Laroche said no more, resolving that no Indian of the flesh should

delude him, whatever deceptions might be wrought upon his senses by

the immaterial Indians of dreams. He seemed to assent. No man could so

fashion the guise of appearances to the similitude of fact. He laughed

a little, with the suggestion of being a trifle out of countenance,

a little ashamed of his confidences. Moy Toy, from being keenly

observant, grew distrait, and answered presently at random. At length,

as if in justification of the foolish importance he had attached to his

vision, Laroche declared that he had great interest in the significance

of dreams, that he held them to be scenes, as it were, vouchsafed

from the border world beyond, peopled by those who have once lived

here, that he had always longed to be admitted to listen when he saw

the “beloved men” grouped under a tree, or in the “holy cabin” of the

“beloved square,” telling their dreams to each other and conning their

interpretations.

“And so you shall hear,” Moy Toy interrupted, “when you are adopted

into the Cherokee nation and made a great ‘beloved man,’ after you have

taught us to manufacture the powder, the spirit of death that comes

roaring and rushing with fire and smoke out of the mouth of the gun,

sending the leaden bullet to work his will.” He was still looking about

with a preoccupied mien and eager eyes, and suddenly he said that he

must be gone for a space, as he had matters of some import to discuss

with the headmen of Ioco Town, for he had been summoned from Tellico to

meet them in their council-house.

The wary Laroche, as he cast his eye over the spaces of the town,

noted that the headmen were presently being sought here, there, and

everywhere, and that a very considerable interval elapsed before,

congregated together, they repaired to the state-house; he inferred

from the fact that the meeting was no matter of previous arrangement,

but altogether impromptu. The coming of Moy Toy had had about it all

the _indicia_ of a mere personal visit to him to make sure of the

state of his health and the date of his possible return to Tellico,

where he was likely to be hardly less a prisoner because he was so

valued as a guest, the prospect of his services being held at so

high a rate. The conclusion was irresistible; the revelation of that

vision of the dead watches of the night, which in his fatuity the

Scotchman called a dream, and the Indian in his craft a delusion, had

a significance, an importance that warranted the exertion of Moy Toy’s

great influence in the nation to summon into council the headmen of a

town, not his own municipality, without the forms, the heralds, the

preambles so habitually required and accorded.

What did it mean, this dream? Oh for a soothsayer indeed!--for an

interpreter of the masked fact rather than the fantasy of fiction!

Laroche stood for one moment in despair, realizing that the lives

of the trader’s household hung upon the result of the debate now in

progress in that strange, clay-daubed, dome-shaped temple,--upon

the wild will of those malignant beings endowed, as it seemed to

him, merely with the semblance of humanity and yet with the mental

processes, the moral insanity, the malevolent spite of fiends. All was

the more barbaric, the more unholy, the more unearthly, because of the

recollection of the grotesque features of that weird, silent circling

and circling last night about the dwelling of their victims. Since

that dwelling harbored her, of whom Laroche could not think save with

a swelling heart, of whom he could not speak for the candor of words

crowding to his lips which his deceit must disallow him, whom he could

not thank for his life that he owed to her and hers, for gratitude was

all inadequate, he must act, he must seize upon some device. And still

he stood silent, inert, not knowing where to turn.

Was it as a penalty, he asked himself in sudden affright, that he was

to be called upon to witness without recourse the destruction of this

home, the hideous massacre of the hearthstone circle, to him now as the

treasure of all the earth? Would he, indeed, do no penance till the

leisure he liked awaited him? Was he to find what joy might be in the

hugging of chains till he should choose to rouse his will and smite his

soul free of its cherished shackles? Was he, unscathed, to steep his

consciousness in the intense, sweet delight of this selfish affection,

pure doubtless, but because of the unimpeachable, unapproachable virtue

and innocence of its object, and not because of any restraints exerted

upon himself by the dictates of honor or manly faith or kindness and

tenderness of heart,--he who knowingly, intentionally, had won her love

for naught, to cast away again, had, perhaps, wrecked her happiness,

had certainly supplanted the true, devoted, loyal man fitted and once

destined to be her husband.

Had he expected to decree his own punishment for his idle cruelty when

surfeited with the semblance of romanticism? Beshrew his leniency!--he

had devised a light one! To return to Great Tellico with an empty heart

and a drear sense of separation from all on earth he loved; to work at

the behests of the government that employed him; to obey the orders of

his superior officers for which even morally he was not responsible;

to dwell in a sad pleasure and a sweet pain upon the memory of a fair

face, a tender parting word--had he thought to hold in the sanctities

of his most secret heart the recollection of a kiss and tears of

farewell? This his prophetic vision had viewed as his unkind fate,--and

he had sighed in the anticipation of this romantic woe!

He now stood aghast between his trivial fancy of the future and its

harsh face coming so near that it seemed half revealed. Heaven, just

heaven, mindful of retribution, would so smite him, insensible though

he had become, that he should feel its wrath. Was the blow to fall on

him through the woes of others? Was he to see the brave and sturdy

Scotch trader, so kindly and generous, suspicious of naught in his own

open candor, smitten to the ground in his own house, gory, scalped,

disemboweled, the gross flout of what once he was? All a-tremble,

Laroche asked of himself should he who had inflicted much keen pain in

ingenious wise on his young rival be compelled to witness the keener

tortures of the stake? And how should he look on her golden hair that

he had loved--save the mark!--dabbled and dulled with brains and blood!

Laroche gave vent to a hoarse, inarticulate cry. For this, all this,

would result from his deception and his long lingering here in the

false guise of Tam Wilson. Had he returned to safety at Tellico the

machinations of the French among the inconstant Cherokees must have

been gradually divulged by the fact of his continued presence there,

and his identity as an emissary of that government suspected; thus this

handful of British subjects, warned in time, would have taken prompt

measures for their protection and have compassed their withdrawal from

the country. The menace that now hung over them was his fault, the

result of his treachery, his idle trifling.

He wondered if the fantastic threats of the previous night might be

explained by the fact that the headmen of Ioco Town were inflated by

the continued presence of the representative of the French government,

the large splendor of his promises transmitted from one council-house

to another, his secret mission to unify the tribes, organize and

command their army. Were they already feeling their emancipation from

the British rule; already emboldened by the knowledge of the great

French king’s strength, as if the promised munitions of war were in

store; already rejoicing in the blood of their earliest victims, even

while it yet coursed with calm pulsations through their veins?

Would heaven only in its omnipotent goodness avert the blow, turn the

time back, halt the sun in its irresistible march! He laughed in a sort

of bitter scorn that these miracles of mercy must needs be invoked to

undo what he had so willfully done. Yet he must know the full measure

of the menace--and once more the hideous, significant phantasmagoria of

that mystic midnight magic pressed upon his quickened consciousness.

This was a keen brain, essentially the schemer’s. Laroche was still

standing near the spot where Moy Toy had left him. Close by, hitched

to the bough of a tree, was the horse of the prince of Tellico,--a

fine animal, bearing in his mien and form strong suggestions of his

ancestors, the Spanish barbs. Though fiery he was as gentle, and he

only reared with impatience and displeasure when the Frenchman, with a

sudden thought, laid hold upon his mane, seeking to mount as usual from

the near side. Remembering the habit of the Indians always to mount

on the off side he was quickly in the saddle, and giving the spirited

charger a cut with a whip to which it was unaccustomed he was out of

the town like a flash and galloping at a breakneck speed along the

trading path through the wild woods.

It was high noon at Great Tellico when he drew rein on the banks of

the Tennessee River. Vernal languors were in the air; the richness of

the waxing season embellished field and forest, the velvet blue of

the Great Smoky Mountains, the intense, almost violet hue of the sky,

the redundancy of the flowering shrubs and the growth of the grass

and weeds underfoot. The river in the recent drought had shrunken

since he last had seen it, revealing here and there a stretch of fine,

amber-tinted sand, and again a rugged, shelving ledge of rock, and yet

again beds of muscle shells, numbers of which, opened and searched for

the fresh-water pearls, lay riven apart, giving an opalescent shimmer

to the casual glance and a whiter margin to the gray and glossy stream.

The shadows were limited, yet dense, so clear was the exquisitely

limpid and fresh mountain air. The sun was not warm, despite its

splendid effusions, yellowing with an effect of burnished glamour,

prophetic of ripening glories.

The Indians who had marked his arrival gathered in groups at a

distance, now sheltered by a shrub or a stump, now by the corner of a

house, occasionally peeping out at him in the covert way which they

affected to ascribe to their consideration toward guests. For, said

they, openly to study the mien and dress and person of a stranger

savors of discourtesy, but unobserved to mark all his qualities from a

screen gratifies the curiosity and gives no offense. In this instance

they were influenced by interests far deeper than sheer curiosity.

They were all well aware of his identity, the terrible fate for which

he had been destined, his reprieve and transference to the British

trading-station at Ioco, that by the European remedies to which his

system was accustomed he might be cured of his strange fever, which

had defied the skill and magic of the cheerataghe. For what purpose

he had been reserved, however, whether for the torture when his

unconsciousness should not rob it of half its terrors, or as a slave,

or as a hostage, or other ulterior view of Moy Toy and the rest of the

headmen, the rank and file were not informed. Therefore a very genuine

sensation pervaded the several coteries as they marked the free,

independent air, the erect carriage, the easy, deft step with which

Laroche, no longer splendidly arrayed in the dazzling French uniform,

but always of a point-device effect, even bedight in buckskins, crossed

the space in front of the mound where he had awaited his fate in such

weary suspense and dread. Perhaps he might not have been able to

maintain this valiant attitude if that hiatus of recollection had been

once bridged over. The event had passed to him as if it had never been,

and he sustained the gaze of the community as possessed of a unique

interest,--a man who, but for an accident, might now have been, instead

of a man, a handful of ashes, whirling about with no more substance or

identity or cohesion of personality than the grains of sand strewn over

the “beloved square.”

Laroche flung himself down upon the roots of the tree in front of the

dwelling of Akaluka, and took off his coonskin cap to let the cool

breeze refresh his throbbing temples. Akaluka, glancing suddenly out

of the door, was startled to see him sitting there--startled and not

pleased. She had had a great fright in the complication that had come

so near to the bestowal of her in marriage upon the Choctaw chief,

Mingo Push-koosh, who had slain in such grievous wise the unoffending

braves of the town, whom he had found peacefully spreading their

seines at the confluence of the Tennessee and the Tellico. Often with

a morbid fascination she went to look at the spot where he had hung up

“the war-brand,” a half-burnt stick swaying across the path, suspended

by a grapevine--an open declaration of hostilities, according to the

rules of Indian war. The cruel man! for as he had slain these he would

have slain her; and the trouble all began with the “mad young men” who

counseled the acceptance of the red scarf, and who cared for naught

save that the Mingo should not be angered and that they should soon go

to war again with the British. But they all blamed her, and they talked

and talked with many sharp words, and she was tired of all mad young

men, who were a vain and a vexatious creation, and she wished to see

none ever again, and here was one who had come and had laid himself

at her very door, as she still stood, barely discerned in the depths

of the cabin. Whereupon she lifted her voice in the extremity of her

disfavor and asked him why he was not burned long ago.

The tenor of the question roused Laroche to his normal mental attitude.

Perhaps, he said with affected humility in his ignorance that this fate

had seriously menaced him, it might have been that in view of the debt

she owed him she had seen fit to intercede for his life. Hence he had

not yet been burned.

This politic reply brought Eve at once to the door. “What debt?” she

asked, in frowning curiosity.

Her face wore a strong expression of racial ferocity strangely

incongruous with feminine physiognomy, which reminded Laroche of the

singular fact that in the crisis of the most exquisite anguish of the

torture, the women and children were permitted and rejoiced to flout

and buffet and sear and cut and aggravate in infinite ingenuity the woe

of the quivering victim. Even thus lowering however, she was not devoid

of beauty, and her dress betokened still a heedful eye to the values of

decoration. The wings in her glossy black hair were alternately the red

of the cardinal bird and the modest brown of his demure little mate.

Her doeskin _jupon_ was also red, dyed deep with the blood-tinted

madder-root. She had a great red sash, such as a pirate might wear or a

major-general. Moy Toy had been constrained by many pleas and domestic

tyranny, in a sort, to confer it upon her from the store of presents

of the French pettiaugre in lieu of the scarf she had been bidden to

restore to the Choctaw Mingo. She wore it like a voluminous cross-belt

diagonally about her body, then passed around her slender waist. Here

and there the silk had come in contact with her smooth, anointed skin,

and the unguents had streaked the sash with a darker hue. Around her

neck, which the arrangement of the sash made visible, being disposed

in what is now called a V shape, a string of white pearls lay against

the clear olive tint of her throat--the gems were large and for the

most part regularly shaped. She was stringing others, which had been

pierced for the purpose with a hot copper spindle--a practice which

the early traders sought to discourage--the application of the heat

discoloring the gem, diminishing its lustre, and spoiling its value

for the European market. Her feet were bare, of an exquisite shape,

small, slender, most delicately made. He had hardly dreamed that her

narrow, liquid, velvet-black eyes, with lashes so long, so straight,

they seemed to cast a shadow, could look upon any object with a stare

so repellent, so infuriated, so brutal.

Before he could answer she asked another question, so dissimilar that

he was at a loss and fumbled for a reply.

“Where is your hair?”

He had been accounted a logician, a mighty wrestler with arguments,

even a subtle trickster with words, but his facility was never so alert

that it could, without bewilderment, make a leap like this.

“Oh--ah--my hair? Oh--they took off my hair at the trading-station--for

the fever, you know.”

“You look like a baby--a grown-up baby,” she said, surveying with

objection his short ringlets.

“My hair is not like a wig. It will grow,” he said, with his gentle

gayety.

“Your beautiful clothes are at the state-house,” she observed. “Tinegwa

wears them at the dance.”

For his life Laroche could but change countenance. So is man, the

civilized creature, artificialized by his need and custom of clothes

that they seem actually a part of him. He felt the indignity as a

personal affront, the more acutely since he had not fully realized his

danger after the desertion of him by Mingo Push-koosh. His eyes rested

on the soft shining of her anointed sash.

“Then I shall wear them no more,” he protested, with covert meaning.

“Moy Toy and I,” he resumed, hastening to cloak his sarcasm lest her

keen perception discern it, “have exchanged all our clothes, in token

of our friendship.”

She gazed at him steadily. Such swift, radical reversals of policy were

not altogether unknown to the Indian scheme, and it might well have

chanced that beyond her knowledge the chieftain and his captive had

thus, in the formal and accepted manner, the exchange of every garment,

pledged and ratified a reciprocal fraternal bond.

Her mood was gradually softening. She came forward a few steps, pausing

once in the sun to gaze at the pearls she held in her slender, deft

hand; then, entering the overhanging shadow of the tree, she sank down

in an easy kneeling posture, carefully selected and threaded a pearl

upon a horsehair which she held in her right hand, half a dozen of the

gems dangling at the end of the string, and looking up straight into

his eyes, asked with sudden recurrence,--

“What debt?”

“Oh--ah--to be sure; why, the debt of your life,” said the wily

Laroche. “But for me, Moy Toy might have given you in marriage to the

Choctaw prince, who had boasted that he would slay you, would take your

life, being a Cherokee born, should the two tribes fall to war with the

English and the French. But for me--for I betrayed his counsels--the

Choctaw fiend!”

Her hand trembled; she let the pearl fall. She searched for it with

patient diligence and a deft finger in the green moss where it

glimmered with a lunar lustre. When she had found and threaded it she

desisted from her labor, although she still held the loose pearls in

one hand, the partially strung thread in the other.

“I will marry no one,” she said apprehensively. “It is very dangerous.”

“It is very dangerous to marry Mingo Push-koosh,” assented Laroche, who

had indeed paid dearly for his humanity.

“And the young men of the Cherokee nation,”--she shook her head

deploringly. “Oh, they are all mad, too,--all quite mad--all dangerous.

I will marry no more.”

She looked down at the pearls in her left hand, but did not resume the

stringing of them.

“The warrior I married once,” she continued,--“he was older and very

good--and brought much meat from the winter hunt. He would not scold

with a woman--that was beneath a warrior’s notice. And if a woman

wished to scold, she might go and talk to the Tennessee River. It

would do her good and not hurt the river, and her husband would not be

obliged to leave her. He was very good.”

She gave a vague glance over her shoulder into the open door of

his house. Laroche, hyper-sensitive with all his recent anxieties,

emotions, sufferings--even morbid--had an uncomfortable realization

that deep beneath the thick clay floor of the dwelling the dead man

sat, buried so close to the life he no longer lived, so intimately

associated with the possessions he no longer owned.

The Frenchman affected a gayer tone.

“But all young men are not mad. Am I not young? I am not mad.”

She evaded the answer. “At their gambols they may well seem mad. One

does not expect more then. But in war, in council, in marriage, it is

not well that young men should be mad.”

“The gambols of various nations are different, as with their other

customs,” remarked Laroche discursively. “But the young men

participating are much alike. I have seen a game of the Cherokees in

which the young men seemed mad--oh, very mad indeed.”

“What game was that?” Eve demanded; for in spite of her aversion to

those bereft young persons, and her stern determination to marry no

more, and her grateful recollection of the domestic placidity of an

elderly spouse, her interest in the “mad young men” was very fresh and

ever new, and easily stimulated to a discussion of their unruly traits

and peculiar manners.

“Why,” began Laroche, shifting his half reclining posture, that he

might support his head upon his hand, his elbow deep in the soft turf,

while he watched her listening face, “what would you say if I should

tell you what happened when I first came here to Tellico Great with the

Choctaw embassy?”

A slight contraction passed over her features always at the mention

of the delegation, a spasm of wrath, of reminiscent terror, of

indignant and wounded pride that she, a Cherokee princess, holding a

line of royal succession, should ever have been in danger of uncaring

slaughter, as if she were a beast, at the hands of a grossly arrogant

Choctaw, to whom she might have been given as a wife, and for no more

provocation than that she had been born a Cherokee.

“What would you say, I wonder,” he went on as she bent her dark eyes

anew upon him, “if I should tell you that one night I could not sleep;

I had had dreams that waked me. And if I should tell you that I rose

and walked a long time by the riverside--very quietly, wanting to wake

no one. And when at last, refreshed and the dream forgotten, returning

within view of the stranger-house--where the Mingo and his Choctaw

escort slept.”--He paused and affected to laugh, but the laughter stuck

in his throat. “The maddest, merriest game--the maddest game!”

She was leaning forward, her eyes shining strangely, the hand that

held the thread moved mechanically, beckoning, beckoning, as if to lure

forth the story; the other hand, holding the pearls, trembled like a

leaf.

“Around and around the house was circling the strangest procession of

‘mad young men.’ Some wore buffalo horns and tails, and all had gourds

cut like faces, with torches inside, on their heads; their faces were

painted--painted! And one like a panther ran on all fours and leaped

and leaped!”--

“Ah--h--h!” A sudden wild scream burst from her lips, which she

struck with the palm of her hand, producing a sound indescribably

nerve-thrilling, and which he had heard from braves on the war-path.

“The spring of Death!” she cried in exultation. And again the wild

scream split the air. “No game; no game!” she exclaimed in convulsive

precipitancy. “That was the mock-rite, the funeral procession, of those

they meant to destroy--and oh, I wish they had! Why did they not! why

did they not!”

Laroche’s face was as pallid as the baubles in her hand.

“The Choctaw embassy--was it intended to massacre them?”

“It must have been--though I know nothing of it. This is the invariable

prelude--the agreement--the seal of the compact. To circle three times

round the house of your enemy, if one rests in your town, as if it were

the house of the dead, and with mock and flout and spells to palsy

resistance, and with lights to prove the path, and with knives to cut

the pledge of friendship, and with the leaping Death to seize them by

the throat--ah--h!--ah--h!”

VII

HOW he fared on his return to Ioco Town, Laroche never knew. The

interval of his transit was a blank in his recollection. He was only

aware of the crisis when he plunged out of the encompassing woods,

still urging the horse to a wild gallop, lashing him at every bound

with his cap, in default of a whip, which he had lost, when or where he

could not say.

The town lay before him, idealized in a suffusion of roseate purpling

light as the sun was going down beyond those dark, heavily wooded

ranges in the west into which the mountain plateau, even then called

the Cumberland, splits at its southern extremity. The eastern loftier

heights, the Great Smoky, bore an almost visible sentiment of peace on

their slopes, which were of an etherealized azure with a reflection

of the red west in the suave sky above their domes. The Cherokee

dwellings were all solidly dark against the fine, delicate intimations

of color in the opalescent atmosphere. Where a fire was glimpsed in

the “beloved square,” the red and white and yellow of the blaze were

like a crude overlay of coarse pigment on some exquisite mosaic. The

figures of the Indians themselves in groups of varied aspect,--sundry

of them arrayed in aboriginal splendor, feathered and mantled; others

almost nude; still again others clad in the coarse and unpicturesque

buckskin shirt and leggings,--all stood as if petrified at the first

disordered sound of the wildly galloping hoofs of the horse. They

watched in blank surprise the equestrian apparition speeding across

the open spaces until, hardly pausing in front of the trading-house,

Laroche flung himself from the saddle. He took no heed to secure the

creature. With the reins loose on his neck the horse, amazed at this

unwonted liberty and lack of care, reared aimlessly once or twice.

Then motionless, with a gaze of obvious surprise, he turned to look

after his eccentric rider, who had burst into the trading-house with

his warning of the danger upon his lips, that all who cared might hear

and tremble. No more would he trust to the foolhardiness of the sturdy

trader, who had weathered many a gale of disaffection, signs of Indian

displeasure, rumors of massacres impending, and threats of reprisal;

nor to the young Highland soldier’s unquestioning reliance on the

superior judgment of Jock Lesly. The under-trader and the young packmen

responded as alertly with fears and precautions as Laroche could wish.

With his martial habitudes reasserted in the emergency, Laroche gave

the necessary orders with such dispatch, such decision, such obvious

discrimination, that the men, discerning their value and aware that

none other of the group could have originated the plan, as instantly

obeyed as if he had been a military superior entitled to the authority

he wielded. Jock Lesly, coming in at haphazard, found himself a mere

supernumerary in his own trading-house, where his word had been law. He

stared for a moment with stunned surprise, and then at last and after

so long a time, hearing the interpretation of the dream he had derided,

he began to admit to himself that perhaps more mischief was brewing in

the air than he wot of.

“It’s the French--thae kittle cattle!” he exclaimed; “I wad na vex

mysel’ if it were na for the lassie.”

He heard with deliberative calmness the preparations which Laroche had

projected for the defense of the little colony, which he instantly

began to detail, so eagerly, so urgently, that amidst the tumultuous

words there came to Jock Lesly’s absorbed sense a fact which he

remembered long afterward rather than noted in that moment of crucial

stress--a vaguely foreign accent. Now he only marked the features of

the plan, and his strong heart was buoyed up by its hopefulness.

“Eh, callant,” he cried; “it’s gey gleg ye are at this wark! Ye’ll no

hae seen foreign service for naething!”

The phrase went the rounds of the lads who stood with their lives in

their hands, and, though loath enough to yield them in this petty

strife that had not even a fair quarrel for its justification, were

still more loath to yield first their strong bodies, endowed with

stanchest nerves, to furnish sport to the Cherokees in the delights

of the torture. Foreign service! The words were like magic. It was a

trained mind, with a practiced eye and an experienced judgment, that

disposed their pitiful resources to the best advantage for defense. And

with this reassurance these resources hardly seemed so pitiful.

In two minutes the trading-house, a temple of peace and built without

the customary loopholes for musketry, had half a dozen sawn through

each of the stanch walls, save on the side nearest the dwelling, where

a dozen slits were fashioned. The emporium of commerce, being a long

and large building in comparison, commanded it on three sides. Around

the home in the early days of its occupation a ditch had been once

dug, intended to drain the slope. This was still deep but now dry, and

in it emergency mines were hastily constructed here and there after a

fashion which Laroche had seen in practice in his military experience

in Europe. There were still many kegs of powder in the store, a

quantity of tow, numerous rude bags and boxes and barrels, half emptied

or altogether thrown aside. Of these boxes and barrels he hastily

contrived fougasses, lining them with tar before placing in each a

heavy charge of powder. The energetic plying of a dozen spades soon

covered them over in the ditch, and several were sunken in deeper pits

with gravel and boulders to fill the space to the surface. He himself

worked diligently with great deftness upon sundry long, thin bags which

he called “saucissons,” fashioned from a bolt of Jock Lesly’s best

linen, filled with powder, tarred externally, to serve as fuses to

convey fire to the fougasses. He was a man of infinite expertness and

a genius in the way of resource, and barricades for doors and windows

were soon contrived of whatever material was at hand. He selected the

guard, the greater number of the packmen, who were to hold out the

trading-house, which, with its outlook and its loopholes, commanded

the dwelling. They were instructed to prevent any possible approach

by picking off the assailants by rifle fire, or, in case of a rush,

by exploding one of the fougasses, the saucissons of several of which

connected with the store, the others with the dwelling itself. The

under-trader, as vigorous, devil-may-care, hard-headed, hard-handed,

hard-hearted a backwoodsman as could have been found in those rude

days, was to take command of the detachment in the trading-house, Jock

Lesly himself, Laroche, Callum, and two of the packmen undertaking to

defend the dwelling. The two buildings were thus enabled to afford

mutual protection, and divide the numbers and break the force of the

assault by the Indians, each offering the garrison of the other, in

case of extremity, the chance of a refuge in flight.

So swift, so definite, yet so simple were these arrangements that when

Moy Toy was summoned from the perplexities of his consultations with

the headmen of Ioco in the great council-house, by the wild alarum

from the Indians without that warlike preparations were going forward

among the trader folk, he found these precautions already in a state

of completion. Laroche, a pickaxe in his hand; advanced to meet the

chief as he came toward the dwelling that now peered at him, as it

were, suspiciously from loopholes. The sounds of excitement from the

square, of wild cries and eager words, the disorder of swift, flitting

figures hither and thither, the clash of weapons and the hasty tramp

of feet, all implied an unusual activity among the tribesmen. They

too were getting under arms, but were distinctly dismayed to find

themselves surprised--the onset they had planned anticipated, crippled,

perhaps even to be repelled by forethought, adequate preparation, and

a valiant defense. In fact, without those tumultuous concomitants of

the sudden onslaught, the stealthy ambush, the surprise of treachery in

conference, the Indian hardly cared to fight. And although they were so

vastly superior in numbers that calculation of odds was impracticable,

they were aware that they must needs suffer severely from the fire of

the little garrison, whose bulletproof walls would hold a far stronger

force indefinitely at bay. Laroche fixed the period of the enterprise

when he warned Moy Toy and the chief of Ioco Town, advancing with him,

to come no further.

“The ground is mined with powder,” he explained. “No Indian shall come

one pace nearer.”

Moy Toy cast an upbraiding glance upon his companion. And Laroche knew

in an instant that his discovery of the inimical midnight mummeries and

the suspicions they had aroused had been the subject of the debate in

the town-house; but for the habitual forbearance of the Indians toward

one another, it might have caused an open rupture that this had been so

conducted as to betray their plans. He had not valued the pledge of the

Indian’s word, but he had thought that Moy Toy realized his interest

was involved in keeping his promise of immunity to the “trader folk.”

Now he would not trust to this.

“I have read my dream, Moy Toy!” he cried triumphantly. “Am I not a

soothsayer--even like unto an ‘old beloved man’ myself--simple as I

stand here?”

The very tones of his sarcastic voice, ringing so jauntily on the air,

daunted the Indians, so assured, so inimical, so subtly menacing his

laughter was.

From the loopholes of the barricaded trading-house interested

faces peered out to witness the dumb show of this colloquy, the

speakers being so distant that only the sound of their voices was

distinguishable; the men at their several posts commented loudly to

each other. “Eh, sirs, hear till him, now!” “Wow, he had best haud a

care!” “Moy Toy looks gin he wad bite, the fearsome auld carle!”

Laroche turned as the two Indians, cautious, mute, doubtful, playing

the waiting game, gazed at him. He lifted the pickaxe and struck it

upon the ground.

“Here,” he cried, drawing the implement along the earth as if tracing

the way, “walked the mock mourners--thrice--thrice around the house

of the living, as if they were already the dead. Following came

the bearers of cords and chains, with charms and spells to hinder

resistance. And so--the lantern bearer, with light to prove the

path. And him with the knife, to cut the bonds of plighted faith and

friendship. And then the leaping Death--quick--quick--to seize his

prey!”

Between each mystic sequence of this ghastly figurative array Laroche

lifted the pickaxe and drew a stroke along the ground.

The two chiefs gazed now and again at each other as this recital

proceeded, first with obvious agitation, giving way to sheer wonder,

increasing to awe, and, as the idea became more accustomed, to a fierce

anger that flashed in Moy Toy’s dark eyes like lightnings from out a

storm cloud.

“Do I not read the dream aright?” Laroche cried at last, leaning on the

pickaxe and surveying them with a smile of glad triumph, infinitely

taunting.

“The white man reads no Cherokee dream,” said Moy Toy. “You have been

told this.”

“The great chief knows all things,” flouted Laroche; “I have been told

it.”

The two Indians looked at him with a keen expectancy that meant woe

indeed to the traitor.

“The river whispered it in my ear. I read it in the clouds. The winds

are singing it in the pines--I can turn nowhere that it does not cry

out to me from all the voices of the earth. For all day I have been

in the woods--even as far as Great Tellico; your good horse may show

my speed, Moy Toy. All your Cherokee country tells it--the fair land

that was to have been rescued from the British, and with the aid of the

French made the head and front of an independent Indian confederacy of

a dozen tribes!”

The large scope of this harmonious scheme that, could it have been

realized,--the combination of the tribes, ever warring against each

other, into a union of massed strength against the colonies,--would

doubtless have worked mighty changes in the history of this continent,

appealed to the breathless hope of the Cherokee statesmen. The chief of

Ioco Town hastened to say that Laroche was the cherished friend of the

tribe; the town of Ioco loved to hold, to shelter his honored head; he

was indeed deceived if he imagined from his distorted reading of dreams

of Indians--for dream Indians were mischievous and would not appear

right to white men, and thus loved to delude them--that the Cherokees,

least of all the town of Ioco, sought to do him mischief; they valued

too greatly his promise of instruction, the assurances he had brought

from his government, and the prospects he had unfolded of that large

freedom and independence he would teach the nation to secure.

“Those prospects are as nothing--as a mere breath--as that mist before

the moon--even the moon’s light will scatter it.” Laroche glanced up

at the great disk slowly rising over the serrated summit line of the

gloomy Smoky Mountains, albeit the western sky was yet red and day

lingered, dusky and doubtful, among the wigwams, and in the opalescent

tints of the river, broken here and there with the tumultuous flashing

of the white foam against the rocks.

“Nothing will I promise--not even that I will remain amongst you.”

He detected a significant hardening in the faces of the Indian

chiefs--a sudden tyrannous gleam in the eyes of Moy Toy.

“You would say I have no choice, Moy Toy.” He took from his belt a

pistol--a fine new weapon, secured from Jock Lesly’s own armament

at the trading-house--primed and loaded. “I hold in my hand the

opportunities of life and death. Unless all at the trading-station go

in peace, go free, and I myself accompany them as far as the Keowee

River, I will not remain with you.” Once more that dangerous gleam in

Moy Toy’s eye. “I will place this at my temple,” he held the muzzle

amidst the loosely curling rings of his light brown hair and deftly

touched the trigger, “and in one moment your league with the great

French king is a thing of the past. His trusted officer, holding his

commission and acting by his authority, will have died in your country,

in your custody, as definitely, in his estimation, slain by your hand

as if your hand had sped the bullet.”

The two Cherokees, obviously at a loss, gazed at each other and

hesitated.

“Never will the pettiaugres ascend your demon-infested, rocky

rivers--never will the barrier towns rise above and below those

defiant, malign obstructions and secure the passage of merchandise.

Your vassalage to the British will be an accomplished fact, your

independence a dream; for I who am sent to organize your armies and

perfect your plans and equip your warriors for defense and legitimate

aggression in war--I will do nothing! My mission is at an end, unless

you comply with my conditions. I am a soldier and no murderer. I cannot

and will not be placed in a position to answer to the British colonial

authorities for the innocent blood, for murder, for massacre. I said

to you once as I say to you now--Let the traders go! They shall not

return! Then, with the aid of the French government, I will put into

the field an army of Indian braves, officered by French experts in each

arm of the service, and the very name of it shall strike more terror to

the hearts of the perfidious English than a myriad of border massacres.”

Laroche had already known something of the swiftness with which the

crafty savage could shift ground, but he was not prepared for the

sudden _volte-face_, without a glance at each other or a sign,

with which both Moy Toy and the chief of Ioco began to protest, albeit

in decorous fugue, notwithstanding their haste,--it being a standing

joke among the Indians, a matter of perennial ridicule, that the white

people would talk at the same time or interrupt one another so that

none could be distinctly heard. The two chiefs instantly declared that

they would respect his words and abide by his promises, which they

cherished like the blood of their own hearts. They admitted that they

ought earlier to have told him the truth--which for shame they wished

to conceal,--that only the mad young men of the town had conceived

the ignoble scheme of revenge for some trivial insults which they

fancied had been offered them by the young packmen--themselves hardly

less insane than the bereft young braves. They had been reproved for

their midnight mummeries and their threats thus expressed, and when

opportunity should offer, after the departure of the trader and his

pack-train, the offenders should be dry-scratched.

The Frenchman duly appraised the insincerity of all this. He well

understood that the plea of the misdoings of their “mad young men,” so

frequently urged, was now, as often before, merely their scapegoat,

designed to bear the burden of the mischievous device of the headmen,

which some change of policy or mischance in execution caused them to

abandon. He hardly cared, however, to challenge their motive, since

it tended to promote the result he desired to foster,--the peaceful

withdrawal of the trader’s household. He stood decorously listening,

with a face of suave acquiescence, until, in the midst of their

antiphonal series of excuses and explanations, the chiefs stated, among

their reasons for concealing the alleged comparatively innocuous source

of the demonstration, that they had refrained from telling him this

lest he might esteem his own life insecure among such an uproarious,

ill-conditioned troop as their mad young men, and thus desire to leave

them.

Laroche, at the imputation, could but laugh aloud in his martial

consciousness of courage. The tact of the Indians instantly perceived

the false step.

They knew, they protested, the great bravery of the French officer, for

no fear had he! His heart was so strong as even to make him contemplate

taking his own life, merely should his plans be crossed. This they

besought that he would consider no more, for they only desired to

know his mind, that they might comply with his every thought. Still

he might well deem that their wild young men could hardly be brought

under reasonable authority, that they could be made the instruments of

winning and wielding such an independence as he had planned for the

splendid future. If he would but observe, he should see how plastic to

command they could become, how rightful authority should reduce their

turbulence and their clamors.

And indeed as they swarmed over the dusky “beloved square” and through

the spaces among the shadowy cabins and wigwams and along the bank

of the river, still red under the vague dream light of the faintly

tinted sky, the wild excitement that had pervaded the tumultuous groups

subsided upon the instant on the reappearance of the chiefs among them;

whether a word, a look, a sign wrought the miracle one could hardly

say. Laroche, standing gazing after his late interlocutors, could but

admire the address with which they had selected the occasion of their

withdrawal,--not that they had been faced down by argument, nor that

their virulent threats were overborne by counter-threats, nor that

their scheme was again proved foolish, futile, fatal to their own

future prospects, but only to demonstrate how amenable, how subject

to lawful authority were these very “mad young men” when adequate

necessity caused it to be exerted. It seemed incredible how promptly

all the aspects of peace were renewed. The long, lustrous, slanting

rays of the moon, soon falling athwart the town, penetrating the dusky

aisles among the Indian dwellings under the drooping boughs of the

gigantic trees, flashing upon the foam of the river, or resting in

full, unbroken placidity on the “beloved square,” scarcely showed the

shadow of a quiver, or a firelock, or the flicker of a feathered head.

Now and again the quiet echoed to the measured footfall of a sedate

passer-by. An open door here and there might reveal a group about a

fire where fish were frying for supper, and gossip was still stirring

about the events of the day. Dogs clustered around the door and begged

with all the insidious canine wiles of their kindred of civilization.

The council-house, dome-like in its elevation on its mound above the

town, was lighted by a party of young people setting forward some of

their usual evening games or pantomimes for the general diversion. The

two chiefs, respectively of Tellico and Ioco, had parted as if nothing

more of importance were to be discussed, and Moy Toy, in the public

office, as it were, the cabin of the aged councilors, deserted but for

two or three of its frequenters, was talking over old times of hunting

and fishing and was telling a tale of piscatorial captures which could

hardly be matched even in these days of expanded imaginations,--his

civil hosts now and again constrained to laugh with guttural

remonstrance, or to interject an incredulous comment, “Ugh! Ugh!”

At the trading-house, lights flickered within, but the barricaded

doors continued closed. The little garrison were to sleep upon their

arms in view of possible treachery in some lapse of vigilance.

Even thence, however, came loud, jesting voices, and now and again

hilarious snatches of song; all were very mirthful and with a renewed

sense of security under the double safeguard of adequate precaution

against surprise and the apparent satisfaction and pacification of the

Cherokees.

In the next few days preparations for an early and orderly departure

were seriously inaugurated. It was not so much in advance of the usual

time for the semiannual journey to Charlestown for the demonstration

to augur undue fear of the Indians or to seem prompted by the recent

suspicious events. With an apparent hardihood, that was yet the craft

of caution, Jock Lesly more than once postponed the date for the

flitting, openly alleging the reason for the delay: now it was the

legitimate one of awaiting a consignment of deerskins which he had

been notified was to be sent from Toquoe; now it seemed that a purely

arbitrary wish of his own induced him to dispatch a messenger on a

long wild-goose chase for a conference with an Indian friend of auld

lang syne, for whom he had undertaken a personal commission to make

sundry purchases in Charlestown,--which gear, when described from the

aboriginal point of view, was found to have no counterpart in the

material world; indeed the demand for it was prompted in the full

faith that whatever wish the heart of man could fashion the great

mart could furnish forth. The remonstrances sent on a second trip by

the runner were productive only of very guarded modifications in the

requisites, and all Ioco Town, in its excess of sophistication, was

laughing both at the simplicity of the old Indian of remote Kanootare

Town--who had never been as far as the Congarees, and who looked upon

Jock Lesly as a master magician in the mechanical arts--and at the

kindly worry and fret of the trader himself.

“Heard ever onybody the like o’ that--the daft auld carle! And where am

I to find sic gear? And am na I a fule to try? A hammer, that suld hae

a gun, like a pistol, in the eend, wi’ a sharp knife for skelpin’ that

clasps under--sae he’ll be aye ready for wark or war. Ding it a’, I’ll

no fash mysel’!”

As he strode about the place and discussed the absurdity with the

various braves, all seeking to recognize some modern and simpler

invention in the mists of his elaborate instructions, and the Indians

came and went from the trading-house and loitered about its recesses

with the young packmen, all in complete and obvious amity, there was

not the vaguest suggestion of the antagonism that had threatened the

destruction of the little party. The idea seemed a flout to credulity.

Jock Lesly again doubted its reality at times. “Hegh, lad,” he said to

Laroche, “ye hae gie us an unco stirrin’. I wad na tak a gliff at a

potato-bogle. It’s ower easy to be frighted.”

For Laroche, albeit aware how thin was this crust of peace that overlay

the seething, fiery crater of conspiracy and murder, was forced to

run the gauntlet in some sort,--to be the butt of the ridicule which

the harbinger of danger that does not materialize always is called

upon to suffer. Now and again he encountered this among the young

packmen poking fun in a sly way. The high value which they had set

upon his views because of his experience in actual encounters in the

continental wars, in which he stated he had served, seemed suddenly

inverted, and for this very reason his measures were derided. It was a

point of almost religious exaction in those days, as indeed sometimes

in these, to decry the regular soldier in aggrandizing the militia

or the volunteer, on the somewhat absurd hypothesis that the entire

devotion of a man’s time to a pursuit renders him necessarily inexpert

at it, or that the more one learns of military science the less one

knows. Whether this comes about from the instinctive arrogation of

the civilian that he is as fit in a fight as any man, and knows by

intuition all that the soldier learns by hard knocks, it is one of the

dearest delusions of the popular mind and is not to be lightly trifled

with. Laroche must needs have been more the diplomat and less the

soldier than he was to have perceived this spirit without the usual

snorting indignation and sentiment of baffled wonder at the presumption

of the comparison. But it is of that grade of intimate persuasion

in which argument or any certainty of demonstration is futile, and

like other military men earlier and since he permitted it to pass

unchallenged, with a secret scorn and a mocking acquiescence. It was

only in the presence of Lilias that he winced under this derision,

knowing that but for him the whole trading-station would be in ashes,

its embers quenched with the blood of its inmates. Yet in the same

instant he was saying to himself that her presence should be naught to

him, and that this guying was a trifle.

How could her presence be naught, when across the supper table the tiny

flame of the candle showed her blue eyes kindling like sapphires?

“Ou, ay, ay,”--her father was answering Callum’s inquiry,--“Tam is gaun

wi’ us--Tam’s gaun to haud a care o’ us,--gin he no taks to dreamin’

agen!” He stopped his chuckle with half a scone.

Lilias had risen and turned away, for Callum MacIlvesty wanted more

parritch and Laroche had matter other than Jock Lesly’s clumsy jest

to canvass in secret agitation. That blue, jeweled light in her

starry eyes--was it set aglow because the day of parting seemed yet

distant?--how could he care for the trader’s flout!

The next day he had in some sort a revenge for his installation as

laughing stock. He had repeatedly cautioned the young packmen against

the lurking dangers of the fougasses which he had connected with the

trading-house for its defense. There had supervened so general a

scorn of the warning, the menace--even the sight of the Indian town

under arms had been apparently only the reflex of their own acts of

hostility--that the emergency mines seemed but a part of the whole

invalid hoax until a stout, red-haired young packman, striking his

flint hard by, communicated a spark to a saucisson, and upon the

consequent explosion of the fougasse he was tossed like a feather

into the air and had three fingers blown off. The ground for several

yards was ripped open as if the ditch had never been filled, and the

crags and chasms of the mountains rang and rang with the successive

reverberations of the detonation.

Great as was the commotion among the trading folk, the incident was

as a revelation to the Indians. Almost palsied by terror, as in some

stupendous convulsion of nature, they no sooner comprehended the

agency of the disaster than their anxiety was increased twofold. At

this period, although the use of firearms was general among them and

the ancient bow and arrow were superseded, save in cases of necessity,

gunpowder was as yet an unaccustomed force except as confined to

musketry. They still entertained great terror of artillery, and the

effects of powder in mining and in so large a quantity seemed little

short of miraculous. Seeing the trader’s band presently clustered

about the scene of the disaster, several of the savages ventured to

approach, suspiciously sniffing the sulphur laden air and eyeing the

deep chasm in the ground with a grave, tentative aspect and a sort of

serious disaffection, which was in itself a most portentous threat.

It seemed to argue that scarcely any advantage was to be neglected

against people who could bring to their aid so potent an auxiliary of

destruction as this. Evidently the town itself might be thus destroyed.

The Indians began to walk about the pit, gazing down at it with the

sort of averse appropriation which one feels toward aught of menace

designed with a personal application. They measured the inimical

capacities of the fougasse, dwelling upon the intention of its device,

and obviously felt that anger experienced when one heartily takes the

ill will for the deed. Their state of mind was all at once so rancorous

that albeit the explosion of the fougasse was only another indication

of the strength of the defenses and the value of the resources of the

white man, and thus would seem to reinforce the dangers of attack, the

fact that it was planned to carry death and destruction to them, who

had as yet given no overt cause of offense and failed in naught of open

friendship, was as a challenge to strategy, invited reprisal, and made

vain all protestations of good will.

“Eh, we maun be gangin’ the morn’s morn,” said Jock Lesly, wiping his

brow with his great red handkerchief, and gazing down from the window

of the spence at the curious crowds that came and looked silently upon

the snare--riven and exploded and harmless now--that yet had been laid

for them.

“An’ what for no?” cried Lilias impatiently. “Ye’re aye sayin’ ‘we maun

be gangin’ an’ we maun be gangin’,’ an’ we aye bide here!”

“Whist, whist, my bairn.” Then perceiving some inconsistency, “The

deil’s in the wimmen folk!” Jock Lesly cried indignantly. “’Twas only

yesterday sennight that ye sat greetin’ on your creepie an’ said your

heart was sair to leave thae grand mountains,--an’ go ye wad na!”

The girl laughed slyly. So dull he was! So well, too, for a father to

be dull, when he had “sic a fule” for a daughter. She suddenly grew

grave and blushed with a deep, serious, conscious glow. She had caught

MacIlvesty’s eyes, bright, alert, with a world of speculation in them

as they were fixed upon her face. Could it be that he connected her

sudden change of will with the fact that on that tearful yesterday

sennight she had not known that mad Tam Wilson was to join their march?

For he had since announced that, designing to return to Virginia, he

would accompany the trader’s cavalcade as far as the Keowee River,--a

great detour and much out of his way.

VIII

NOR only Tam Wilson, but Moy Toy himself, Quorinnah, a dozen braves

from Tellico, and as many more of Ioco Town joined the escort, the

Cherokee headmen having become impressed definitely with the idea that

their interest was essentially involved in keeping faith with Laroche.

An early start was made the morn’s morn. The night had not yet revealed

the aspect of the day, whether fair or foul; the world was sunk in

darkness and swathed in mists. Now and again, glancing upward, one

might see a star, augury that the sky was clear, and then the web of

vapor annulled the scintillation and portended the gathering of clouds.

Torches were here, there, everywhere, flaring through the gloom. The

gable of the little home would show for a moment as one sped past,

and anon would collapse into the similitude of a burly shadow. The

trading-house stood forth with continuous distinctness; the light

within streamed through the open doors as the final preparations of

departure were in progress. It gave bizarre glimpses of the heavily

laden train of horses standing--shadowy equine figures--outside, with

now and again one of the packmen moving in the midst, readjusting a

burden or examining the strength of the girths. In the chill matutinal

air the bells on the animals gave out a keen jangling,--all the clamors

of the raucous voices of the packmen crying here and there; the noisy

movement of bales and boxes scraping upon the floors or against each

other; the thud of pawing hoofs; the swift beat of human footsteps to

and fro were punctuated by this continual, metallic vibration, which

somehow was jarring to the senses and added a distinct element of

confusion. Albeit, with the expectation of immediate departure, the

preparations were deemed complete the night before, still, when the

actual moment was at hand, it seemed that all was yet to be done--after

the perverse manner of a journey’s start. Trifles developed into

obstacles; obstacles became immovable; the impracticable asserted its

inelastic limitations; and throughout was heard, from time to time,

Jock Lesly’s half paternal, half petulant, admonitory upbraiding, “Oh

fie!--oh fie!”

Occasionally he quitted the precincts of the trading-house, leaving

the solution of its problems to his lieutenants, and plunged into the

more dusky and shadowy domain of his own dwelling, where, however,

he acquired no placidity, for now and again his favorite adjuration

issued thence, invested with a sort of pathetic intonation of futility

and associated with the name of Lilias. “Callum,” he would yell from

the door in despair, “Lilias winna ride ahint ye on the pillion!” Then

his stentorian roar, relaxing to domestic exhortation to the rebel of

the interior, seemed in the distance a mere rumble of “Oh fie!” in

conscious defeat; he would lift his voice anon as he was beaten back

from one line of defense to another, “Callum, Lilias winna ride ahint

me on the pillion!”

Callum’s face, half seen in the flare from the door, grew set and hard,

as he stood saddling with his own well-descended hands the palfrey

destined to bear the weight of the trader’s daughter. His action was

significant, whether or not it was observed. He had begun to take the

pillion off--since she would accompany neither him nor her father she

should not ride behind the saddle of Tam Wilson, if that were her

object. The other men looked at one another, laughing slyly, with a

certain relish in the paternal discomfiture and the hardiness of the

young insurgent, rejoicing in the ultimate victory of “little lassie

Lilias,” after the manner of those who are indulgent to the whims and

desirous of forwarding the power of a spoiled and imperious child--out

of their own household. They discerned nothing more serious in the

discussion, but Tam Wilson, busy in the group, was obviously expectant.

A longer interval of argument and remonstrance ensued. Then the great

voice, with a hapless quaver in its tones issued forth anew.

“Callum, Callum! Lilias winna ride on the pillion at a’. Lord save us!

The lassie vows she maun hae a tall horse all for her nainsel’--oh fie!

oh fie!”

He was fairly beaten, for time was against him, and he must needs come

out and see to the getting of his convoy together. Again and again in

the extremity of his despair he protested that night would find them

still hirpling about Ioco Town. But the first long slant of the sun met

the pack-train in full march, descending one of those steep defiles

among the mountains and the swirls of the Tennessee River, and the wind

itself was not more blithe and free and fain to travel. The pack-horses

swung in single file along the familiar ways of the old trading-path,

now at a brisk trot, now carefully treading a ledge whence a false step

would precipitate the creatures into the torrents below, without rein

or guidance selecting their footing and balancing their burden with

that strong animal intelligence and good will in labor which might seem

to entitle them to be considered conscious factors in the commercial

enterprise. Their chiming bells, blithely echoing from the crags, now

loud, now softly vibrating, as the tones of those in the vanguard or

far away in the rear came to the ear, made no dissonance in the free

open air in their diversity of quality, and smote upon the dash of

waters with the effect of sudden cymbals in the flutings and stringed

vibrations of orchestral music. The mist had taken wings. Far and near

the airy essences were rising from the mountains. The morning star,

luminous, splendid, in her amber cloud, exhaled like a dewdrop in the

glance of the sun. The spirit of May was in the air. The alert breeze

had a keen, matutinal reviviscence, despite the languors of spring,

and upon the mountains was a vague, blue presence, an efflorescence of

haze like the bloom on a grape, that made their tint deeper, richer,

softer, whether it were the azure of the furthest reaches of vision or

the sombre purple of the nearer ranges, or the densely, darkly verdant

slopes closing about the immediate vicinage of the series of cup-like

coves.

In the distinct light the convolutions of the train became easily

discernible to the eye, as from lower ground one could look back up the

winding slopes of the ravine, so narrow at times as to leave a passage

but for two or three abreast. Several of the stoutest men, fully armed,

rode in the vanguard, and after the pack animals and their drivers

came another close squad of horsemen, for owing to the packmen that

Callum MacIlvesty had brought with him, the guard of the pack-train was

more numerous than it was wont to be. A salient feature of the long,

winding troop was the waving feathers of the braves, themselves riding

together, for albeit most friendly of aspect, it was deemed meet that

they and the young packmen should have as scant opportunity as might be

to fall at loggerheads.

“They can’t talk thegither, praise God!” said Jock Lesly, who had had

little thought he should ever be in case to be thankful for the impiety

of the builders of the Tower of Babel, that had brought about the

confusion of tongues. “But they are a’ kittle cattle, and I’se no trust

them thegither.”

As he himself rode between the packmen and the Cherokee braves, his

own companions were Moy Toy and Quorinnah, who had attached themselves

to the chief of the expedition as their only equal in point of rank.

He had anticipated this and had directed Callum to ride at the bridle

rein of Lilias, whose station was between the squad of extra packmen

and the drivers of the pack-train. Tam Wilson had no place assigned to

him in the line of march. He was aware, when he took up his position

on the other side of her palfrey, that he might seem animated by a

sentiment far alien to the spirit of resignation and renunciation

that had lately possessed him, but in reality he was influenced by

the knowledge of the added protection his proximity afforded her.

Nevertheless, with the satisfaction of their safe departure, which

he knew his own exertions had secured, the keen edge of exhilaration

and expectancy that dangers still unmasked may give, the necessity

to support the character he had assumed, the delirious joy that her

presence and his knowledge of her preference could but diffuse through

mind and heart, all overcame for a time his sense of regret for his

idle delay, his disloyalty, his duplicity. He forgot the futile cruelty

to Callum MacIlvesty, and the deceit practiced toward her; and the

identity of Tam Wilson, which he claimed as his own true character, was

never more definite, more consistent than as he fared gayly by her side

down the devious ways of the mountain wilderness. The tinkling of the

bells and the chiming of the echoes were in his ears. He breathed the

fragrance that the herbs of the earth distilled into the rare air; the

colors of the landscape glowed so rich, so fine, so fair; and all the

heart of a beautiful woman who loved him was in her eyes as she looked

at him.

It was plain to Callum MacIlvesty, and Lilias scarcely cared that it

was. She had no realization of him save that his words, his face, his

very existence irked her, and she would fain be rid of him--being

in the nature of an interruption of the free thought of another. He

wondered afterward that he could be so patient--to watch her fair face

cloud as even casually she turned; to hear the inflection of annoyance

in her voice when she spoke to him, and she did not speak unless she

needs must answer; to mark her appeal to Tam Wilson for the buckling of

her rein anew, and the readjustment of her saddle; for a flower growing

beside the way; for a cluster of wild strawberries, which she ate to

the manifest danger of life and limb, the reins falling on her horse’s

neck as he gingerly picked his way, stumbling now and again down the

rugged descent, until Tam Wilson himself gathered up the lines and

guided the animal. And when the strawberries were eaten she rode on,

laughing like a child, her head bare under the sun, her golden curls

hanging down on her shoulder, and her milk-white face burning red,

although her riding mask swung by its string to her belt.

Sometimes Laroche was summoned back by the requisition of Moy Toy, Jock

Lesly, and Quorinnah, to give opinions or arbitrate on some moot point

of the trading privileges as established by the treaty, the Cherokees

secretly delighted that it was to a Frenchman, actively employed in the

French interest, to whom the unwitting British trader was appealing, by

whose decision he professed himself willing to abide, and that these

fine-spun theories were to be of consequence no more.

Then--the two young Scotch people left together--Lilias would gravely

grasp the reins and ride slowly along, gazing up continually at the

massive ranges, for their aspect shifted as the route of the travelers

deviated. When one majestic dome, always in view from the little window

of the spence, seemed on the very border-land of vision, the turn

around a crag about to cut it off forever, she checked her horse and

paused to look her last upon it.

“I’ll never see it mair!” she cried, in accents of positive pain. “I’ll

ne’er be sae happy again as I hae been, living in the sight. Fare ye

weel, sweet friend. May the warld gae cannily wi’ ye!”

The blue dome still towered like a mirage in the distance above the

purple of nearer heights and the green of the foothills; then the crag

intervened, and suddenly she laid down the reins on the horse’s neck

and began to tie on her mask.

“Ye’ll see mountains agen. There’s mountains enough elsewhere, Lilias,”

said Callum, in awkward consolation, as he caught up the reins and held

the horse to a steady gait.

“Nane like these,” she protested in a husky voice. “There’s mountains

enough in Scotland, an’ that’s nae joy to you nor to me.”

And this was very true, as the poor exile realized; his heart might

ache vainly for the rugged mountains he remembered and loved, and as

for these mountains of this new land she, whom he loved best, loved

them well for another man’s sake. He gazed upon them with dreary

eyes and an inward protest against them. Happy in their shadow! in

magnitude, in multitude they typified woe, unceasing, immeasurable,

ineradicable. So these two rode on together in silence, save that she

murmured now and again, “Thae sweet mountains!”

He was none the happier when Tam Wilson came spurring up again, and

Lilias was suddenly blithe and bonny once more. She was as gay as a

child when they reached the first unfordable river, where the singular

methods of ferriage of those days came into requisition. Through the

shallow waters of the fords the knowing pack animals had cheerfully

trudged, scarcely needing and certainly not noticing the halloos and

cracking of whips with which the packmen beguiled the passage. Here,

however, was a river deep enough to threaten damage to the packs and

to require swimming, and the horses lined up on the margin, still with

their tinkling bells fitfully jingling, and staidly awaited, more than

one with expectant whinnies, the removal of their burdens. A delay

ensued, as always, and each section of the guard coming up, kept apart

to this time for reasons of policy, halted in a medley on the high and

rocky banks which resounded and reëchoed with the various calls in

Cherokee and English and braid Scots, with the jangling of bells and

stamping of hoofs. Here and there an active and agitated search was in

progress for the boat, constructed of buffalo skins and always hidden

among the willows or rocks on shore when not in requisition by the

traders and packmen and their Indian coadjutors,--the headmen of Ioco,

the town where the station was situated, being admitted to the secret

of the cache.

“Gone! gone!”--a frenzied exclamation arose. “Stolen! Carried away!”

Perhaps hidden anew! A score of active figures dashed hither and

thither, now bursting out of the willows with exclamations of dismay,

now plunging down the bank to a new point of search. Some as they sped

up and down showed above the rocks heads polled and feathered, others,

most genteel, with cocked hats, and again the coonskin cap or Callum’s

Highland bonnet was in evidence. Lilias, in the flickering, glinting

shade of a low-hanging beech tree, her head bare and golden, her face

so fair, looking as some dryad might, captured by this wild and varied

rout, waited like one apart, without a pulse of the impatience that

swayed the whole cavalcade. She was living in the present. For aught

she cared the journey might last forever. The past, it was naught to

her; the future was so strangely veiled--and somehow she trembled at

the thought. To-day! to-day!

The disaster threatened a long delay; a new boat must be built, new

hides procured, all suitably tanned, and the incident itself suggested

treachery and fomented suspicion. More than once the eyes of Callum

MacIlvesty and Tam Wilson met in secret comment, an interchange

of inquiry, a fraternal interdependence, all other considerations

forgotten in the realization of a common danger. But Moy Toy’s face

was frankly clouded, and Quorinnah was already suggesting ways and

means by which, going into camp here, help might be fetched from Ioco

Town. Only Jock Lesly gave no outward sign of his inward perturbation

as he strode up and down the bank, save that now and again he

admonished his cohorts with a shake of the head and a vehement “Oh fie!

oh fie!”

And at last and suddenly, quiet descended on all the disordered crew,

bating a word or two of rancorous upbraiding and a retort of raucous

yet sheepish protest, for the boat was found where first it had been

presumed to be. It had been overlooked, so well had it been hidden,

and once declared to be missing the place of its usual and most

obvious bestowal was not searched again till desperation suggested

the retracing of all the various steps that had been taken. And so

it was presently launched. A queer craft we of to-day would deem it,

and perhaps would prefer something more stanch and less picturesque,

seeing how swift and deep and rocky was the river. But the capsizing of

such a boat meant only some slight injury of the goods and the swift

swimming of the hardy passengers ashore, none the worse for the plunge

into the clear waters of the mountain stream. The hides stretched

between stout saplings, serving as gunwale and keel and tightly bound

at each end, were distended toward the centre by crosspieces of the

same fashioning, holding the boat in the conventional canoe shape,

and the structure would convey ten horse loads at once. The method of

progression was still more singular--no oars nor poles were used in

its propulsion. The hardy packmen of the day, being lightly clad in

buckskins, were wont boldly to fling themselves into the river and swim

across, pushing the pettiaugre before them, their horses all gallantly

swimming in the rear. When the first boat’s load had been piled upon

the craft, Lilias was conducted down the steep bank and seated in the

boat, the only passenger, upon the bales of fine dressed deerskins.

Callum MacIlvesty and a number of other young men were instantly in the

water, wading first, then swimming, with the liberated horses following

after. The girl liked the novelty. She smiled down from her high perch

at each strong stroke that sent the curious structure throbbing and

quivering on its way, with its silver wake and a little ripple of foam

at the prow. The river was crystal clear, smooth, and shining in its

centre under the sun, deeply, duskily green beneath the shadow of the

trees on the further shore. Beyond, where the stream rounded a sort

of peninsula, a great glittering stretch of water seemed to extend

indefinitely in a haze that hung about a flat margin and there met the

sun in a vaporous shimmer, dazzling yet soft. All the group on the

hither shore gazed at the progress of the boat, but only the cultivated

imagination of the French officer suggested similitudes of aught that

it was not. Against that green and white and misty background the

shell-shaped craft and the still and smiling golden-haired figure

recalled some legendary sea nymph, some Venus in the gliding shallop;

the sleek heads of the attendant train suggested dolphins and sea

horses, gleaming in the sunset as they swam swiftly after.

There was scant space for the flattery of illusions, for the deep

shadows of the leafy bank opposite were falling upon this misty

presentment of myths, the necromancy of the sheen and shimmer, and

obliterating it as the little craft was pushed in to the land. Those of

the packmen who had crossed were shaking the water from their dripping

garments with no more care for a drenching than so many shaggy dogs,

and presently were resaddling their horses, while Lilias, quite dry and

fresh, stood apart on a little promontory of rock and with a scornful

wave of the hand bade Callum in his saturated kilt keep his distance.

It seems incredible that such a man as Laroche should fear a little

guying, but perhaps it was only the spectacle of Callum’s discomfiture

that reconciled him to the knowledge of the scoffs at him, covert and

otherwise, which he knew he should receive from the other young men

when with Jock Lesly and the Indian headmen he should cross in the

boat on its second trip, his condition as a recent invalid entitling

him to share their honors and ease. It was barely possible, however,

that Lilias would have found no occasion, even were he also dripping

from the short swim, to place an embargo on his near approach. Why it

was that this watery quarantine should have roused Callum MacIlvesty’s

spirit of revolt, of self-assertion, of pride, it is difficult to say.

Perhaps merely the limit of his endurance was reached when he was cried

out upon like a too affectionate and dripping water dog.

“I winna sprinkle your kirtle,” he said with some dignity, despite the

triviality of the theme. And he withdrew himself--not merely till the

hot sun and the reflected heat of sand and rocks should dry off his

garments, which, aided by the swift running to and fro on the errands

of the pack-train, the brisk wind, and the warmth of his own body, was

shortly effected.

The whole train was in motion again incredibly soon, considering the

abnormal difficulties which these primitive methods of ferriage would

seem to present. The young packmen, by reason of being detailed to

the earliest crossing, were kept separated from the braves, the “mad

young men,” with whom it was feared some quarrel might arise through

their perverse ingenuity, independent of verbal communication. These

tribesmen came last of all, after the dignitaries of both factions, and

thus when once more on the march the original formation of the little

cavalcade was preserved.

Only Callum MacIlvesty had shifted his position. He no longer rode at

the right hand of Lilias, but ahead with the squad of packmen, and Tam

Wilson succeeded to the position he had occupied; but Lilias appeared

hardly to have noticed Callum’s absence, and certainly did not waste

a thought upon it. Her radiant spirit seemed to shine through her

eyes--she was gay, whimsically, childishly fascinating one moment;

soft, serious, deeply emotional the next; now showing her more earnest

traits, careful, womanly, unselfish; and again the veriest flutterer

of a butterfly. She had never been so protean of mood, so beautiful,

so charming. And yet Laroche looked upon her with changed eyes, a

newly aroused and upbraiding conscience. The frightful bodily danger

in which they had all recently stood from the murderous Cherokees,

his triumphant scheming to avert their impending fate, had been as a

reprieve to thoughts that now in this leisure again clamored for a

hearing. His long, idle lingering amongst them and enforced concealment

of his identity had brought this menace upon them. He had not yet

annulled all its evils. And now--whither was he tending? Daily he

considered the question.

He was a man of education, having had superior facilities and both the

talent and the will to avail himself of them. He was not without social

culture, and he moved in coteries of refinement. While not of the

higher nobility, he was still a man of good birth, of degree, and of

some fortune, and this had enabled him to tolerate the more kindly the

bourgeois, nay the peasant-like aspect of the Lesly household, since

it was but a matter of contemplation, and by no means of assimilation.

He had regarded it with all its homely traits and habitudes as

impersonally as if it were a scene on a stage.

In addition he was consumed by professional ambition; he had always

been accounted an efficient, superior officer; he believed that his

military abilities were great. Upon the successful issue of his plans

among the Cherokees and other tribes high preferment would await him

in the gift of the French government. To hamper by a _mésalliance_

with a simple Scotch girl, the daughter of a bourgeois trader, his

future, his pride of diplomatic achievement, his opportunity to render

great services to his government--he was appalled by the very thought.

He promised himself that he would make no such sacrifice for any woman

on earth! Seriously contemplated, he could not raise her to his level,

and he would not sink to hers. All must be renounced should he dream

of her in any sense but to kiss her hand in gallantry and bless her

goodness in gratitude.

Yet what was he doing? Separating forever two young people whose

kindness had been so largely instrumental in saving his life. Lapsed

in the luxury of a sweet, delicate, almost abstract emotion, flattered

by the consciousness of her love, he had supplanted her true suitor

by this ghastly simulacrum of a lover, and was wrecking the happiness

of both. He was sentimental enough, in the abstract, to care much

for a sentimental woe. He was conscientious enough to appraise the

unjustified intermeddling of the course he had pursued, and sensitive

enough to shrink from bearing the consciousness of it all his days.

With the policy of the confessional of the faith in which he had been

trained, that restitution must accompany repentance and peace only

follow penance, he was canvassing how to undo in days all that he had

wrought in months. It should not be, he declared arbitrarily. He cared

honestly, kindly, too much for her, loved her too truly, for herself,

as a friend! And toward Callum himself he was not indifferent. Yet how

could he bring them together again? Difficulties hedged him about. He

feared the English in his character of French emissary. Now, daily, he

was approaching the Englishman’s country. He adventured, indeed, much

for the sake of her and hers. Knowing his prejudice, he would not trust

Jock Lesly with his secret. But the girl loved him. He would trust

Lilias! She would doubtless expect him to follow her to Charlestown.

She would watch and wait for him. She would pine. But should he

disclose his nationality, his employ, it must appear that their parting

was final; in all probability, so divided by distance and prejudice,

they would never meet again. It would be a poignant pang to them both,

and Lilias he could never forget! If thus unhampered she could find her

happiness in Callum MacIlvesty--he sighed--but he would not grudge it.

At all events he owed her this: she must not waste her sweet young life

in devotion to an illusion.

In reaching this resolution he was far too acute, too accustomed to

introspection, not to perceive that he had postponed the shattering of

the romance that had delighted him until its enchantment had at the

most but a few days’ lease. He took some credit, however, that he had

determined to submit to the ordeal and the jeopardy it involved before

these were passed, that he might have space for an earnest effort to

bring the young people to their former understanding. Besides, he

argued, he might easily, in the interests of his own safety, hold

his peace. Surely it was not a part of his duty, in going about the

country, to warn susceptible maidens against losing their hearts to him.

Notwithstanding the stress of this absorption, he conducted a dual

train of thought, listened to her talk, answered in character, followed

the manifold changing theme, commented on the varying aspects of the

country,--all the region being new to him,--found even space for a keen

notice of her flattered consciousness that it was for her sake that

he made this long and laborious detour in his journey to delay their

parting--if ever they should part again; and only once did he answer at

random, and only once did he fall into silence, to be merrily rallied

and asked when and where did he see that wolf.

One day the camp was pitched about sunset, the blue twilight yet in

abeyance. This, too, was the first halt since breakfast, dinner having

been eaten on the march. A substantial meal, therefore, was this supper

_al fresco_. Kettles were swung gypsy fashion; venison was broiled

on the coals; some wild ducks, brought down by a volley in the course

of the march, were split and toasted on a long stick at the general

camp, but brandered at the fire of the “gentlefolks” as the contingent

of Moy Toy and Jock Lesly was called,--it boasting a branding iron. The

“gentles” also rejoiced in a case bottle of brandy, while the lower

grades were content with rum, and only Lilias and the Frenchman drank a

“dish of chocolate.” By a watercourse, necessarily, the halt was made

and in the neighborhood of one of those exquisite springs for which the

region is noted.

It seemed illimitably deep as Laroche and Lilias stood amidst the

sweet-scented ferns on its rocky verge and then sat down on one of

the fractured fragments fallen from the great crag beetling from the

mountain slope above their heads.

Lured by the fascination that this sort of fountain in the wilderness

seems to exert on all travelers, each of the cavalcade had come to gaze

upon the crystalline depths which were like topaz in the lucent tints

imparted by the golden gravel beneath. The hewing of the circular basin

was almost as symmetrical as if wrought by hand. The down-dropping

branches of the sycamore and beech nearly veiled the crags closing

about them, and the far-away mountains across a stretch of valleys and

lesser ranges were purple and sombre under the light of the sinking and

vermilion sun. Only these two lingered here, quite silent at first, and

Laroche wondered if he could speak at all. He glanced about doubtfully.

“Lilias,” he said slowly, “I have something to say to you.”

The shadow of a homing bird sped across the sunlit valley. Down the

current of the river was visible a red reflection that was not a cast

of the western sun, but was caught from a camp-fire on the bluff. At

these he looked, not at her, lest the sight of her face disarm his

resolution; yet somehow he was aware of the sudden flutter of her heart

and the quickening of her pulses, and he knew that for all his art and

all his tact he had begun amiss. He hastened to nullify the impression

she might have taken, nay, nay, must have taken from his words.

“It is a secret,” he said hurriedly. “You must promise that you will

tell no one--not even your father.”

He wondered, his eyes still fixed on those furthest western mountains,

if her heart had ceased to beat, so still she suddenly was; then he

realized rather than saw the slow motion of surprise, of protest, as

her head turned toward him on its long and slender white neck.

“Not even your father,” he reiterated, for he must needs go on.

So sudden had been the revulsion of feeling, so complete, so

paralyzing, that she could not trust her voice. And this was well, for

he perceived that even in these few steps he had stumbled into a second

pitfall. Exclude the paternal idol, know a secret forbidden to that

paragon of wisdom and crown of creation, Jock Lesly! In another moment

he would have a downright refusal of the trust. He must quickly involve

her in the safety, the confidence of another, and even filial fealty

would not warrant her in breaking faith with him.

“No,” he qualified hastily, “don’t promise. I will throw myself on

your honor--in the fullest assurance of safety. Lilias, I am not what

I seem; I am an emissary of the French government, an officer of the

army!”

She recoiled violently, suddenly shaken, shocked; and albeit ghastly

pale she fixed a challenging stare upon him.

“A spy?” she demanded in a husky voice, impressive with its deliberate

tone and weighty yet incredulous rebuke.

Laroche hastily collected his faculties. This untoward trend of his

disclosures must needs be checked in sheer consideration of the safety

of his neck.

“Ah, Lilias, _bien aimée_,” he cried, in half petulant, half

affectionate protest. “How can you misunderstand? Remember how I came

to you--was it of my own intention, my own volition?”

The recollection of those weeks of illness, of helplessness, when he

lay under their roof unconscious, brought thither by her father, was

supplemented by the thought of the simple domestic routine in which he

had grown a factor and had made the dear sense of home in these savage

wilds so doubly dear, his eager care for their safety, his suspicions

of the Indians, his precautions for the defense of the trading-station,

his oft ridiculed anxieties and prognostications of savage treachery

that had at last proved stern truth,--only foiled by his foresight and

ingenuity and sagacity. As these reflections flitted through her mind,

his eyes read the changing expressions of her face like an open book.

He spoke as if in response.

“Remember,” he said with emotion, “for believe me I can never forget,

dear heart”--

Suddenly, seeing the roseate color at the word beginning to return, to

deepen, to glow in her cheek with a subtle, conscious emotion, he was

admonished of that far more significant secret of his mission which

must be disclosed, and that quickly, for the sake of both.

“No, not a spy,” he declared deliberately, seeking to quell the wild

plunging of his own heart, as though one should find a gentle palfrey

suddenly metamorphosed into a mighty charger. “My mission was primarily

to survey and report the character of the obstructions to navigation of

the Cherokee River--far away, a hundred miles or more; but I feared to

say as much to your father, because of the international jealousies,

that yet need hamper no friendship between him and me. May we not think

kindly of each other as man to man, even though the nations are at war?”

He turned questioning eyes upon her--and she, her face so sweetly

flushed, her eyes so gently luminous, looking all her love for him, all

her soft faith in his love for her, silently acceded, for she could not

trust her voice in the consciousness of what she looked to hear, what

his words next promised.

Oh, how could he speak? Yet how could he dally and delay and torture

both himself and her? The look in her face nearly routed his resolve.

With an effort he went on almost at random, blurting out his revelation

by piecemeal.

“My mission was primarily merely diplomatic--but I foresaw the

opportunity here and, representing it to the government, I volunteered

for the service; my authority was accordingly extended, and I will

command an army of Indians when it is put into the field in the French

interest.”

He had plucked off a frond of the fern that grew by the margin and was

tearing it to bits and throwing them from him in the pause. They could

hear the water of the spring softly gurgle. The voices of the camp

beyond sounded distant and a-dream, like half heeded calls to drowsy

ears; the reflection of the camp-fires in the river had mustered a

deeper glow, as if recruited from the crimson clouds so lately parading

through the sky. Now the sky was vacant, a clear, pure, faintly tinted

blue, and in its midst a star gleamed with an incomparable whiteness

above the darkly bronze green of the mountains. And yet the night had

not come. The world was full of this gentle, limpid clarity of light.

He could have seen every line of her face as she sat upon the rock had

he dared glance toward her.

If the girl had been an image, craftily wrought of stone, she could

have shown no more semblance of life than that silent, motionless

figure.

She doubtless heard. She could but understand.

The reserve of her attitude overwhelmed the alert expectation of

the Frenchman, whose mental posture had been, by long and agitated

anticipation, braced for expostulation, for reproaches, for tears, nay

even appeals,--for she loved him as he loved her, and he knew it. This

absolute nullity as the result of a revelation so momentous to them

both reacted on his nerves. Oddly enough he experienced the tumult of

feeling in which he had thought to see her whelmed. He even called out

to her in his agitation, as heretofore he had prefigured her appeal to

him. He had utterly lost his artificial poise--he had become once more

the natural man.

“Lilias! Lilias!” he cried with a poignant accent. “It is true, lassie,

to my sorrow--to my sorrow! I am a French soldier, but no enemy of you

or of yours, and, God help me, I love you!”

She lifted her head suddenly and looked at him with stern eyes, which,

even despite the dusk, he could by no means misunderstand.

“Do you mean,” she said, “that you volunteered to spirit up these

fiends of Indians to fall upon the frontier and massacre women and

children?”

He drew back, affronted and wounded.

“Nay, Lilias, war is war, and never play. If women and children suffer,

’tis the fortune of war, and the responsibility is on the men who have

the care of them. And do not the English march savages against the

French? And have not Frenchmen also wives and children, and even hearts

and souls?”

“If it were your bounden duty,” she stipulated.

“It is, being my country’s opportunity,” he argued.

“If it had been that ye could na turn back--that your help had been

pledged--your honor engaged--your own and your hame to defend! But to

_seek_ the foul employ--to lead into the field these merciless

fiends against the peaceful hunter and the patient husbandman, the wife

and the daughter, the grandame and the babe! And for what price, Judas?

Is it gold--or is it place?”

He could kiss her hand, even if it dealt a blow.

“Nay, Lilias,” he said, wincing at every thrust. “It is justifiable by

all the rules of war; no honorable soldier need evade the duty. But

I will not have you think of me thus. I mean”--taking the plunge of

irrevocable revolt, to his own amazement--“I will renounce it; I will

resign. I will return to civil life. I will be a planter--a--what you

will, and you shall be my wife.”

“Your wife!” she exclaimed, and her voice, although steady, rang

uncertain of intonation. “Your wife!”

She seemed, to his alert receptiveness, to dwell lingeringly, fondly,

on the words. But after a moment she went on unfalteringly,--

“Oh, man! you’d break faith with king and country to win favor with a

woman!”

He was staggered for an instant.

“It would be no loss to the government. They would only send another

officer to fill my place.”

He hesitated in a sudden jealous speculation as to who might succeed

to the result of his careful work and the rewards of his hard-earned

opportunity. Then he resumed with eager urgency, “But you think my

orders are revolting and the service unholy. You account my engagements

with the French government inconsistent with my honor”--

“It is na what _I_ think, but what are they to

you--naething?--naething?”

“Nothing in comparison with my love for you; nothing in comparison with

my gratitude for your love for me. For, Lilias, you love me; surely you

love me!”

She had risen, and still standing, she suddenly put both hands before

her eyes.

“Oh, puir Tam Wilson!” she cried, and burst into a tumult of tears.

The irrelevance stunned him as he stood staring at her.

“But you are na Tam Wilson!” She turned upon him in a sort of fury,

throwing out one hand at arm’s length with a gesture of repudiation.

“Oh, you are na Tam Wilson! Oh, the leal heart _he_ had! He wad

na gie ower his trust and renounce his pledges and quit his country’s

wark for ony lassie alive! He could na be balked by fear, an’ he could

na be bought by favor. And if God prospered him he thankit Him for

his mercies! And if God denied him he thankit Him for his chastening!

And when in the gude time his wife suld come to him, ’t would be as

a helpmeet, as ’t was ordained,--to go hand in hand in an honorable

path, to work together, building up, not throwing down, keeping faith,

not breaking it,--open as the day, hiding naething and with naething

to hide. And she would be dear, but his honor would be dearer! He wad

na win a woman’s heart wi’ vain protestations an’ false names, and wi’

terrible secret military orders to haud him back,--and then tell her

that his engagements were naught to him for _her_ sake! For she

might tell him, as I tell you, an oath’s an oath, and ill to break! And

I will hae naught to do wi’ a man wha wad break it for the blink o’ a

lassie’s eye! _He_ wad na do that--oh, puir Tam Wilson!”

He stood aghast, arraigned, conscience-stricken. But she had leaned

against the crag, her soft cheek pressed on the stern gray rock,

relinquishing her reproaches and bewailing her bereavement.

“Oh, puir, puir Tam Wilson!” she cried again and again. “To think

_he_ never lived! He isna you! He is naebody--naething! Puir Tam

Wilson--to think he never lived!”

She would not hear remonstrances. She would not look at Laroche. He was

fain presently to leave her in the closing dusk, lest the others might

join them when neither could well explain her emotion. As he slipped

away in the elusive gathering gray shadows, he still heard her sobs

from their midst, bewailing the tenuous estate of puir Tam Wilson,

quite as elusive as they.

He did not see her again till the next morning. She was pallid as

the result of a sleepless night. Her eyelids, although swollen from

persistent weeping, were still heavy with unshed tears. Her face was

stern, hard, even sullen. She seemed averse to speech and answered her

father’s expressions of alarm because of her grief-stricken manner and

Callum’s eager solicitous inquiries as to her well-being with a curt

explanation, “I hae had dreams.”

Laroche, who had had time for reflection, appreciated an undercurrent

of a more subtle sincerity in the response than was obvious from the

surface. Dreams indeed--mere dreams! Puir Tam Wilson!

He was glad of the relief which this apt reply afforded him, for he had

suffered some mundane and most personal anxieties, in view of her youth

and inexperience in diplomatic matters, as to her capability to guard

his disclosure. Indeed he was doubtful of her disposition to shield

him since her emotion had been so strongly elicited and the unexpected

resultant repulsion for him had so completely offset her prepossession

hitherto in his favor, on which he had relied for protection. His

liberty, and even his life, were in her hands, and he could hardly

contain his regret that he had confided aught to her.

There is no repentance so sharp as that which arises from a mistake

made in a presumable excess of conscientiousness. He told himself now

that acting in the discharge of his political and official duty he

might well have left events to take their own course. If he had parted

with her, revealing naught of the true identity of puir Tam Wilson,

she could hardly have pined more for the man himself than for the

figment of her fancy. Callum had scarcely a more definite rival in the

substance than in the shadow. If the two young people could not come to

an understanding with the memory of the man between them, they could

hardly now have a unity of interest separated by the myth.

But the dreams that she had had, of which he was acutely conscious of

being a visionary part, and her fractious, imperious temper served

to account for much childish petulance in her conduct toward all who

approached her. She waved away the horse on which she had hitherto

ridden, when the animal was brought forward, ready saddled for her use.

She would not speak, nor would she mount.

“Oh fie! oh fie!” exclaimed Jock Lesly, as in duty bound. Then in

dulcet solicitude, “Winna ma poppet ride her pillion? Hey, Duncan,

Dougal,--Miss Lilias’s pillion!”

And then it became evident that on this pillion she would in no wise

ride behind Callum, who was only too officious to proffer his services;

nor Tam Wilson, whose proposition, despite a secret reluctance, was

made with all needful show of alacrity. Therefore the pillion was

strapped behind Jock Lesly’s saddle, and when mounted there Lilias

leaned her head against his broad shoulder and wept silently from time

to time and desisted to clasp both arms as tightly as possible around

his broad girth with a childish but joyless hug, feeling, nevertheless,

that here was the only stanch heart in all the world, the only one

whose love was of any value. Then she would fall to weeping again, and

pause to take pleasure in wiping her eyes on the gray and flaxen wisps

of his plaited hair, hanging down on his shoulders within her reach.

So often was his hair devoted to the sad duty of drying her tears that

the locks came unplaited and escaped from the leather thong that tied

them, so that she needs must plait them over again. This she did, using

both hands and sustaining her weight on the pillion by holding to the

hair of the suffering scalp of her father, who, much tormented lest she

fall, punctuated the performance with adjurations--“Oh fie! oh fie!”

Presently he would feel her head, once more lying against his shoulder,

shaken by the tumult of her sobs, and in a bewildered effort at

consolation he would admonish her, “Whist--whist, hinny! Dreams are

naething! but maist like sour sowens for supper. Dreams are naething!”

“Naething!” she would respond ambiguously. “Naething! Oh, that I suld

say so! Dreams are naething at a’!”

She did not speak to Laroche again except upon the day of his

departure, which he had expedited as far as he might without incurring

comment. She was riding her own horse again, and when she pressed the

animal up abreast with him in the cavalcade, he felt his heart glow

within him. He had loved her, truly and purely, and with a sort of

tender lenient admiration, and he warmed to the thought of bearing

away with him some word of friendship that would make the remembrance

of her less like a flagellation than a grief both sad and sweet and to

be tenderly cherished. For she could not be aware that he had revealed

his military and national status without intending to confess his love

merely to stem the tide of her own.

There was a touch of pride in the poise of her head. Yet it was always

carried high, in truth. Her eyes flashed. They were always at their

brightest when they looked out thus, gleaming like sapphires upon the

variant blue of the distant mountain ranges. The day was fair, the wind

went by with a rush, and her smile was as bland as the sun on the

expanse of vernal foliage in the valley beneath the verge of the path

as they rode adown the rugged ravines.

“They tell me you are gaun to quit us the day,” she said suavely.

“Aye, and sorry am I,” he replied with polite alacrity.

She made a gesture as of flouting a triviality.

“Why suld mortals be glad or sorry?” she said. “Their fate is a’ fixed,

whether they will or no. And they go to meet it--ane might a’most

say--without mair knowledge o’ its nearness than kyloes hae o’ the

shambles.”

She paused for a moment. Then quickly resumed as if she neither

expected nor desired response.

“But mony folks try to speer out the future, and tak muckle heed o’

signs an’ sic-like, especial o’ ill luck. Ye hae heard us speak o’ thae

strange warnin’s that appear in the likeness o’ a man’s nainsel’--but

I misdoubts these are only auld wives’ clavers; I misdoubts. I want to

tell you this,”--she turned upon him a casual but radiant smile,--“if

e’er you hap to see a man comin’ till you that looks like yoursel’,

_ye_ needna be frighted, for it winna be Tam Wilson. Tak my word

for it--it winna be Tam Wilson!”

She reined in her horse and fell back among the others, while he rode

on feeling his heart thrust through with the stabs of her deliberate

cruelty; and these were all the farewell words that passed between

them.

IX

PERHAPS no man ever lived a tragedy of thought and feeling, unrelated

to the conditions and professions of his merely material life, more

consciously than did Laroche. Flung back perforce on his military

character, every pulse ached with the straining against those

professional chains, the fragments of which, had they broken in the

stress, he would with loyal perversity have hugged. Yet since they

held fast, he pined for Jock Lesly, for the simple household, for

the humble domestic habitudes and the hearthside atmosphere, for the

chaste yet alluring presence of Lilias. Many a day after he had seen

the trader’s cavalcade fare downward through the bosky ravine, becoming

dim and diminishing as it went, flickering among the shadows seeming as

immaterial as they, finally vanishing indistinguishably in their midst,

he could behold it anew in freshest tints and near at hand whenever the

wish--or alack, the unruly fancy--brought it to mind again. Long after

the echoes had ceased to repeat the hearty halloo of farewell, the last

of many regretful tokens of parting, he was wont to hear these voices

in song or breezy talk or affectionate greeting as of yore.

Yet he had scant time for this as he rode back to Ioco Town, for it is

needless to say the projected detour to Virginia was never really in

contemplation. Moy Toy was obviously jealous of his self-absorption

and silence, and had become captious under the enforced relinquishment

of the trader’s party as his lawful prey. He was more impatient still

of the necessary delays that must ensue before the Cherokees could

be in case to strike a blow in revenge for all their disasters,

plainly registered in the charred tenantless towns here and there on

the face of the ravaged landscape. Laroche sought to divert his mind,

to placate him anew, to excite his interest. In devising subjects of

talk the Frenchman often attempted to sound the depths of the Cherokee

character and definitely gauge the capacities of the tribe to receive

and assimilate the values of civilization, that thereby he might deduce

something of the force that their national traits would exert in the

destinies of this great continent. For instance, he would argue with

Moy Toy upon the Indian aversion to the stability and permanence of

architecture.

“The white man like the Indian can live but a day--why should his house

outlast him?” the chief would protest stolidly.

“For those who come after,--since houses congregate into cities, and

cities erect nations, and nations continue throughout ages, and ages

are aggregations of strength. What is done in a day lasts but a day,”

retorted the soldier.

Thus speculatively disposed he would seek to measure the extent and

divine the catastrophe of that ancient prehistoric civilization

of which his keen instinct read much in the scattered fragments

along the shores of Time: in the aboriginal traditions, unique and

indefinitely antique; in the ceremonials, of which the significance

was lost in degeneracy, retaining but the manner without the matter,

the shapeless shadow of an unimagined symmetry; in the language,

absolutely individual, he thought, with copious verbal forms and facile

locutions, with orderly construction, with subtle shades of minutely

diverse meanings, with large and sonorous adaptation to high themes;

in the religion, with its elaborate theory of symbolism without the

vital spark. He wondered how far this definite cult, seeming almost

inherent, would deter the Cherokees from a conversion to Christianity.

He doubted this result because of their earnest observance of the

ritual of their ancient religion and implicit faith in its sanctities.

Yet Moy Toy was himself the suavest of postulants, the most promising

of catechumens. So eagerly he listened to the French officer who

explained the grounds of his own belief and its revolutionizing effects

upon the nations of all the world--not failing to turn and scan the

number of tribesmen in the band from time to time, to make sure that

none had followed with treacherous intentions the trader’s train--that

many another man as discerning as Laroche yet less crafty might have

been deceived.

Over the camp-fires at night especially Moy Toy seemed to delight in

repeating some of the more simple and discursive details of the day’s

talk, often startling Laroche by his powers of memory, the accuracy

of his comprehension, and his gift of mimicry. Laroche wondered if a

preference which he noted for biographical details might be ascribed

to that fraternizing instinct to realize the conditions of the life

of man in whatever age or country, despite the lapse of time and the

barriers of distance, that attests the universal brotherhood, and if it

was this which had served to invest the narrations with such reality

and had so strengthened the grasp of his mind upon them. The officer

found, however, a curious flavor of speculation in the fact that try

as he might he could not enlist this vivid interest in the incidents

of the New Testament. The sanguinary histories of the Old Testament,

dealing oft with force and fraud, met with no skeptical reservations

or evasions from Moy Toy. The motives they adduced were eminently

comprehensible to him, the result credible, and his attitude of mind

applausive. But with the gospel of love and meekness, the forgiveness

of injuries and succor of enemies, the dictates of self-sacrifice and

self-denial, the savage had no pulse in unison. Moy Toy listened as

his obvious policy required. Sometimes he commented.

“Christianity is to make the red men good? Then tell me, why has it not

made the white men good?--they have had it so long--seventeen hundred

years, you say, and more!”

And the French officer, fairly routed, could only answer that the race

had not lived up to its best opportunity.

The chief’s interest in the ethical phase of the subject often flagged,

however, beyond the power of simulation. It was only held to a pretense

of attention by the inexorable etiquette of the Cherokee, however

prolix his interlocutor, and an occult intention to master certain

knowledge by the ruse of surprise, as it were. But inborn subtlety is

no match for the ratiocination of cultivation, and Moy Toy’s instinct

was fatally at fault when with a child-like blandness and irrelevance

he casually demanded, “How was it, did you say last night, that the

good San Quawl made his powder when he journeyed down to the city of

Damascus?” or “I have forgotten how many pounds of powder you said the

brave chief Samson put under the gates of Gaza when he blew them up to

carry them off.”

The trail of the earnest dominant desire to discover that seigneurial

secret of civilization that made it the lord of the world, the

conqueror of force, the despot of right, the annihilator of

numbers,--the simple formula for the manufacture of gunpowder, the

materials for which Laroche had already assured him abounded in the

Cherokee country,--lay through all the devious windings of their talk,

and divulged the springs of self-interest in Moy Toy’s affectations of

the dawnings of faith.

On each occasion the revulsion of the officer’s feeling was so great

that the betrayal of the Indian’s motive in searching the Scriptures,

and his conviction that the ultimate value of the white man’s religion

lay in his superior knowledge of destructive explosives, failed to

excite any cynical amusement in Laroche, and roused in him a very

genuine indignation. For the demonstration always came as a surprise in

its devious methods, half incredulous though he was as to the eventual

conversion of the Indian.

“Let it be accounted to me for righteousness that I do not instantly

give you over!” Laroche would cry angrily.

It was essentially the pulse of the church militant which animated the

soldier. His patience was scant, his summons imperative. “Become a

Christian, or I’ll be the death of you!” might be a just translation of

his urgency.

And in good sooth his easily excited anger was so obviously genuine

on each recurrent presentation of the lure to entrap him into the

disclosure of the secret which he had promised in his own good time to

communicate, that Moy Toy experienced a very definite alarm lest by

his precipitancy the precious knowledge that gave the white man his

supremacy might be snatched from the Indian forever. With his naturally

keen faculties thus whetted, Moy Toy evolved with countercraft a

diversion that appealed irresistibly to the speculative phase of

Laroche’s intellect and for a time led him captive, although he

appreciated fully the trickery of the intention and the treachery of

the heart of his interlocutor.