner of

his present manifestations.

“But the man will die!” said Moy Toy, looking down in angry despair at

the wasted face and form, as the restless head of the patient turned

from side to side, always weary, vainly seeking rest.

“Is he the first?” asked one of the cheerataghe. For like a physician

of civilization, he by no means guaranteed the continuance of life by

virtue of his science.

It was very honestly and earnestly exerted, and both he and his

colleague felt all the virtuous rage of sustaining a grievous injustice

when Moy Toy said, with a rancor that surprised them (for quarrels and

unkindness to one another were almost unknown in the tribe, the utmost

placidity of temper and mutual forbearance being _de rigueur_),

“You promised rain,--and behold at this season of the year a drought

lasting six weeks, and the planting of corn delayed till a famine

threatens, and not a drop till to-day.”

“A visitation! a visitation! because of the sins of the people and

their hardness of heart!” cried the two magi in a breath.

Wherein they improved an advantage over the faculty of to-day.

Moy Toy silently gazed down at the rolling head and the fixed,

absorbed eyes bent steadily on some phantasmagoria of the fever. He

noted the weakness of the once clear, strong voice,--the definite,

trained enunciation had sunk to a husky mutter. Still Laroche babbled

of military operations, for now and again Moy Toy caught the phrases

“quatre mortiers--Coehorn--champ de bataille--barils de poudre,”

although the rest was unintelligible, for now he spoke continuously in

French.

“He must live! He must live for the Cherokee nation!” exclaimed the

chief, with the insistence of hoping against hope.

One of the cheerataghe had a fine, steady, acute eye, a hideously

painted face, with the aspect of a bedlamite, arrayed as he was with

buffalo horns and tail, and with his body stuck over with wings of

owls, the calves of his legs hung with a dozen garters of rattling bell

buttons, and a long-handled gourd filled with pebbles in his hands,

which were covered with bear’s paws. Perhaps the patient’s delirium

could present nothing more grotesquely, absurdly frightful.

“You, Moy Toy,” he said, in his grave, sonorous, sane voice, “you have

given offense to the demon of fever. For when the sun is rising the

man revives; he will take drink, although he cannot eat; he will speak

Cherokee, softly, softly; he will close his eyes and sleep. And then

come you!--with a troubled face, and a harsh voice, and an eager step,

and a fierce hurry! And the demon of fever is angered, and the fever

grows quicker, and more eager, and harsh, and angrier than you! And it

rises and rises till the man will not drink and cannot see, and has no

speech but a shred of French and screams for dreams that are without

sleep!”

He looked to his colleague, who gravely nodded his fantastic head in

corroboration.

Moy Toy silently studied the face first of one of the magicians, then

of the other. Although immeasurably superstitious and credulous, he

was yet grounded in craft and suspicion. And, in truth, perhaps he was

not without justification; the cheerataghe, like more modern disciples

of Æsculapius, doubtless often attributed to other causes disasters

consequent upon a lack of skill or its misdirection. In this instance,

however, the value of the stake at hazard, the imputation of the malign

personal influence of his presence, a vague indignation that he should

be esteemed obnoxious to any being--even a demon of fever--rendered Moy

Toy peculiarly alert, watchful, disposed to exact to the extremity of

the possibilities.

The two cheerataghe, as his glance once more sought the pallid face,

the ever-turning head on the pillow, looked anxiously at each other.

For the face seemed death-stricken. The next moment they took sudden

hope. A change, a vague, indefinable change, quivered over it. The

jumble of French words faltered on Laroche’s feeble tongue. With

unexampled resolution, he pressed firmly his silent lips together.

And in that silence the wary Indians heard what had come first to his

ears. Even in the dullness of fever and the frenzy of delirium, he

had interpreted its significance, so momentous it was to him. A voice

it was in the broad spaces of the “beloved square” without, a bold,

hearty, roaring voice, speaking the English language with a blatant

Scotch accent.

The three Cherokees gazed at one another in tumultuous and contending

emotions. They experienced much gratitude that the spark of perception

intimated they might still hope. They could hardly repress their

admiration of the finesse, the courage, the mental balance, that

enabled Laroche to perceive the crisis, interpret its meaning, and

meet it with a sane judgment,--his self-control, which even in the

thrall of fever could curb the infirmities of that weakly, babbling

tongue, and silence the self-betrayal of the French speech upon it. All

their excitement, however, was subordinated to the triumph in his craft

that stimulated their own emulous resources. He was indeed in great

danger. Emissaries of the French among the Indians, having done so

much to instigate and maintain the late Cherokee War, were peculiarly

obnoxious to the British authorities. In fact, rewards had been offered

for their scalps, and by the late treaty the Cherokees themselves were

pledged to arrest and surrender these enemies of the English. Moy Toy,

making a gesture imposing secrecy, stepped out of the door to meet the

visitor, who was clamoring as loudly and boldly in the “beloved square”

as if he were in his own byre.

“Hegh, Moy Toy!” he cried bluffly, breaking away from the “second men,”

as the subordinate authorities of the town were called, “how’s a’ wi’

ye, man?”

He was a tall, heavy, awkward fellow, with a boisterous, assured

address, a broad, red face, light almost flaxen hair, plaited and tied

with a leather thong in a queue, arrayed in buckskins but with long

cowhide boots, and enveloped in a great match-coat, for it had been

raining heavily, and the drops still clung upon the tufts and fibres

of the cloth. His cap of coonskin, with the tail as a pendant, was

pushed back from his brow, revealing remarkably straight, regular, and

well-formed features and shrewd, blue eyes. He held under his arm a

stout horsewhip as a companion rather than a weapon, for his pistols

were in the holsters on the saddle of his nag, which, drenched to the

skin, hung down its head where it stood unceremoniously hitched to a

stake whereto was sometimes bound a victim for the torture. The guest

made no pretense of adapting to the Indian ceremonials the manners in

which he had been bred, as was the custom of strangers and traders

generally, or of recognizing any princely arrogations on the part of

Moy Toy. He advanced with great, muscular strides toward his averse

host,--who visibly winced from the overpowering redundancy, as it were,

of his presence,--seized upon the limp hand of the Indian, and crushed

it in his cordial grasp as if Moy Toy had been also a bold Briton.

“How’s a’ wi’ ye?--an’ what d’ ye hear frae Charlestoun?”

There was scarce similarity between this hearty, warm-blooded entity

and a snake, but Moy Toy, of his own volition, would have touched

neither except upon necessity or in the way of business. The fibres of

his hand tingled with the consciousness of the detested impact long

after the trader’s unwelcome grasp had relaxed and his manual energy

was expending itself in aimlessly cracking his whip at the sand of the

smooth spaces of the “beloved square.” There was a spark of smouldering

fire in the eyes of the Indian, a tense restraint in the muscles of his

shoulders and his straight back, as if he would fain hold himself under

strong control. Albeit his interlocutor spoke English he understood

Cherokee, and Moy Toy replied in his native tongue; thus each talked

without solicitude, for each was comprehensible to the other. The

Indian said that he had no news from Carolina and inquired in turn, but

with scant show of interest, “as to the Muscogee?”

“I begin to think a’ thae carles are dead!” exclaimed Jock Lesly,

with a vigorous snap of the whip. “They were looked for to join the

Chickasaw and the English agen the French away yon to the south. But

deil ane o’ them hae minted a word yet!”

The Cherokee’s stately dignity, his cautious, reserved speech,

contrasted strongly with the Scotchman’s unsuspicious plainness, as

he waited with an air of expectation. If the Indian had had news,

he would not have bartered it with the trader, nor indeed had the

trader repaired hither for what he could hear. This mutual realization

embarrassed the pause, yet Jock Lesly still sharply cracked his whip at

the sand and hesitated as to what he should say.

With all the thrifty instincts of the canny Scotch pioneer of that day,

with all the bold, bluff courage of his vigorous personality, Jock

Lesly had been the first, and as yet the only trader to venture back

within the remote mountain region, whence the fury of the terrible

Cherokee War had driven all mercantile enterprise. Indeed, the treaty

was hardly signed before he was again in the place that had known him

of yore, his trading-house rebuilt, depending for his safety partly on

the treaty and partly on his utility to the savages, his popularity

among them, and his conscience void of offense against them.

“I hae had as muckle o’ the rack an’ rief o’ the war as ye,” he was

wont to say, “an’ the Lard kens I wad wuss to be canty and quiet enow.”

As he stood looking aimlessly about, he noted that the ranges were all

full of mist between the domes, and from the soft densities of its

white, fluffy masses those eminences rose in sombre, purple hues and

massive effects against a pale gray sky, along which lay horizontal

clouds, of a darker, denser gray. The river, with lace-like films of

mist hanging in the budding green willows and pawpaws of its banks,

had the tint of burnished copper. The great trees of the limitless

forests, and those gigantic growths around the town, dripped with

moisture as they hung down their sodden branches about the newly washed

boles, the bark so dense of color as to suggest the effect of being

freshly painted. A dull day it was, and the atmosphere, devoid of all

elasticity, seemed almost too lifeless to breathe. He broke at last

from his dubitation and began in his neighborly wise:--

“A-weel, a-weel, Moy Toy, there hae been a wheen idle, feckless loons

frae your toun o’ Tellico down to Ioco Town aboot my trading-house. An’

there they lifted a few trifles frae the stock,--but I’se no grudge

that,--a few bit duds. But then they slartered a couple o’ sheep,--an

auld yowe and a yearlin’.”

Moy Toy’s face grew dark with anger, and yet almost kind with concern.

The good-natured Scotchman hastened to qualify. “They never carried aff

the meat nor yet the pelts,--they scalpit the twa puir beastises first,

an’ then cut their throats. I’m no the waur for the lack o’ mutton,

but”--

Moy Toy’s countenance of amazed disfavor, astounded at the account of

this curious emprise, coerced sudden intelligibility.

“Jus’ a wheen feckless laddies aping their elders,” explained Jock

Lesly, doubtfully. Then with an uneasy laugh he added, “An’ the bairns

cam hame wearin’ the scalps at their belts. I chased them a’ the way

with the powney.”

Moy Toy did not laugh. Indian children play as do children of other

nations, reducing to the circuit of their narrow round--a juvenile

microcosm--all the methods and events of the elder world. But this

exploit transcended the limit of verisimilitude and entered on the

realms of the verities. The small banditti unchecked would soon venture

further and bring upon their elders anger, retaliation, embroilment,

with the trader, and premature fracture of the treaty.

“They shall be dry-scratched,” said Moy Toy promptly.

“Oh, wow, man!” exclaimed Jock Lesly sharply, as if he had been

suddenly pinched. “Na,--na,--not dry-scratched! Odd! I could na sleep

in my bed if the hempies were dry-scratched for me!--they ran sae

supple--the knaves! It is an unchancy, ugly thing, that dry-scratching!

Cuff the bairns weel--or gie them a flogging they’ll remember. Man

alive! flogging is healthy for boy or beast! I’ve had it a thousand

times frae my auld daddy, God bless him! Flogging is what’s made the

British nation what it is,--but dry-scratching,--I’d die of it mysel’,

now. Oh, man,--oh, man,--flog ’em a little,--but dry-scratched--oh,

wow, wow!”

He caught at the arm of the august Moy Toy, who was more accustomed to

order the torture and burning of Christian captives than the punishment

of a few children who had offended against the municipal law. He made

no sign and stood as adamant, but other Cherokees, who had joined them,

were smiling and looking at each other with the softened countenances

that express a gentle ridicule. Despite their friendly scorn, the

kindly trader’s deprecation of the punishment of the children and his

wild and earnest plea in their behalf could not fail to commend him to

their tolerance, and went far to explain a sort of popularity that he

had enjoyed among them. They knew that the little drama of the storming

of the sheep-fold and massacre of its inmates was too significant to

pass without notice, and for this very significance the punishment

decreed was to be immediate and sharp, to teach the youngsters where

fun ends and serious fact begins. Indeed Moy Toy himself saw to the

preparations for the capture and condign penance of the miscreants,

who, having returned from the war-path scathless, were now in full

swing of a mimic celebration of victory, the triumphant scalps in

evidence, and all the wide-eyed children of the town in joyful

participation.

“Deil hae ye, then, for a fause-hearted, unceevilized tyke as ever

lived!” exclaimed Lesly, as the chief drew off from his grasp. “Egad!

I can ne’er abide to hear ’em skreigh like that,--wow,--wow!” And

clapping his hands to his ears, the Scotch trader fairly ran off as the

first shrill plaint of protest rose upon the air.

Now it was a point of juvenile honor to bear this kind of punishment

as stoically as might be, and a severe dry-scratching, always carefully

adapted in ferocity to the age of the delinquent and his capacity to

support pain, usually drew forth a tear or two and sometimes only

murmuring sighs. The habitual gentleness of the savages with their

children doubtless convinced the rising generation that the punishment

was only intended for their benefit and no whit administered in anger

or tyranny. Therefore in submitting with a good grace they were

contributing so far as in them lay to their own moral culture, and were

ambitious of the stoical poise, perhaps to make the penalty as salutary

as possible and go as far in reform as it would.

The two little Indians were easily stripped of such semblance of

garments as they wore, and as they were being bound to the stake they

craftily set up a wild and poignant shriek upon seeing the Scotchman in

full flight across the “beloved square,” being apprised by the comments

of the laughing bystanders of his intercession in their behalf and his

aversion to the sight and sound of their woe. This had considerable

justification, for thus bound and helpless they were sharply scratched

from head to foot repeatedly with an instrument formed of snake’s teeth

fastened in the end of a stick.

Because of the unusual commotion with which the affair had been

invested, no one noticed that the refuge to which the Scotchman,

familiar enough with the place, bent his steps was the stranger-house.

He burst in, and started back astounded at the figures of the

cheerataghe arrayed to frighten the fever in such manner as might have

frightened the devil. Then the trader’s eyes fell upon the white man

lying helpless on the brink of the grave, as it were, the victim of the

fever.

“Lord save us!” exclaimed Lesly, with a sudden change of countenance,

“wha hae we here?”

The two cheerataghe, unaware of the very disconcerting effect of their

own professional appearance, themselves showed every sign of fear,

incongruous enough with their terrifying aspect. In fact they could

scarcely have been more alarmed had Satan himself appeared, for they

were unacquainted with him and his reputation, while quite well aware

who and what was Jock Lesly. The presence of the French emissary here

was a breach of the treaty lately renewed, under which the Cherokee

tribe traded with the British, and a menace to the privileges promised

to the Indians under its stipulations. They hardly knew how to reply,

and the abrupt entrance of Moy Toy was like a rescue from mortal peril.

The chief had bethought himself suddenly of the possible suspicion of

the stranger’s presence here that might be casually conveyed to Jock

Lesly’s perceptions, while free in the town unguarded and unwatched.

Anything so complete, so inexplicable, so irrefutable as his intrusion

and the evidence of his own eyes the chief had not anticipated for a

moment, and his ready resources of subterfuge failed him for the nonce.

“Puir chield! I doubt na he is in the dead thraw!” the trader muttered,

his compassionate instincts uppermost. Then impressed by something

unfamiliar in the cast of the features, he asked doubtfully, “Is he

frae the colonies,--or overseas?”

Laroche had been divested of his fine French uniform when he had been

brought here ill; it had been carefully put away in view of its future

use by his captors, being an official garb, for the crafty Moy Toy

fancied some occasion might arise when it would serve a diplomatic

turn. Moreover the gold lace and fine cloth were much too dazzling,

considered merely as booty, to be spared to the prisoner as habiliments

in which to be ill or tortured or buried. In the varied experiments

of the cheerataghe, contending with the rigors of the chill following

the fever, Laroche had been clad in buckskins, supplemented now and

then in the convulsions of the shudders and shivers by one of those

feather-wrought mantles that attracted so much attention from the

early travelers in this region, the effect of which was pronounced

“extraordinary charming.” There was naught to indicate his nationality

or his estate as captive. Every evidence of care and solicitude

environed the patient, and Moy Toy’s explanation seemed obviously

genuine.

The sick man had come to Great Tellico, the chief said, with some of

the Cherokee tribesmen who had been up to Virginia, and being taken

ill they had left him to recover while they went their various ways

homeward. He did not ask the man’s name of them, thinking to learn it

from himself. He had been only a little ailing at first, but now one

hardly knew what to make of him.

Jock Lesly seated on one side of the cabin on the divan, with his

hands on his ponderous knees, his head bent a trifle forward, gazed

thoughtfully across the room at the fevered patient, as not so long

ago the Choctaw Mingo had sat and glowered at the recumbent frame then

sunken in sleep.

“He is gaun to dee!” the trader remarked dolorously, at length, and the

words, bespeaking his own fear, fell with a crushing force on the hopes

of Moy Toy.

Jock Lesly drew a long and labored sigh. If the sorrows of the little

dry-scratched Indians--wicked varlets--could take such hold upon the

sympathies of that frank, compassionate heart of his, how the sight of

this tragedy racked him,--this valuable life going out in exile, among

savages, with not one intelligent, civilized effort made to save it.

“Gin I had him ance at hame!” he cried, in futile aspiration, “I doubt

but what Jeemes’s powder might wark a cure!”

“Carry him there! The demon of the fever may not dare to cross a

stranger’s threshold!” cried Moy Toy, with a sudden inspiration. He

was thinking very rapidly. If some untoward chance should reveal

the secret of the nationality of the man, which even in delirium

he instinctively guarded, why Jock Lesly and his household were

practically alone here, hundreds of miles from any English settlements,

and accidents were lamentably common in the distracted Cherokee

country at present,--so frequent, indeed, that the discovery might go

no farther! “The Cherokees will aid their guest. The brothers of the

tribe will rejoice to bear the burden of a litter,” he continued. “The

demon of the fever maybe does not know the way to Ioco Town and cannot

follow!”

Jock Lesly, heeding little of these hopeful schemes for confounding the

demon of the fever, sat doubtful nevertheless and dumfounded. A vague

sentiment of suspicion had been lurking in his mind,--first, that the

Indians had not expected him to discover so unusual an inmate of their

stranger-house as this white man, and that he and his status were not

as represented. Then as Moy Toy so freely and instantly relinquished

his custody, the trader experienced as vague a doubt if the patient had

had fair play among them, since they were eager to get rid of him and

of such responsibility as his care imposed.

“The puir Injun!” Jock Lesly said to himself reproachfully, “if I’ll

suspicion him o’ ane thing I’ll e’en doubt him o’ the contrary.”

The man lay as in a “dwam,” to use Lesly’s expression. The trader

crossed the room, felt the temperature of the forehead, noted the dull,

opaque eyes, and laid his hand almost paternally upon the light brown

hair of a fine, silky quality, dense and curling.

The trader was an unsophisticated man, unlearned and of a scanty

experience of the world, his life having been spent for the last ten

years in the treadmill round of a British factory in the Cherokee

country. He realized his responsibility and he shrank from it. He

looked at the impassive cheerataghe and received no light upon his

course. He glanced out of the door.

A change had come over the landscape. The wind was astir,--the clouds

were flying before it. Between their dense white masses the sky showed

intensely blue, inconceivably high. The sun shone with a vernal

brilliance,--it would not be unduly chilly by noon. Fragrance was in

the air, so fine, so fresh, so illusive. One might say that it was the

scent of the budding wild cherry; or, no,--the early blooming grape;

or, stay,--the delicate aroma of the bark of a tree, touched to this

distillation of incense by some happy combination of sun and wind and

rain. The whole scene beckoned, lured, besought.

“An’ what for no?” cried Jock Lesly, his resolution taken at last. “As

weel dee under the canopy o’ heaven as in an Injun’s cabin!”

Every precaution that could be devised was taken. The litter, fashioned

under his directions, was furnished by Moy Toy munificently, freely,

with the softest skins for mattress, with fine fur mantles for covering

that were impervious to water in view of sudden rain, and with others,

feather-wrought, light, and warm, to fend off all deleterious effects

of exposure. A dozen tribesmen bore it, stepping lightly, easily, on

their springy feet, unshod save for the elastic moccasins, and a dozen

more mounted men accompanied it to act as relays, and, thus relieving

one another, suffer no fatigue to retard their progress.

“A body wad think the creature was a Christian instead of a doited

heathen!” Lesly said to himself, impressed by Moy Toy’s liberality and

anxiety in this work of mercy.

For Moy Toy had despaired of the efforts of the cheerataghe to exorcise

the demon of fever and save this life to the utilities of the Cherokee

nation.

“It is some devil of the paleface that has taken hold of him,” the

chief said sagely to the cheerataghe. “Let him have the white man’s

charm worked on him!”

For if the French officer should die on the way to Ioco Town, would he

not also have died at Tellico?

IV

THE moment that Laroche was recalled to life was never very accurately

defined in his mind, so gradually did a full consciousness return. Nor

was he sure how entirely delirium had held him in its delusions. His

speculations were of a metaphysical tendency when he afterward dwelt,

with a microscopic scrutiny, upon those phenomena of involved cerebral

processes manifested in the sudden silencing of the French words upon

his dreaming tongue, as it vaguely shaped the confused thoughts of a

stupefied brain,--all upon one coherent impulse, on the sound of an

English phrase spoken in an English voice!

That salutary monition abode with him, whether he slept, whether he

waked, whether he lay in that dim border world of swoons between

sleeping and waking. He was stricken dumb, although he could hardly

be said to have heard, for he consciously heard naught. And if, he

argued, these perceptions could have been so alert to the mere vocal

vibrations of the air, the instinct of danger so keenly receptive,

the will so strangely responsive to the demands of those supersubtle,

unclassified faculties, although every voluntary function of the

muscles lay prostrate, and every recognized process of the brain

was paralyzed, did not this imply some curious duality of identity,

an absolute independence of the intellectual life, unrelated to the

bodily functions, since so complete a solution of continuity had

supervened? It might have been that, though he accounted himself a mere

blunt soldier and upbraided his mismanagement that had jeopardized

the interests of the French mission, he was so complete a diplomat

at heart that he could withhold with a nerveless hand, hear with a

deaf ear, plot albeit with a swooning brain, and hush the babblings

of delirium to keep a secret, of which at the moment he had no

consciousness!

Thus, although his pulses ran riot, he continued to maintain a tense

silence. When the tumultuous phantasmagoria of frenzy gave place

to visions as vain but calmer, he found himself still mute, quiet,

orderly, exact, mentally verifying with mathematical accuracy the

relative measurements of a line of field fortifications, so designed

that an attacking column might be enfiladed thence. “For nothing,” he

said to himself again and again, “can stop an attacking column that is

not enfiladed.” Later, he was considering the possibility of defending

effectively a certain salient angle of an imaginary redoubt.

To prevent the enemy from carrying the redoubt by storming this too

acute angle he began to mount a battery _en barbette_ in the dead

salient. The doubt that now and again seized him as to the necessity of

these labors was dispelled by the actual sight of the canvas walls of

his tent about him, and therefore he would busily absorb himself once

more in these duties, and actively prepared to defend the ditch of the

redoubt by constructing there a solid _caponnière_.

The placid peace of the man who is consciously doing his best in his

chosen vocation pervaded his whole system, mental, moral, and physical,

and brought refreshing, curative sleep to his pillow. So definite a

hold had this impression taken upon his mind, sleeping and waking, that

one morning he lifted his head with a start of alarm. There upon the

sloping canvas walls was a yellow streak, all the more vivid for the

white glare of the cloth in the rising sun,--and how had he not heard

the reveille? The echo of the bugle was in his ears, the molten, golden

notes of the old French call.

A strong tremor ran through the elbow on which he had supported his

head. Alack! no stirring, martial strain had summoned him. He lay back

on his pillow, realizing in dismay and yet in surprise that the walls

of the tent of his fancy were the dimity curtains of a bed, and he

began to remember vaguely the chances that had befallen him and to seek

the grace to be thankful.

“I will wait and see what cause for gratitude I may have,” said

the unsubdued inner man, while his lips framed the verbal show of

a thanksgiving. His state of mind might have furnished still more

suggestive details of the possibility of a dual life in one identity.

Nevertheless he recognized the fact that as far as the bodily entity

was concerned it was distinctly comfortable. Now and again he dropped

off into short, luxurious naps, even between the stages of his

investigation of his surroundings. In one waking interval he took

account of the furnishings of the bed: it bore sheets, a rarity of

the place and time so unexpected, so inexplicable, that it roused new

doubts and anxieties as to where he was, what had befallen him, and

what might yet betide. Still he could but finger them in pleasure and

with a childish relish of luxury;--snow-white they were, of a heavy,

fine linen smoothly woven, with the fragrance of the wood violets of

the bleaching ground, and the freshness of the wind yet in their folds,

as it seemed,--and once more he closed his eyes.

When he wakened again he had so far accustomed himself to the homely

opulence of blankets and bedding that he was prepared in a measure for

the night-rail in which he found himself clad, but not for its size.

As he stretched out the voluminous length of its great sleeve and took

account of its breadth of shoulder, “A big man in good earnest this was

made for,--I shall take care to be friends with the monster!” he said.

He bethought himself suddenly of the English words that he had

heard,--a mere sound and locution,--yet this was the only definite

recollection that had stayed in his mind since the moment he had

beheld the flying figures of the Choctaws speeding across the “beloved

square” to the pettiaugre. He must bear a caution,--a Frenchman, and

possibly liable to be accused as a spy! He lifted his wasted hands to

his head: it was enveloped in a red nightcap, with a gay tassel swaying

on its fez-like peak; and much he needed it, for the whole head had

been shaved, sometime since evidently, for delicate tendrils of a new

growth were starting there and he felt fibres moist and soft about his

forehead.

A step sounded suddenly outside, heavy but cautious; a stealthy hand

was laid upon the curtain; and as it was drawn aside the red face of

a man of middle age, tall, powerful, flaxen-haired, with high cheek

bones, a man whom Laroche had never before seen, looked in upon him.

Grave, astonished, delighted, the stranger seemed,--with a sudden

twinkle of comprehension in his blue eyes and an outburst of joy in his

big voice that made the bedstead tremble on the uneven puncheons of the

floor.

“Hegh, callant!” he cried, as their eyes met, “but this dings a’!

Lilias! Callum!” he began to call over his shoulder to other inmates

of the house in so stalwart a roar that it might have been heard half

a mile. It easily penetrated the flimsy partitions of the primitive

building, and the feet of those summoned were audible rapidly

approaching. “Here’s the callant!” he exclaimed, as the door opened.

“Here he is,--a’ himsel’ again!”

He had the manner of announcing the arrival of a guest, and Laroche

easily divined, from the hiatus in his recollections, that he could

hardly have been considered present hitherto, although visible in the

flesh.

A young man, with less enthusiasm, but still an air of proper pleasure,

partly induced by genuine gratulation upon so happy an augury of

the termination of a serious illness, and partly in propitiation of

the elder, whom it was evident he would have crossed upon no slight

occasion, advanced to the bedside and declared that he was glad to see

that the patient had recovered his consciousness and doubted not that

he would soon be on his feet. This young man wore the Highland garb,

from which Laroche inferred, somewhat quakingly, that he was of the

British soldiery who had been active in this region during the previous

two years, in the campaigns conducted by Montgomerie and afterward by

Grant against the Cherokees, in which the Montgomerie Highlanders (the

Seventy-Seventh Regiment) and others had participated, for at this time

the national dress was proscribed except for those enlisted in British

regiments. A barbarous garb the Frenchman considered it, hardly a whit

in advance of the savage decorations he had been called upon to note at

Tellico Great,--so strong were the international prejudices of those

days. For in truth it was a manly and graceful figure appropriately

bedight,--with swaying kilt, the short coat, the blue bonnet, with

its bit of bearskin decoration. The young Highlander’s fair hair hung

down thick and half curling from beneath this blue bonnet and lay in

an effectively contrasting tint upon the collar of the red jacket,

which constituted at that time part of the dress of the Forty-Second

Regiment, and was worn with a red waistcoat. The latter, we are

informed, was made over, in the governmental thriftiness, from the

red coat after a year’s wear, while the plaid, furnished biennially,

subsequently did duty cut down and frugally reconstructed into the

filibeg. But if the wildernesses of the Great Smoky of that day at all

resembled the tangled forest densities which still remain, the military

tailor who refashioned any garments whatever from the gear that

survived the marches through those brambly mountain jungles deserved

immortalizing above all other knights of the shears.

The dark blues and greens of the sombre “Black Watch” tartan in

Callum’s plaid and kilt afforded an added fairness to his locks. His

florid complexion showed a fluctuating red and white. His blue eyes

were large and well set, with lashes and eyebrows much darker than the

shade of his hair. He had high cheek bones and an expressive mouth,

with finely cut lips, red and mobile, often parted in the blithest

laughter for very slight cause, and exhibiting two unbroken rows of

strong, white teeth. His smiling face was as frank and honest as the

sun.

Laroche’s sudden dislike of this young stranger surprised himself and

dismayed him as well. For would he have experienced this emotion were

the third member of the little group that stood by the bed different

from what she was? Her likeness to her father might have served as an

illustration of the apotheosis of humanity in a spiritual miracle.

Jock Lesly’s flaxen hair, half gray, half tow, was golden in the

glistening soft skeins of silk that swept upward from her brow in heavy

undulations. The blue veins that showed so definitely in the temples

could not have vaunted their delicate tracery through a skin less fine

and fair. Here and there was a freckle, but a faint blush-rose bloomed

over the whole cheek as if it sweetened the air. Her figure, draped in

a sober, gray gown, was tall and strong, but a trifle angular, denoting

more bone and muscle than exuberance of flesh. In fact she was frankly

thin, although her face was so delicately rounded. No small rosebud

mouth, but shapely, dainty, red lips, the upper deeply indented in the

centre like the curve of a bow, opened over white, regularly formed

teeth,--a mouth of beauty but of character also, whence might proceed

sage household counsels, and words full of judgment, just reproof,

and deserved applause. She was the ideal of a helpmeet. She seemed to

Laroche the thought God had in mind when He made woman, before she so

whimsically refashioned herself after her own feminine ideal. And if

any man deemed that he needed help it was Callum MacIlvesty, and that

the woman to assist him on the path of life was Lilias Lesly.

If aught of the cynical reflections that this discernment of the

persons and predilections of the group afforded Laroche appeared in

his worn and wasted countenance it went undiscovered, so great was

their pleasure in the success of their ministrations and his happy

prospect of a speedy recovery. They were all aimlessly laughing from

sheer triumph; only there was a suggestion of moisture in the eyes of

Lilias,--or were they always so liquid, so luminous, so deeply blue, so

heavily lashed with those long, dark fringes.

“And ye’ll breakfast enow!” roared Jock Lesly heartily. “Lay the cloth

here, Lilias. We’se all take potluck wi’ him!”

The young Highlander pleasantly seconded the hospitable motion, and

the objection advanced by Lilias that the invalid was not equal to

entertaining so much company was drowned and overborne in her father’s

imperative orders.

“Aye, lass, ye ken how to care for a sick man, but this fallow is weel

now an’ a proper lad, strong enough. D’ye think ye’ll hae him doun on

spoon meat an’ gruel an’ sic like fripperies a’ his days! That’s aye

the trouble wi’ the wimmin. They want to master ye! If ye are weel,

they drive ye! An’ if ye are ill, they own ye! Na,--na,--lay the

cloth,--an’ we’ll hear him tell his name an’ business.”

This suggestion placed Laroche upon his guard, but being of a quick

and keen imagination and having a good sense of verisimilitude, he had

his account of himself ready long before he was called upon to render

it. In fact Jock Lesly was graciously disposed to be autobiographical

himself, and in the course of his prelection was explained the unusual

presence of a white woman in these regions at present; for the Scotch

or English traders did not risk their families here, but left them

far away in the safe precincts of the small white settlements or the

coast towns. His daughter, Jock Lesly said, had heard,--and who could

not hear anything “in sic a wild, ambiguous country” (to use his own

expression), “where the news is carried by wild Injuns, wha lie, it

seems, for the sheer purpose of provin’ themsel’s the children o’ the

deil, wha is the father o’ lies an’ liars,--an’ a monstrous progeny

he hae, to be sure!--a-weel, the lassie heard that her father--an’

that’s mysel’ an’ not the deil--had been ta’en doun wi’ the smallpox,

an’ the bairn was worrited out o’ her life, mair especially as sae

mony people--thae wild Injuns in particular--were deein’ wi’ the

distemper, havin’ nae proper sense how it suld be treated. An’ sae

the lassie started out for Ioco Town,--not that I hae forgiven

Lilias for puttin’ hersel’ in sic a danger, forbye makin’ a fule

o’ me, as weel as of Callum MacIlvesty also,--though _that’s_

a smaller matter. A-weel--Callum heard o’ her intention an’ hired

a wheen o’ young packmen in Charlestoun--they being mostly idle at

this season,--_he_ ca’s ’em ‘gillies,’--an’ started out with

her, havin’ leave o’ absence to veesit his ’Merican relations, Callum

bein’ a far awa’ cousin,--my mither was sibb to his mither,--an’ he

overtook Lilias as she was about to come alane frae Charlestoun wi’

the under-trader an’ a packman or twa, an’ a lot o’ dour red deils of

Injuns that could hae scalpit the haill party, gin the mind had ta’en

them. An’ I as hearty an’ thrivin’ as e’er I was in a’ my life!”

He paused to emphasize the incongruity.

“But, lad,” resumed the joyous host, “a’ the bairn’s preparations for

the sick that she fetched wi’ her on the pack-horse were na wasted at

last,--for the Jeemes’s powder an’ the pills an’ the lotions an’ a’

thae dinged things she meant for me hae a’ gane into your inside, man,

an’ the sheets an’ the curtains an’ sic-like were nae sooner unpacked

than we clappit ye intill ’em!”

“An’ now will ye no tak a dish o’ your ain chocolate?” said Lilias,

with a smile curving her red lips, “that we fetched a’ the way frae

Charlestoun for ye, expressly, Mr.--”

Her father remarked her hesitation.

“Aye,” he exclaimed, with his mouth full of bread and meat. “Gie us

your name, sir,--Maister--what?”

“Wilson,--Thomas Wilson,” replied Laroche, relying on the perfection

of his English. But albeit an excellent linguist, he rejoiced in the

discovery of their nationality as an additional pledge of safety,

realizing that his English would better pass muster since they

themselves spoke the language so ill.

“A proper name,--Tam Wilson,--I hae known a score of ’em,” said

Jock Lesly, setting down the glass in which, following the old

fashion, he drank something far stronger for breakfast than tea. He

interpolated at this crisis a remonstrance with his daughter against

the chocolate as a foreign kickshaw, protesting it “ower flimsy for a

gude British stamach;” but the foreigner was secretly truly grateful

for her persistence, for with the rising yet squeamish appetite of a

convalescent, he doubted his capacity, even in the interests of his

disguise, to forego the chocolate in favor of the ale and brandy with

which the two Scotchmen moistened the meal.

“An’ whaur do ye hail frae?” Jock Lesly asked.

The question was sufficiently difficult of reply. Louisiana or the

Illinois, in the French occupation, was obviously out of the question.

Yet should the guest say Georgia or South Carolina, he might be exposed

to conversation touching localities familiar to them which he did not

know: people--citizens, as well as officials--with whom he must needs

seem acquainted as were they; the names of ships or rivers or towns,

all necessarily household words to one of the more southern provinces,

yet of which he was densely ignorant.

“Virginia,” he said at a venture, “about Williamsburg.”

To his consternation Jock Lesly laid down his knife and fork, and he

knew instinctively it was no slight matter that could check their

activity. But for the fictitious glow that the hot chocolate had set up

in his veins he might have succumbed to a rigor that had no relation to

the vicissitudes of his disease.

“Now I hope ye are nane o’ thae Firginians[7] that latterly hae been

tampering wi’ our Injuns, an’ invitin’ ’em to come for their goods

to Firginia, an’ seekin’ to coup our trade out o’ our ain hands. Hae

ye seen Governor Bull’s letter--Lieutenant-Governor Bull o’ South

Carolina--Governor Bull’s ain letter to the governor o’ Firginia, man?”

It was well for Laroche that his cadaverous aspect, as he lay in bed,

propped by pillows into a half sitting posture, his face almost as

ghastly white as the voluminous folds of the night-rail--the scarlet

flannel nightcap, with its gay and flaunting tassel accentuating his

pallor--was ascribed altogether to the effects of illness. Much of

it was doubtless due to his perturbation of mind and the conscious

jeopardy of his position, although he managed to hold with a steady

hand the cup containing his chocolate and to maintain a quiet,

interrogative gaze as his eyes met the Scotchman’s eager blue orbs, and

he replied succinctly, but definitely, in the negative.

“A-weel, man,” said Jock Lesly, the importance of the subject

precluding the resumption of his knife and fork, “Governor Bull did

set forth and make known unto his Excellency of Firginia that we of

the king’s province o’ South Carolina had suffered much in the auld

Proprietary days with thae bloody loons o’ Injuns, an’ had warked

wi’ ’em an’ wrastled sair wi’ ’em, an’ had made unco gude friends

wi’ several strong tribes on our borders,--Creeks, Chickasaws, an’

mair especially the Cherokees, till this late war,--all through the

privileeges o’ the trade we had wi’ them an’ the restrictions an’

facilities of the licensed traders the government establishes an’

mainteens amang them, to furnish them wi’ a’ their needcessities, an’

powder an’ lead--a deal mair than is gude for them! An’ if Firginia

draws aff this trade frae these distant tribes, for the sake o’ the bit

profit to be had frae it, Georgia an’ South Carolina hae nae means o’

keepin’ thae blackguards o’ Injuns in order close on our settlements,

whilk will be left to their mercies. Thae provinces would like be

destroyed.”

He paused with earnest, convincing eyes, while the guest held his cup

motionless and listened.

“Cain in the old days jaloosed his brother an’ for rivalry killed him,

but I’se warrant even he wad na hae sold him fur a shillin’. It’s later

times hae taught us better--or waur!”

“My dear sir,” exclaimed Tam Wilson, “you may rest assured that I am

seeking no Indian trade for Virginia.”

Jock Lesly drew a long breath of relief.

“A-weel,” he said, easily placated, “his Excellency of Firginia

answered and promised to let the Injun trade be as it was built. He had

na seen the matter in sic a serious light, he said. No man could speak

fairer. But I thought--I dooted--leastwise--hegh, man, what errand did

bring you then to Great Tellico?”

“A matter of business,” said the French officer quickly. “Some of the

Cherokees sold a lot of horses to our neighborhood near a year ago, and

this spring most of them disappeared. It is said always that horses

bred in the Indian country go back yearly to their old grass.”

Jock Lesly nodded his head in confirmation, his mouth again full, knife

and fork plying.

“Is it true?--I doubted it. But I came with some neighbors as far as

Tellico. I fell ill at Tellico,--and I remember no more.”

“They went off and left you!” exclaimed the young Highlander, with a

touch of indignation.

“Wow, man,--what fearsome looking worriecows be thae

medicine-men,--thae cheerataghe! But Moy Toy was kind and helpful,

though fine he liked to get rid of ye! That was what made me jaloose

that mebbe you were meddlin’ wi’ the trade.” Lesly recurred to the

subject.

“How do thae Injuns come by sic prodigious fine horses?” demanded

Callum MacIlvesty, effecting a diversion with more delicate tact than

might have been anticipated from his lowly station and coarse garb as

a common soldier. Laroche began to understand that the Highlander,

despite his position and rude dialect, was of a higher social grade

in his own country than these compatriots of his, and that their “far

awa” connection with his family was a source of pride to them, albeit

the relation of wooer and wooed had compassed a certain reversal of the

natural order of precedence. It occurred to his quick mind immediately

that one of the many individual disasters involved in the national

calamities of the Scotch rebellions of 1715 and 1745 was represented

in the impoverishment and exile of this scion of a family of degree,

perhaps even of high birth, for the young man used their vernacular

evidently by reason of association and lack of education rather than

station. He had sundry unmistakable marks of a highly bred gentleman,

despite his evident poverty. Laroche knew that certain such, serving

as soldiers of fortune, held commissions in the foreign armies of

Europe, while a few others, more destitute of money and influence,

could be found as “private men” in those Highland regiments recruited

by the British government for service in America against the French and

Indians, and officered in several instances, strangely enough, by men

who had recently themselves been arrayed in arms against the dynasty

they now supported.

“Their horses come frae the Spanish barbs that De Soty an’ his men left

amang them--an’ I wuss we had naething waur frae the dooms meddlin’

Spanish than their cattle. Lord, sir, the lies they tell the puir

Injuns!--that the British are determinate to sweep them aff the face o’

the warld!”

“The Spaniards are na sae kittle as the French,” said Callum MacIlvesty.

“The French,” rejoined Jock Lesly, bringing his clenched fist down on

the table,--“the French are the deevil! Did ye notice, lad, how mony o’

the Cherokees can speak a little French,--nae mair than a ‘polly voo’

or sic like,--but sae mony!”

Laroche was conscious and out of countenance. So weak he was he could

ill resist the strain of anxiety. “I did not notice--I was there at

Tellico so short a time--what am I saying?--I do not know how long I

was there nor how you happened to find me!” But he could not divert his

host from the subject.

“As sure as you are an unsanctified sinner thae gabbling, blackguard

French bodies hae been again meddlin’ wi’ the Cherokees an’ their

trade,” declared Lesly solemnly. “Moy Toy was too polite by

half,--onything to be rid o’ me,--dry-scratchin’ the weans that kilt my

sheep till their screechings wad hae melted a heart o’ stane! An’ when

I begged him to let me ha’ the loan o’ ye for a while, he happed ye in

a’ his fine furs. I had to be gey carefu’ in returnin’ them a’.”

So they were within reach of Moy Toy and the town of Great Tellico

by an hour’s travel, perhaps, or two. Laroche felt his heart sink.

He had not counted on this possibility nor on the capacity of the

Indians to keep his secret. Nay, so capricious was the temper of the

Cherokees that he could not be sure of their will to conceal the fact

of his nationality and his connection with the Franco-Choctaw embassy.

Even his own mission, the confidential and private assurances of

the French government which he had conveyed to Great Tellico, might

now be maliciously divulged as a means of currying favor with the

British,--since the utility of the promises he had made seemed a thing

of the past and the prospect which they had presented had faded like

a mirage into thin air. His face, with these thoughts in his mind,

showed so sharp a change that Lilias, alarmed, rose with a protest.

Even Jock Lesly permitted himself to be convinced that the session of

breakfast should not be unduly prolonged, and Callum MacIlvesty shook

up the pillows and drew the curtains, and the Frenchman sank down in

silence--not to sleep, he stipulated within himself, but to ponder, to

devise, to plot.

He slept unaware, unadvisedly, peacefully as a three years’ child. And

he dreamed placidly and in satisfaction. Moy Toy came and drew the

curtains, he thought, and looked at him with keen and friendly eyes,

and with a significant finger on his lips. When he woke at length, so

far had the bodily man got the better of the intellectual entity which

led together a dual existence that he felt scant care for aught,--his

detention, the French interest, Moy Toy’s possible disclosures,--if

but he had a sup of that mutton broth, the enticing odors of which

permeated the whole house. As he himself, with his thin hand, pulled

aside the curtain that he might call to Callum MacIlvesty to beseech

a share in that delectable burden of the family board, he burnt his

wasted fingers against the hot bowl which Lilias was in the act of

bringing to the bedside, and he hardly could wait to join in the laugh

which the two Scotchmen set up in triumph on the recovery of his

appetite.

If it could make them happy to see another man eat, he ministered

lavishly to their felicity in the days that ensued.

At first he was unsteady enough on his feet when he was permitted to

quit the haven of the bed. He could only make short voyages, as it

were, from one chair to another, catching at everything that came in

his way for support. But although of no great strength or stature he

was of a good, compact physique, and once “on the mend,” as Jock Lesly

expressed it, he progressed rapidly. He developed to his surprise a

sort of luxurious inertia; he would fall asleep after dinner on the

shady porch, his head against the doorpost. Naught in Ioco Town was so

lazy save an old collie sleeping at his feet in the sun. His inaction

extended to his mental processes,--he revolted from thought. He would

not address himself to consider his plight, his jeopardy, the future of

his mission. In fact all his faculties were instinctively quiescent,

facilitating recovery. He felt even that he had joyfully dispensed

with his old troublous identity. As Tam Wilson he was a new man, with

no plans, no past, no obligations, no imperative military duty. The

pioneer garb of buckskin, with its many fringes and leather belt and

coonskin cap, that he was constrained to wear aided his release from

himself. It was like being in some new world, this freedom of the ways

of the household, this transition into the identity of a man who had no

past, no secrets, no duties, no future. A joyous, kindly fellow he was,

too, and all who looked on him liked him.

“This is what I should have been, uninfluenced, unhindered; Tam Wilson

is really I,--unhampered by circumstance,” he said to himself.

His haunts were chiefly about the dwelling, which was situated near

the trading-house and in the very centre of the Indian town. The

traders--of whom there had been but very few in the whole region, each

always in great isolation, none of whom had now returned except Jock

Lesly--were allowed by the Indian municipal authorities, so to speak,

the “second men,” the choice of erecting dwellings at a little distance

from the towns or in their midst, if this were deemed to conduce to

the greater safety of the white inmates of the house, thus under the

immediate protection of the headmen of the village, for whose behoof

the trader was licensed. The Indians being often at war with other

tribes, especially the northern savages, this method of hovering

under the wing of the Cherokee strength, both civil and martial,

commended itself to the prudence of the trading folk. But the aspect

of the little Scotch home, with all its suggestions of exile, devoid

of a loophole within or a palisade outside, with no defense save the

uncertain faith of the red savages who swarmed through the surrounding

village, was pathetic in its isolation, its unique dissimilarity, its

effect of captivity.

A vine, only a trumpet vine, hung luxuriant over the eaves and sent

tendrils astir above the lintels of doors and windows. Shining pans

were suspended to take the air and the sun against the posts of the

porch. Piggins, crocks--blue, brown, and yellow--ranged themselves

in vaunting cleanliness on a window shelf outside the sill. Motherly

hens pecked about the steps, and a coop of slats, built in the form of

a peak, restrained the activities of one who might have led too far

a brood of the newly hatched, mere balls of fluffy brown and yellow

down, endowed with motion, that flickered in and out of the crevices.

Often in her gray-green dress the golden haired Lilias sat here at her

homely flax wheel, while in the “beloved square” a company of braves

were marshaling for a northern expedition against the Shawnees, singing

their war-songs, painted for the war-path, the fullest expression of

the terrible upon which the eye might rest. Sometimes there would be

races or exhibitions of strength in the game of “ball play,” when

hundreds would assemble from other towns to witness these diversions.

The visitors, lured by the report of something uncommon at the trader’s

dwelling, would come after the more exciting events of the day and

stand outside and gaze upon her with insatiable curiosity. They would

watch the revolutions of the whirling wheel and the flying thread.

Her deft white hand, her unfamiliar, smiling face, her strange, golden

hair were all points of interest. They would listen to the whir of the

spinning and the vague sound of her voice, as she hummed low a weird

old song which she often sang about a “gyre-carline” and her witchlike

doings of “lang syne.” The men expressed no surprise, it being a point

of honor with the Indians to have known all things always. They would

invariably turn away without a word or a sign. Not so the women! The

fashion of attire it was that served in an instant to denationalize

them. From silent amazement they passed to whispered comments as

they stood in buzzing groups; then to open questions; to shrill

exclamations; to an unmannerly yet kindly frenzy of inquisitiveness.

Sometimes a girl would step gingerly forward, touch the slipper and

the stocking on the slender foot,--then fall back with a hysterical

twitter of mingled delight and ridicule. The vagaries of the mode, as

it was understood in Charlestown, the fashion of the white kerchief

about the shoulders of Lilias, the pleated folds of her dress, were of

endless interest to the young Cherokee coquettes, and kept them grouped

long about the porch, and Lilias’s pink and white dimples continually

playing in her cheek.

Somehow this curiosity concerning her was displeasing to Laroche.

He wished Lilias were at home in Carolina. This was no place for

the rooftree and the ingleside. He always distrusted the savages’

protestations of peace and professions of friendship. He was happier

when they were all gone and the little spinning wheel with its tuft of

flax stood close by the window in the “spence,” as the Scotch household

called the living-room. There the puncheon benches and the “creepies,”

as the stools of blocks of wood were dignified, had a gossiping way

of clustering around the hearth of flagstones, where an ember was

always kept alive in the great chimney place, being renewed night and

morning, as a fire was deemed salutary for the invalid. Its glamour

held gay Tam Wilson loitering there as long as the little wheel whirled

and the green shadows of the newly leaved trees without flickered

across the sunshine of her hair. Sometimes her knitting needles clicked

and shimmered in the firelight. Sometimes she compounded and stirred

with a long spoon and a burning red cheek the contents of saucepans

for his behoof, then laughed with frolicsome scoffings at the celerity

with which he disposed of them. He and the two Scotchmen exchanged

experiences and argued on political or religious themes, and throughout

Tam Wilson supported his character with a verisimilitude that would

have won him credit in the histrionic profession, and like the others

took in good part the trenchant remarks having a personal application

with which she saw fit to comment. He fell into the habit of holding

the skeins of yarn while she wound the thread for her knitting. So

adroit and persistent was he in thrusting himself forward for this duty

that he almost supplanted the young Highlander whose coveted boon it

had been. Indeed Callum MacIlvesty openly sulked, taking no blame that

he was the slower or the more inexpert swain of the two in the proffer

of assistance. And so far had the identity of Tam Wilson submerged that

of the diplomat, the soldier, the ambassador, that he felt a great and

irrelevant joy in the sight of the young Highlander, thrown back on

the opposite settle, each arm extended at full length along its back,

his eyes fixed dully, blankly, on the rafters, that he might meet

no glance of Lilias to win him from his just displeasure, his long,

muscular legs stretched out to the fire, his plaid, his sporran, his

belt, his kilt,--mentally designated “ses jupons” by Laroche,--all

in unpicturesque and careless disarray. So painful to Callum was the

spectacle of the dual industry that one day, unable to endure it

longer, he sprang up to leave the house, encountering Jock Lesly at the

door, where his horse stood saddled.

“Are ye gaen aff enow?” he interrogated Callum. “I am na willin’ to

leave the house wi’ Lilias.”

“Oh, Tam is there,” replied Callum impatiently. “An’ I am na goin’

further than the spring,”--which was scarcely ten steps from the door.

“Sae lang as there’s twa men about,” said her father, and he rode off

on his errand.

But Lilias had overheard Callum’s first phrase and no more, and Tam

Wilson’s quick ears were hardly less alert. Her face turned crimson.

The young Scotchman had won much sincere gratitude and a very tender

appreciation of his interest in her by his instant expedition to join

her in her journey hither to her father’s rescue from the smallpox,

a disease then so dreaded, his adequate, thoughtful measures for her

safety and protection, and yet the swift forwarding of the succor she

brought. Odd that a thoughtless phrase could work such wreck! It was

but a fancy, a freak that had taken him, she said to herself. She had

thought too much of it, rated its significance too high. As for the

distance, the danger, the fatigue--were the men not all and always

louping hither and thither through this wild country, like the ranting,

gangrel chiels they were, where five hundred miles seemed a less

journey to them than fifty at hame in the gude po’ shay. He came wi’

her because he maun aye be ganging--and now he was content to commend

her to the protection o’ Tam Wilson. She wad na gainsay him. She was

not seeking Callum MacIlvesty or his help, good sooth! Tam Wilson was a

welcome substitute for his presence and guard.

She held her head high and proud on her delicate, white neck. Her eyes,

half cast down on the skeins as she disentangled the thread, glowed

and flashed, and Tam Wilson, the personification of demure mischief,

gazed discerningly at close quarters at them. Her sensitiveness was the

keener for the fact that Callum on his father’s side, the MacIlvestys,

was kin to “gret folk,” and the relationship of Jock Lesly and his

daughter to the young Highlander’s mother was so distant as to baffle

any ordinary computation, despite their pride in the fact and its

frequent mention. At that time in the colonies women were few and much

in the ascendant, and Lilias Lesly felt all the importance of her

position and the strength of her power to make Callum rue the slight if

he really cared aught for her, and to show him her own indifference if

he cared naught.

Tam Wilson, in his idleness, his enforced inactivity, had developed a

domestic proclivity. He was seldom out of the house, and as the days

wore on the desire to go vanished. He was promoted to many domestic

duties. He was permitted to stem the wild strawberries that graced the

evening meal, and felt a stealthy joy to be berated that he should be

so slow, and to be accused of taking toll of the fruit too heartily to

solace his labor. It was he who went back and forth in pride to the

spring with the pail, who was set to guard the bannocks that they did

not burn, and when all was done who lounged on the settle and idly

watched her smilingly lay the cloth that he might dine. It was he who

beguiled the tedium of the sudden storms in the spring evenings when

the clouds shut out the stars and the door shut out the mists and

the roof rang with the marshaling of the hosts of the rain and the

wind sang like a trump. Then Tam Wilson would stir the fire and tell

wonderful stories and sing songs--military songs, gay clashes of the

cannikin, and stories of the camp and the field, showing a knowledge

so intimate as to cause the lowering Highlander to ask suddenly one

night,--

“Ye hae seen service, sir?”

“Aye, sir,” answered Tam Wilson, instantly on his guard. “Foreign

service, sir, some years ago. I was at Hastenbeck in ’57, sir, fighting

with the Duke of Cumberland.”

Which was true, but as one of the victorious French, and not, as the

phrase implied, among the defeated allied forces of the famous English

commander.

“And two years later,” Tam Wilson continued with less animation, “I was

at the battle of Minden. I have participated in several campaigns.”

Having thus unwittingly enhanced his rival’s consequence, the young

Highlander asked no more, but fell back to lower savagely and bite his

lips, as perhaps an outward figure of how he was eating his own heart

within.

But it was the glamour of the clear vernal moon that bewitched

the unstable Tam Wilson, himself with as many phases. He would

fall suddenly silent, as under a spell, when its rays aslant, just

discerned, would drop down through the window from the west, where it

hung little more than a crescent in a pink haze, and draw the outline

of a leaf of a chestnut oak, an acorn half developed, and a bare twig

upon the rugged puncheon floor of the spence. The girl’s fair face

would be vague, ethereal; her hair dimly a-glimmer; her white homespun

dress of linen a poetic suggestion in the gloom; her rich voice full

of undreamed-of vibrations that he could study with a quickened

perception lacking in the bold light of day. The ember faded to ashes;

the candles, with the canny Scotch thrift, were not lighted, since the

moon lent a torch; the sense of home, of simple, domestic habitudes,

was in abeyance with the eclipse of the visible exponents. With its

sights and sounds annulled, the abstract interpretations prevailed. The

mind rose to loftier conceits. One felt the forces of life--not merely

living; the endowment of absolute entity--not sheer individuality, with

its limitations, its crippled past, its doubtful, hampered, anxious

future. The wind stirred the foliage without and reminded one of the

wilderness, the vastness of the world that was made for man; the spring

floods of the Tennessee River lifted a voice into the air and thundered

primeval truths.

Through this window they could see the mountains--far, near, always in

massive majesty. Now a pearly, opalescent mist would glimmer among the

domes with the witchery of the moon, and again after it had sunk the

skies would be clear and densely instarred. Once a planet, so brilliant

as to annul all lesser glories, showed through a great chasm, whose

rugged, craggy slopes seemed illuminated in the surrounding gloom with

a weird, unaccustomed luster, so different from the familiar light

of the moon was the quality of the radiance shed by a star alone.

Poetry was in the night--no lyric, no vague, murmurous rune, but with

a splendid majesty of rhythm, with an epic grandeur and a meaning of

awe that might be felt by the pulses of the heart and suggested to the

brain--baffling language, never to be set forth in the paltry medium of

mere words.

In differing degrees they all felt its influence, perhaps. Jock Lesly,

smoking his pipe with an assiduity which he had learned from the

Indians, talked, it is true, but casually, fragmentarily; and Callum

heeded enough to respond in kind, with sedulous care for the respect

he always maintained toward his host and far awa’ kinsman, but often

the matter and manner of his replies showed that thought and heart were

not in them. For the others they were silent, save now and again at

long intervals a murmur of assent or negation,--a dangerous silence,

instinct with a meaning no words might adequately interpret. As one

night succeeded another and the moon waxed to fuller splendors and all

the woods without were pervaded with that magic sheen which showed

such silvery vistas in the dark umbrageous forest, which idealized the

aboriginal architecture of Ioco, which made the feathered head and

straight form of an Indian passing now and again adown the bosky ways

of the woodland town so meet, so apt an incident of the picture, even

the Europeans felt an irking in walls and restraint and longed for the

freer air, a moonlight stroll, to stand unbonneted beneath the zenith.

“Eh--the wearying wa’s!” exclaimed Lilias one evening, her elbow on the

sill of the window and the moonlight in her upturned eyes, with all the

wistfulness of a prisoner in their sweet longing. “How thae flowers

scent the air!”

“Whist--whist--bairn; oh fie! Ye maun bide here,” said her father in

gentle reproof. “The moon will last our time. They’ll hae the moon yet

in the lift at Charlestoun, an’ gowans to pu’, I’se warrant, by the

time we get there.”

What was this pang in Tam Wilson’s unmannerly heart! He dared not,

even in his most remote consciousness, attribute its pain to the

French officer, the Sieur de Laroche. And even as the Virginia drover

and herdsman he affected to be, did he expect Jock Lesly to keep his

daughter here indefinitely? He was almost stunned by the discovery

of the sentimental anguish occasioned him by the mere idea of her

withdrawal from his sight. He wondered now, however, since his mind was

drawn to the subject, that as the object of her wild-goose chase--her

father’s supposed illness--was removed she had not already returned.

So vital an interest he felt that he was moved to steady his voice,

which--oh, how preposterously--trembled in the first words, to ask of

her father a definite question concerning her departure, albeit his

inquisitiveness in his host’s family affairs ill accorded with his

position as a guest laden with many favors. And in fact the query gave

rise to some embarrassment.

“The lassie might hae gane back at once,” Jock Lesly said,

“but”--taking his pipe out of his mouth and glancing cautiously over

his shoulder at the dusky room, still in the brown shadow, although

the light of the moon lay in a broad silver square on the floor, so

high had it climbed into the sky--“but”--evidently he hardly dared

to put his prudence into words; only fragmentarily he explained that

Callum and he had agreed that it would be injudicious to suggest the

idea of fear or flight by leaving Ioco earlier than was the custom

every spring. The Indians--“thae dour deevils”--so delighted in the

terror they inspired that they could scarcely refrain from the exercise

of its power. The little guard could be easily taken, overcome; and

mischievous malice, originating perhaps with the mere intention of

giving them a fright, might with the realization culminate in a

massacre. The journey was fraught with much peril at best. The Indians

always requited every grudge with the utmost rigor, and certainly to

pass by those blackened charred skeletons of towns in the ashes of

Grant’s fires, still tenantless for the lack of hands to rebuild them,

would be a pertinent reminder. The bones of cattle and horses were

bleaching along the watercourses. Other and human bones were even yet

being slowly gathered from the débris of the battlefields, or on the

site of remote hand-to-hand conflicts, and identified and conveyed to

the town of their nativity, till one was forever in danger of stumbling

on communities in all the gloom of funeral ceremonies when no death was

recent--oh, there were grudges on every hand to claim requital, and

the Cherokees never considered the identity of the individual who had

wrought disaster.

Whereas, Jock Lesly reasoned, if Lilias remained here until the usual

time of his semiannual pilgrimage to Charlestown, with all his force

of packmen and pack-horses, laden with buckskins for the exchange of

British goods, any demonstration on the pack-train would be associated

with injury to the trade, the interests of which the Cherokees were

always solicitous to conserve; hence it was hardly to be anticipated.

The murder of an unofficial party, so to speak, would create scant

stir; but an assault upon the pack-train of a licensed trader in his

semiannual passage through the country would paralyze the trade for

years to come, and necessitate investigation and retribution at the

hands of the government.

And this result, the paralysis of the trade and the disaffection of

the Cherokees, was precisely what that scheming Laroche had come to

the town of Great Tellico on the Tennessee River in the earnest hope

of compassing for the French interest. Had he been as true to it as

he was accounted, he said to himself, he might have found means to

promote this emprise of pursuit and capture and massacre. But it was

with the sentiments that properly appertained to Tam Wilson that he

perceived the wisdom and applauded the prudence of the proposed course.

He resented that Callum MacIlvesty should have aught of weight in these

councils, and began to grudge him, with all a lover’s niggardliness,

the poor boon of having been her escort hither, and the torment of

anxiety Callum must have experienced in his prayerful care in planning

for her safety, and his generous courage, prepared to spill the last

drop of his blood in her defense.

“That’s why we no keep the door open after dark,” Callum briskly

explained. “The Injuns are used to seeing the door closed in winter,

an’ they’ll no wonder we hae only the window open now, an’ dinna gae

abroad.”

“An’ that’s why lassie Lilias hings here at the window sill, as wishfu’

as ony hempie ahint the bars at a tolbooth,” her father said, reaching

out his hand and passing it over the sheen of her golden hair. “I’m

thinking, Callum lad, its thae lint-white locks--the bairn’s tow

head--that aye gars the Injuns stare. Mind how auld Moy Toy stretched

his big black een?”

“Moy Toy?” said Laroche, with a sudden wrench at his heart. He felt as

one might, long ago sold to the devil, at the abrupt reappearance of

the fiend. “When was he here?”

“When ye were ailin’, lad. And now I come to think of it, the devil’s

no sae black as he’s painted, an’ forbye, no sae red.”

He chuckled as he placed the long stem of his pipe in his mouth and

talked on languidly as he drew at it. “The creatur seemed kindly, an’

wearyin’ to see you.”

Tam Wilson could have fallen from the settle.

“An’ when we wad na let him at ye on no account to speak till ye, he

begged he might hae ae look at ye, an’ when he drew the bed curtains

and he had just a gliff, he was satisfied, an’ went awa cannily enough.”

So it was no vision that Laroche had remembered amidst the disjointed

phantasmagoria of his delirium. In terrible reality this red savage,

with whom he shared the hidden, subtle scheme of the French government

against the Carolina colonies and trading interests, had come to his

bedside and sought through the mists of his wandering perceptions to

sign to him, to promise silence, to counsel secrecy. More distinct than

aught else of the images of his fevered brain had been the presentment

of that feathered head, that many-lined, keen-featured face, the

white curtain in the firm grasp, the intent, warning eye, the finger,

mysterious, menacing, laid upon the long, flat, compressed lips. More

distinct--since it was real.

Alack! of what avail the gay snatches of a soldier’s song; the tales of

the tented field; the kind, sweet, homely present of this simple cotter

life; the uplifting awe of nature that must needs follow that fine

sweeping of the horizon line of mountain crest against the blue; the

breath of the aromatic woodland; the mystery, the magic of the moon;

the sheen of the girl’s golden hair--Laroche could not escape his doom.

The past laid imperative hands upon the future. The reminder of Moy Toy

left him the realization that there was no choice. Moy Toy had come--he

would come again, bringing cogent influences of the Franco-Cherokee

scheme, the political promises, the actuality of identity, and all a

subordinate’s thraldom to the will of an official superior.

V

MOY TOY came indeed the next day and laden thus. In fact it was he who

had first thought of the design of falling on the trader’s pack-train

on their return trip to Charlestown and cutting them all off. Thus,

he argued, the country would be rid at one blow of the trade,--for

the others, here, there, everywhere, would never return,--and it was

the trade, the paltry bauble, that had bought the Cherokees, scot and

lot, alienated them from their own best interest, threatened them with

vassalage to the British, and with national annihilation. The vengeance

of the Carolina authorities would scarcely discriminate, scarcely even

seek out so elusive a prey as the immediate offenders; frantic and

furious it would alight like a bolt from heaven on whatever lay within

its orbit. Thus it would serve to unite the upper Cherokees, the Ottare

district, and the Ayrate towns in their own defense--the doubting

must needs be steadfast, the weak-hearted confident and strong, the

politic might scheme only from ambush, and Atta-Kulla-Kulla postpone

his strategic talks of statecraft till the council once more should

have time to heed his plotting and counterplotting. Then the way of the

French would be open. Then might its skilled officer bring the great

guns and build the forts and drive forever from the Cherokee borders

this perfidious foe who sought to enslave a free people by goods and

rum, at ruinous great prices and tolls of trade.

Despite Laroche’s experience of the inconsistencies and contradictory

traits of the Indian character, this precipitancy surprised him.

He began to see that the patience with which the savages were

credited, their long waiting and scheming for revenge, the illimitable

distances they traversed in war, the innumerable shifts and devices

they practiced, of almost inconceivable ingenuity, to attain their

object--all were exerted only when it lay beyond their immediate reach.

Once within the possibilities, and the leap to seize upon it was like

a panther’s, as swift, as bloodthirsty, and as unreckoning. For the

Indians’ policy of doubting and debating was only when impotence held

their revenge in bounds. Thus it was that their hasty, unguarded,

impulsive seizing upon an opportunity of massacre and robbery so often

recoiled upon the body politic, which suffered as a whole in the

vengeance of the colony, the withdrawal of the trade, and the cutting

off of supplies and ammunition, for the murderous enterprise of some

small band. More than once Moy Toy himself, both earlier and later,

headed a party of these independent warriors, for whose deeds the

Cherokee nation at large paid the reckoning.

It was well that Laroche had the futility of such raids in mind to

point the moral of the value of delay, of preparation, of acting with

due caution for the attaining of permanent effect. Press the British

back for a moment--that full-armed, embittered, more powerful still,

they might again overrun the Cherokee country! And thus bring to naught

the plans of the great French father to aid and abet the throwing off

of this heavy yoke--all these plans as yet in abeyance,--not a cargo of

ammunition _en route_.

“I care naught for the desertion of the base Mingo Push-koosh; it is to

me but the freak of a peevish child, as his very name implies,” Laroche

declared. “The Choctaws are ever loyal to the French; the Muscogees,

and their subordinate tribes, all are in amity, all preparing for the

great decisive blow, the simultaneous attack that shall some day drive

the English colonists east and south into the Atlantic ocean and the

Mexico gulf. But the moment must be propitious--the occasion ripe.

Time, Moy Toy, time is the great warrior. Time always wins the long

fight.”

He had walked out with the Indian, who had declined Jock Lesly’s

invitation to light his pipe at the hearth in the spence, this being

unsanctified fire, kindled by no cheerataghe, and had repaired to the

fire always alight in the centre of the “beloved square,” annually

kindled by the men of the divine fire, distributed amongst the

dwellings, and never suffered to die out till the last day of the

old year. The necessity had occurred to neither of the two men as a

subterfuge, but both eagerly embraced the opportunity that they might

speak apart--Moy Toy to communicate his scheme, and Laroche to contend

with it.

The spot was solitary at the moment. Rain was threatening; a great

slate-tinted cloud hung above the darkly green mountains in tantalizing

suspension, seeming weighted and surcharged with water above the

drought-smitten cornfields. Day after day they waved with the delicate,

newly sprouting blades, rustling and lisping in the capricious

breaths of the wind, but showing a far-spread yellow tint beneath

murky, purple glooms. Day after day the impending storm passed; the

lightning that had rent the heavens with a stroke like a flashing

blade, and a thunderous crash as of the rivings of a world asunder,

subsided to an aimless flicker with a vague and distant rumble. The

purple-black clouds of weighted portent would grow of lilac hue, and

presently one might see the tint of the blue sky through the fleecy

dispersal of their folds. The wind rushed down from the mountains;

the sun shone out; the cornfields lay parched and sere; and the heart

of a farmer of that day and generation differed in nowise from one of

the present, albeit more than a century apart in time and of an alien

race. Fortunately the laws now are kinder, and the weather prophets

are fended from the wrath of him who plants and does not gather, who

sows and does not reap, because of the rain that is vainly promised

and the thunderhead that deludes and deceives. The cheerataghe of Ioco

Town were playing in very hard luck. The luring of that particular

storm down upon these fertile fields along the Tennessee River devolved

immediately upon them, and although the tribesmen were assured that

the failure was to be attributed to the wickedness of their own hearts

and their frequent misdoings, a farmer at odds with the weather is the

least amiable of the brute creation, and there was an unmistakable

tendency to retort the fault upon the lack of skill of the cheerataghe.

Moy Toy cast a glance of indifferent interest at the group at the

further side of the square (recent rains had fallen at Tellico,

long, soft, satisfying--what is now known as a “season”), where

the cheerataghe of Ioco were plying their invocations and spells,

surrounded by a number of the agricultural sufferers and several of

the second men; their plumed heads and scantily covered, copper-tinted

bodies were all distinct in the weird, dun light under the purple

cloud, and against the white and gray fleckings of the tortuous river,

and the pallid expanse of the wilting corn. No one was alert to listen

to what might pass between Moy Toy and the foreign white man. What

would a drought-harassed farmer of that region to-day care for issues

of diplomacy if he fancied he had a chance of working a charm on the

weather!

“Will there be enough of the powder?” Moy Toy asked tentatively. His

experience was limited, but he knew enough of the world to be aware of

the folly of exchanging a small certainty for a large possibility--a

small massacre for a large war of doubtful outcome.

“Powder!” exclaimed the soldier with a scornful laugh. “I can teach

you to make powder! The country is full of the materials for its

manufacture.”

With the keen observation of the scientist and the alertness of a

schemer to turn every incident to account, he had taken note in his

short stay of the nitrous caves of the country, of its resources for

sulphur, of the infinite growths of dogwood and of willows along the

streams to furnish the requisite grade of charcoal. In later wars these

yielded their benefits to discerning labor, but even so early Laroche

fully appreciated these opportunities and projected thus using them.

Moy Toy, standing on the opposite side of the sacred fire, gazed at him

for one moment in blank wonderment, the curiously wrought stone pipe in

his hand, slipping through his nerveless fingers, shattered unheeded

on one of the steatite rocks that supported the fire. And he--Moy Toy,

the fool, the madman, but for an accident, a mere trifle--would have

laid in ashes this fine brain with its curious workings, its many

shifts, its convolutions of knowledge that exceeded the wisdom of all

the men he had ever known from far or near,--all would now be a mere

cinder, the sport of the wind, all lost to the Cherokee nation and the

aggrandizement of the great chief, Moy Toy! With the recollection he

became anxiously apprehensive. That night--that night of woe, while the

slaughtered braves were laid in their hasty graves, and the prisoner

awaited their fair passage to a world beyond in a bitter suspense that

was to inaugurate and augment his destined tortures--would the memory

of those anguished hours, guarded on the summit of the high mound, move

this Frenchman to withhold aught of this vital, this all-important,

this intensely coveted knowledge from the Indian warriors? Moy Toy’s

mental attitude, wistful, repentant, propitiatory, was distinctly meek,

as intently listening he stared at Laroche, who was a trifle surprised

at his agitation.

“Being a warrior, a soldier, I have learned many things, Moy Toy, that

you would like to know, during my service as an officer of engineers

and artillery,--and that would be of help to you against the English.”

One could hardly say how many months of work had gone into the

fashioning and polishing of that pipe, a fine bit of carved stone, a

unique specimen of aboriginal art, shattered on the ground, but Moy

Toy’s fingers were unconscious that it had escaped them.

He essayed some anxious phrases of apology.

They hardly knew what they did that night--surely they were sorely

tried--an embassy received in peace and honor, and ending in a murder

of unsuspecting and generous hosts--he feared Laroche had been

inconsiderately treated, but prayed he would forgive the ignorance of

the poor Cherokees, and help them against their foe.

The subtle Frenchman now stared hard at the subtle Indian.

“Oh,” Laroche said at last, airily, yet still at a loss, “you did the

best you could, no doubt, in turning me over to the care of these white

people who treated my ills in a way to which I and they are accustomed.

No, no; although they are British the quarrel would have been had you

persisted in keeping me at Tellico.”

Moy Toy shut his mouth so suddenly that his tongue was in some sharp

danger from his teeth. Evidently by reason of his delirium Laroche had

forgotten the aggressions upon his liberty, the length and torment

of his captivity, the preparations for his torture and death in

satisfaction of the crimes of his Choctaw colleague. The happy fantasy!

The blessed fever!

“There is one boon I shall exact for the service I have already

rendered you,” Laroche continued, seriously, weightily. “It is my

pleasure to ask it, yet it is also your interest to grant it, and as a

pledge of the future. I jeopardized my interest and promotion, I braved

the wrath of Mingo Push-koosh, that a woman’s life--your sister’s

life--should not be placed in peril. Much evil came of this,--but

_I_ risked most.”

Moy Toy, gazing fixedly at him, thought he little knew how much he had

risked.

“And now,” continued Laroche, “I ask in return a safe conduct for

another woman--the daughter of the Scotch trader.”

He paused with some sudden impediment of speech, his eyes seeming

lighter, clearer than their wont, cast upward at the lowering storm

cloud.

“This British family have saved my life by their care, and I owe them

their lives in recompense. They must go in safety, but--I promise

you”--once more that sudden hiatus in his fluency--“they shall not

return.”

He was not as observant as usual, or he must have discerned some

extreme and secret joy beneath Moy Toy’s calm exterior. That unique and

quaint phenomenon of knowledge so delighted the crafty Indian!--that he

should hold the key of incidents of great import in the experience of

this man who was himself unconscious of them! And in the excess of his

relief that Laroche remembered naught of his cruel perils, averted by

a mere accident, the chief could have cried out in sheer, inarticulate

joy. But he said, quite simply, that Laroche was his best beloved

friend, whose injunctions should be obeyed, that he loved every hair on

his head, that he should never forget the rescue of his sister, which,

indeed, he felt he should have remembered earlier, for it was his

nephew who should be his heir and hold the sway of Great Tellico.

“The life of the trader’s daughter, her safety, and the safety of all

the trader’s household I demand for that service,” Laroche repeated

solemnly. “And as it is assured to them so will I requite you. I will

promise you then all the aid that mind and heart and hand can give you

hereafter. I swear it.”

Moy Toy renewed his protestations of friendship and reiterated his

apologies. The tone and tenor of his remarks implied acquiescence,

and Laroche felt no lack. But Moy Toy looked after him cynically as

he took his way back toward the dwelling of the trader, for the first

large drops of the impending storm were falling slowly through the air.

A breathless cry, like a gasp, went up from the rain enchanters at

the other side of the square; then ensued silence, tense, expectant,

painful. The farmer, poor sport of the skies, was aware that this

limited manifestation of the obedience of the powers of the air rescued

the reputation of the cheerataghe, since rain had fallen at their

bidding, yet did not save the crop, and, reduced to the position of

the only sufferer in the event, hung in desperate suspense upon the

developments of the next few moments.

The trading-house, with its door broadly aflare, giving a glimpse of

an orderly assortment of merchandise within, had on the roofless porch

or platform a group of the young packmen who had accompanied Callum

MacIlvesty from Charlestown. They were wearying for their return

thither, since so many restrictions had been laid on their conduct and

language, lest they give offense to the Indians and bring down reprisal

while they had in their keeping the precious charge of the young lady,

“little lassie Lilias,” as auld Jock loved to call her. This restraint

greatly irked them, for they were accustomed to giving and receiving

hard knocks, speaking their minds without fear or favor and with a

very rough edge to their tongues. One, fallen a trifle ill, declared

that he would be well in a trice if he were not “just dying of all

these manners!” Sodden themselves in a thousand superstitions, they

had taken a keen interest in the weather bewitchments, in which, from

these motives, they had been forbidden to mingle. They had neither the

time nor the inclination to notice the invalid hastening away out of

the rain to shelter, but his disordered step, his pallid countenance,

his agitated mien did not fail altogether of observation. The door

of the dwelling opened as he approached it, and there stood Lilias

holding it against the wind. So incongruous seemed her fair face and

golden hair and whitely glimmering attire with the sullen aspect of

the approaching storm, the gloom-darkened woods on every hand, that

she suggested an affinity with a sunlit scene that glimmered along the

far perspective of the ranges where a rift in the cloud admitted a

suffusion of ethereal golden light, in which the mountains were azure,

the woods of a fine, intense jade hue, the flash of a cataract like

molten silver,--the very apotheosis of scenery, some transient glimpse

of the fair land of Canaan.

Laroche’s lip trembled as he looked at her--so beautiful, so good, so

cruelly endangered.

She noticed his pained expression, but misunderstood its meaning. With

the constant household anxiety as to his health--“Ye hae been lang awa

wi’ that dour carle, Moy Toy, an’ ye look pale. Set ye down by the

fire, an’ I’ll gie ye a posset, before the others get here to beg for

tae half o’ it.”

He loved to do her bidding, even if it were not blended with many odd

“sups an’ bites,” of a quality peculiarly acceptable to an invalid’s

capricious appetite. He would have drunk poison as readily for her

sake, he said to himself, and added with a grim smile that he might do

that yet. For he had come to a full realization of late. He consciously

recoiled from all his loyal plans, his secret orders, his duties,

his pride of intellect, of achievement, his past, his profession,

his future. He said to himself that he would have liked the life of

a poppet--he could have felt if he had been made of wood or wax--to

be placed thus in a corner; to gaze at her with unwinking eyes; to be

given a bowl of drink, withdrawn in a minute, as she must needs test

with her own lips whether it were not too hot. He sought with sedulous

care the section of the rim her lips had touched. Poison! but the cup

of the present held nectar! He would have been satisfied--would have

kissed the hand of fate had he been only her pet dog.

A great collie, old, cosmopolitan,--he had come across on the ship with

her father in the days “lang syne,” and exceedingly surprising did he

find the experience of a collie of degree on the ocean,--had deserted

the trading-house, since her arrival, repudiated his master, forgotten

his friends, the packmen, cut his Indian acquaintance dead, to lie by

her hearth, to follow her footsteps, to feed from her hand, to sit with

his head against her knee and his listless body, dislocated, weighing

against her, to whine in jealous disfavor and an effort to attract her

attention had she more than a sentence or two to exchange with any

interlocutor save him.

“Whist, whist, hinny,”--she would gently smite his lolling head--“ye’ll

talk soon, and then I’ll ken ye’re no canny!”

For this, even so little as this, Laroche felt at times that he would

barter his learning, his prospects, his identity, his duty. Sometimes

he sought to justify his long, unnecessary lingering here, despite his

consciousness of the fact that his very individuality was a dangerous

secret. Were it known or suspected that he was employed in the French

interest, he could not hope to escape arrest, and thereby injury to

the cause he represented. Whatever might be the will of personal

friends, should he retain them in the stress of these disclosures,

hard usage would he encounter at the hands of the British colonial

authorities--perhaps even death; nay, had there not been a reward

offered for the scalp of every Frenchman busy among the Indians? And

certainly in such an adverse development he could not count on the

adhesion of the fickle Cherokees, especially to their detriment!

But for this one rift in his loyalty, he was wholly devoted to the

Louisiana interests which he had so zealously sought to advance.

This--this was his own personal beguilement. He would have known how

to resist his wonted allurements,--the pride of intellect, the pampered

independence and security of life, the world, the flesh, and the devil.

He was full armed against them; the attack would have been met by hardy

resistance along those lines. But to divert him from his duty, his

loyalty to his political trust, his obedience to his officers by means

of a virtuous attachment to a being so gentle, so fair, so good that

“no man could think on evil seeing her”--this seemed a device worthy

of the devil, and very like him; for this attachment would have done

him honor in any station of life save this, harbored deep, deep in the

subtle, deceitful heart of an enemy in the guise of a friend, a spy

upon his benefactor, the destroyer of their simple and limited and

humble prosperity.

Not so subtle as he thought--for now the schemer was but the man. Worse

still, for his secret, he was a Frenchman. Sometimes as he looked at

her those keen, eagle-like eyes of his softened suddenly, with his

emotional French susceptibility, and filled with tears. These tears she

saw, and in responsive emotion her own would start, trembling, to the

eyelids. She was not used to the sight of tears in a man’s eyes. Callum

MacIlvesty had not trafficked with such gear since he had first gotten

afoot on his sturdy infant legs and began his long travels through this

weary world. Sometimes, taking a pinch out of the proffered snuffbox of

a merchant of degree in Charlestown, Jock Lesly, who could carry his

liquor well enough, would find this unaccustomed gentility of the mull

culminating in a sneeze and water in the eyes. But such tears as these

of Laroche’s--tears of sheer pleasure, of subtle sorrow, of hopeless

love, of the sweet emotion of looking upon her--she had not witnessed,

and yet, enlightened by a kindred sentiment, she could appreciate; and

the difference of the manifestation for her sake from aught else she

had ever known made it seem the deeper, the truer, the dearer.

Certainly it was more picturesque than the obvious signs of Callum’s

dissatisfaction in an unhappy love, though, to be sure, she took scant

heed of them. When “ses jupons” swished out of the room in his swinging

stride, she was cognizant neither of the cause nor the circumstance

of his sudden taking of offense. And this brought slowly to his

intelligence the fact that she was equally unmindful of his embarrassed

return, as he sat glowering at Laroche across the fire, well aware

that his watchful rival fully appreciated and rejoiced in the futility

of his show of anger. Once, in awkward inadvertence, Callum stepped

on the collie’s tail, and the shrieks that the doggie sent up to high

heaven would seem to imply that there was no other canine so ruthlessly

afflicted in the universe. Lilias rebuked MacIlvesty’s carelessness in

a tone which conveyed genuine indignation, and he could only protest

in a gruff monosyllable; while the beast, leaning against her knee,

causelessly sobbing for half an hour, would burst forth in a plaintive

yelp whenever his eyes met Callum’s, and her “Whist, hinny, whist”

had all the adverse sentiment that might have been expressed in an

admonition, “I wad not tak ony notice o’ him.”

Callum could not even mend the fire with wonted deftness, nor keep his

temper when the logs of wood would roll down, but would administer a

kick of such free force as to send the red-hot coals flying about the

puncheon floor and all the family scuttling to catch them up before

the whole “bigging suld be in a low.” Even in the assiduous comity of

his conversations with Jock Lesly he often seemed to forget names of

people and places in Scotland with which he was obviously familiar,

and he was curiously uninformed of all calculated to interest the

elder in the doings of the regiment. Sometimes, indeed, his sentence

broke off in the middle, and he would fall into a revery, from which

he was only roused by the sudden jocularly upbraiding voice of Jock

Lesly, and once more with galvanic earnestness he would essay his

method of propitiation. Matters went better with him when the simple

and unobservant Jock Lesly himself did the talking, which was usually

the case, in great fullness of detail and long, circuitous routes of

narrative, leaving his auditor scant duty save to murmur “Ou!” “Ay!”

“I’se warrant ye!” at intervals, these dicta being uncompromising

and calculated to be generally applicable to any situation. His

supplantation was definite and complete.

And still Laroche, despite his qualms of conscience, putting aside his

repentance as for indulgence at a more convenient season, interpreted

all the _indicia_ of the young Highlander’s state of mind, felt

the complacence of a favored rival, and experienced all the joys of

triumph over the poor young Callum, as if he had a full intention to

enter a contest against him for this prize. True he was touched with

the generosity of the young mountaineer, who had shown at the first

some definite proclivity to inquire into the stranger’s means as well

as local habitation and association, but becoming impressed from some

casual phrase with the idea that the guest was of meagre resources and

had experienced much financial hardship, he withdrew all his forces

along that line. The reverse, in fact, was the case, for Laroche’s

fortune was not inconsiderable and he enjoyed fair prospects. The

error of his magnanimous rival elicited that æsthetic sentiment, that

prepossession in favor of whatever is noble, which a certain type

delights to admire rather than to emulate. It stimulated a degree of

reciprocal interest in the young Highlander,--a sort of curiosity as to

his status which comprised several incongruities. MacIlvesty’s poverty

was obvious, not merely from his humble estate as a foot-soldier,

but often from allusions to it that escaped him. He had the manner

of a gentleman of a high type,--he was lofty, yet not assuming; kind

without condescension. He was often merry but never clownish, and

by turns grave and dignified without affectation. Yet his education

was most limited; he notably lacked the training appertaining to a

certain social rank, while possessing all its other worthy attributes

and inherent values; his experience of travel was the service of the

Forty-Second, the troop ship, and the forced march of the wilderness.

Laroche, in his idle interest, had had an intermittent intention of

inquiring directly of Jock Lesly concerning the inconsistency of the

young Highlander’s endowments and position, but the awkwardness of

this display of sheer curiosity was obviated when one day the trader

complained of a freak of taciturnity which he declared Callum had shown.

“I canna get muckle mair talk out o’ Callum now than when he kenned

naught but the Gaelic.”

Then in reply to a question which seemed to express but a civil

interest, “Ou, ay,--Callum was near grown when he had the meenister

for a tutor, an’ the callant got to his English. Ou, ay,--the family

hae had hard straits,--but, wow, man! the clan were a’ out in the

Fifteen, an’ then what was left o’ them went out in the Forty-five!”

Though not without sympathy, he spoke with obvious reprehension of this

clan’s misfortunes, for Jock Lesly was of the Lowland Scotch and had

always been well affected to government. “An’ they lost much blood,

an’ a head or twa amang them afterward,--an’ a’ the land was forfeited

to the crown--there were twa or three titles amang them, a yerl an’ a

baronet or twa--I wot na what, but a’ very fine--if it were not for the

attainder. Callum is kin to gre’t folk! But what’s a title--neither

fitten to eat nor to drink, I trow. I wad wuss, though, the callant did

own the land that the government took away from his father,--wha died

in hiding after the Forty-five,--an’ the rents, that he might hae made

a gentleman o’ himsel’ instead o’ just a buirdly foot-sodger.”

He was a gentleman even without the land or the rents, and the

Frenchman piqued himself upon his subtlety of discernment in having

perceived this fact in so untoward a guise as a “foot-sodger” who

shoulders a musket for pay.

For these reasons now and again Laroche experienced a compunction

that he should be destroying the prospect of the domestic happiness

of this man, when circumstances--nay, his life was at stake!--forbade

any serious intentions on his own part. And yet, and the thought was

subtly sweet, she loved him--he was sure of it--as he loved her. But

in the dark hours of the night, when the house was silent, all wrapped

in slumber, a certain wakefulness had begun to harass him, like a

Nemesis; a voice of reproof sounded in all his reflections, of warning,

of presentiment, the prophecy of the future. When thus repentance and

doubt fell upon him he would urge in extenuation that if he had idly

won her heart it was but in the interests of that disguise still so

imperative upon him. Yet the thought of their kindness was like coals

of fire. They had brought him back from the verge of the grave. They

had lavished their best upon him, the stranger, for aught they knew

humble of station and penniless. Still, and it was the trifle that

wrung his heart with the most poignant pang, the best room in the house

was his; the graces of the bed curtains; the luxury of the sheets;

the cleanly though rude furnishings; all the little comforts packed

with the view of her father’s illness, and brought so far through the

toilsome wilderness, were for the guest.

The heavy snoring of Jock Lesly would echo from one of the rooms on

the other side of the spence, but through the flimsy partition of the

adjoining chamber Laroche could often hear the creaking cords of the

bedstead as Callum MacIlvesty, sleepless too, flounced back and forth

in the instability of his feather bed, restless, anxious, reviewing

many trifles fraught with great moment to him, heartsore, weary, and

despairing. Laroche commiserated the young Highlander’s sentimental

anguish, but he had a sentimental anguish of his own, and he dwelt upon

it in alternate pain and pleasure, in an ecstatic torment.

One night as he lay thus, pondering the events of the day, his

attention was arrested by a stealthy step. He put his hand under his

bolster and grasped the handle of his pistol. He listened hopefully

for the stir of the tortured Callum MacIlvesty, but sleep at last and

some fond and peaceful dream held the young Scotchman, and naught but

the sound of his deep and regular breathing attested his proximity in

the next room. Laroche hardly dared cry out and alarm the house, lest

the impending demonstration be delayed and renewed at some moment when

no one was awake and on guard. Except for the possibility of firing

the building, it was in danger of no calamity that could fall upon it

without noise. The doors were locked, the batten shutters had heavy

bars; therefore he judged it prudent to wait and listen.

There came again the tread of feet, stealthy, quiet as before; the

impact of a bare sole upon the ground beneath the window was distinct

for a moment. In the blank interval that ensued he heard the continual

rise and fall of the breathing of the night; the chiming and chanting

of woodland cicada, in regular alternations; the rush of the Tennessee

River dashing over the rocks. Once more that sound, as of a bare foot,

and again beneath the window.

He was exceedingly deft and light and certain in all his movements;

when it had passed he slipped out of his bed and crossed the room

to the window, not a sound attesting his progress, save that once a

puncheon creaked. He stood for a moment motionless, then peered through

the rift between the shutter and the window.

Outside there was a glare--a sudden glare. He saw a figure so

grotesque as to recall for a moment the associations of his delirium;

then half a dozen figures came into view, all in Indian file, and

strangely bedight. They were making the rounds of the house again and

again, evidently working a charm. Perfect silence waited on their

movements, save always beneath his window the stroke of a bare foot

fell on a sleek and clayey space with that slight sibilance that gave

him warning. Heads surmounted by torches enclosed in great gourds,

hideously painted in the semblance of human faces, showed faces below

still more hideously painted; buffalo horns and tails adorned figures

grotesquely and silently dancing; others wore bears’ claws and hides;

a human panther ran on all fours, now and again leaping so high into

the air that he seemed some inconceivable triumph of mechanism instead

of a living creature. The soldier felt his heart sink. Seldom did the

Indians permit the presence of white strangers in their more national

customs, and thus often the depths of their savagery, their fantastic

barbarism, lay unrevealed. Some strange significance surely marked this

grim pantomime, enacted in the darkest hour of the night about the

silent dwelling, while its unconscious inmates slept. Their lives might

seem to hang by a hair. He bethought himself, with a pang of terror, of

the young packmen quartered in the attic of the trading-house--surely

the glance of a wakeful eye must prelude the crack of a rifle, for

could a sane man imagine this to be aught but the revelings of the

creatures in the midst of an assault. But while he gazed in a terror he

could hardly suppress yet dared not voice, in one instant, while the

panther was in the mid-air trajectory of one of its wild leaps, every

light was extinguished, every figure vanished; and lurk and listen as

he might for the impact of the bare foot upon the clayey soil which

would intimate that in darkness the strange procession continued its

rounds, he heard only the vague sighings of the melancholy woods, a

creak once of the timbers of the house, and again the voice of the

Tennessee River dashing against its rocks.

VI

THE next morning Jock Lesly positively refused to credit the reality of

the remarkable procession that had thrice encircled his house while the

dwellers within, all save one, had slept oblivious and unsuspecting.

His bushy eyebrows had drawn together in a big blond frown as he

listened, his eyelids contracted over his narrowed eyes, but he shook

his head when all was said.

“Na--na!--ye were dreaming, lad--just a bit of the fever on ye yet!”

The futility of the proceeding; its lack of precedent in his

experience; the clear, fresh, reassuring presentment of Ioco Town under

the vernal sky, so peaceful with the dewy matutinal woods hard by, the

flashing river, the mountain ranges suavely blue; the friendly denizens

of the vicinage coming and going in and out of the trading-house;

the clusters of headmen about the buildings of the “beloved square,”

perhaps discussing some point of interest in the cabin of the aged

councilors, or playing the endless but trivial sedentary game of “roll

the bullet”--all combined to discredit it; all was as sane, as seemly

as civilization itself, once adopt a different standard--how could it

be aught but a dream!

But Laroche continued pale, anxious, distrait.

“I thought I ought to tell you and Callum,” he said--the young men

affected a friendly familiarity of address. “I know what I know! It was

no dream!”

Jock Lesly rubbed his hands together as he leaned forward with his

wrists on his knees and looked up at the younger man’s face, with an

expression of kindly but superficial gravity--obviously humoring, as he

thought, a whimsey.

“If you have no objection, I should like to speak of it to Moy Toy,”

Laroche said.

“To no one else, then,” said Jock Lesly, for he accounted himself a

great proficient in the subject of Indian traits and manners. “The

Injuns no like to be keeked at an’ spied out when they are at their

high jinks and fandangoes. But Moy Toy’s a kindly soul an’ friendly. I

mind how he wearied to speak wi’ ye while ye lay in a dwam when ye cam

first to Ioco.”

The instant the revelation passed the lips of Laroche, he saw by the

change in the Indian’s face that the disclosure was unexpected. Moy

Toy, however, caught his features into their wonted stoical calm, and

the flicker of expression was as sudden and as transient as the flash

of light reflected from a bird’s wing on a pool of sombre waters.

Then he replied casually, almost in the words of the Scotchman,--

“It was but a dream!”

“But, Moy Toy,” urged Laroche, “dreams come true. All the Cherokee

nation believe the dreams that visit the sleep of their ‘beloved men.’”

The chief smiled with a sort of flouting contempt that the white man

should thus place himself and his paltry sleeping fancies on the

same plane with the “beloved men” of the great Cherokee nation and

the eternal truths, the veiled face of the future, revealed to them

in the sanctities of their priestly visions; he seemed angrier than

even the presumption might warrant. The paleface, he declared, was

not a Cherokee “beloved man,” nor even an adopted tribesman. Why

should Indian visions haunt his slumbers in the sincerities of truth?

Then, once more visibly repressing some secret, rising agitation, he

continued with a specious smile, “I myself have firmly grasped your

hand, and I do not speak with the lying lips nor the snake’s forked

tongue. I am Moy Toy! But these Indians of the dreams--beware of them.

They do not know you to be the best beloved friend of the Cherokee

chief. They may cheat you and deride! No man can lay hands on them--the

dream Indians,--and this makes their lying tongue so strong to the

paleface, even to the ‘beloved man’ of the French king. No Indian of

the vision should delude you to the wreck of your peace of mind.”