“But,” he commented to himself, “if a gang of Cherokees should tomahawk

that party, strange as it may seem, brains would be spilt as well as

blood!”

Among those denizens of the nation who took ceremonious farewell of

the commissioners’ expedition was gay Tam Wilson, arrayed still in

white dressed deerskin with its flaring fringes, wrought with scarlet

feathers, all floating to the breeze, gallantly mounted, fully armed,

and with a crest of scarlet feathers on his curling light brown hair.

This demonstration impressed Everard as only another intimation that

Tam Wilson was naught but what he seemed,--some colonial wight who had

rather idle and hunt and play among the Indians than work at a more

suitable vocation at home. Callum, however, accounted it the height of

insolent bravado. Albeit his conviction was not susceptible of proof,

he had no doubt that this was the long-sought French emissary who

fomented the discontents of the Cherokees. He was sure that trouble

indeed would soon be brewing along the frontier.

Laroche had perceived at a glance that the situation was a revelation

to Callum MacIlvesty, who had no thought to find Tam Wilson a French

emissary. Lilias had indeed kept her promise. It was not she who had

betrayed his secret, but only through his own inadvertence had the

Highlander been permitted to discover it.

He read in Callum’s face the proud indignation that he felt in the

knowledge that for this man, this arch-deceiver, his love had been

scorned, his loyal heart cast aside,--this man, who had accepted their

tendance which brought him back from the verge of the grave, and

who yet burned, by the hand of his myrmidons, the kindly roof that

had sheltered him,--this man, who won a woman’s love under a false

name, a false semblance, a false nationality, a false tongue, idly,

purposelessly, to beguile the tedium of convalescence, slipping cannily

back to his old life again and leaving her to pine,--this man, their

old familiar Tam Wilson, the French emissary who with wily and wicked

instigations spirited up the mischievous Cherokees against the British

colonists.

The change in his position here, his acceptance of the customs of

barbarism, his amity with the Indians, his adoption into the tribe,

his assumption of the Cherokee garb, had always impressed Laroche

as a military necessity, but he winced as he fancied how the grave,

deliberative, listening face of Lilias would relax to scornful laughter

and contemptuous pity when Callum MacIlvesty should detail to her these

grotesque details in the discovery of Tam Wilson’s identity with the

malignant destroyer of the peace with the Indian tribes. He had never

been so conscious of the tawdry savage foolery of beads and feathers

and paint as when the party were all climbing a steep ascent afoot to

rest the hard-traveled horses, and chance brought him near to Callum

MacIlvesty. Yet it was in bravado, as he strode along with the reins of

his steed thrown over his arm, that he greeted the Highlander.

“Barley! Barley!” he quoted, smiling. “A truce, lad! Be sure that you

remember, when you tell Miss Lilias of how you found me here still,

the same yet not the same, and of my high place in the esteem of the

imperial Moy Toy, and of my suspected efforts to shake the footstool

of the British throne, to tell her also that but for me you and your

blundering braggadocio of a lieutenant would never have got home alive.

So between us it is even--a life for a life!”

“Maister Wilson,--though that is not your name,--you may e’en find some

other to bear your messages. I shall tell that young leddy naething;

and but for that you do bestir yoursel’ to save the lives of the

commissioners, I wad strike ye on the mouth for so much as calling her

name!”

Laroche winced as from a veritable blow; then, with one of his sudden,

mercurial reactions, he cried impulsively, “Tell her all, Callum! Let

her know how it stands now! It will make it the better for you! For

myself, I never hope to see her again!”

The Highlander doggedly trudged along the verge of the steeps, his

shadow gigantic in the leafy valley below, his picturesque figure with

kilt and plaid and bonnet and long firelock imposed on the varying

azure of the ranges of mountains that she had so loved. He had been

gazing at them all day and for many a day past with that thought in his

mind,--that she had loved them!

“I sall tell her naething!” he said implacably. “If it makes it better

for me that another man isna what he seemed she is no for me.”

And then he closed his lips fast.

In Laroche’s heart blossomed forth suddenly a deep secret joy to know

that in all this time the young lovers were not reconciled. His vanity

plumed itself in the thought. No transient fancy it was that he had

inspired. And this proud fool!--he could have laughed aloud to see the

Highlander, solemnly stalking among his bitter memories and her “sweet

mountains,” resolved to hold his peace and eat out his heart because

he would not deign to profit by the fact that the lady of his love had

cared for a man who proved unworthy, thus liberating her preference, to

be captured anew by himself, catching her heart in the rebound.

“Choose, you proud peat!” Laroche said to himself, repeating a gibe

that he had often heard at Jock Lesly’s fireside. And when he mounted

anew he rode away right merrily.

XV

THE method in which Lieutenant Everard had compassed his retreat

from the Cherokee country gave rise to much discussion in that day,

especially among military and _quasi_ military men. Particularly

was this of interest at those remote and feeble posts at which small

detachments were stationed on the verge of the Indian country and

among conditions likely at any time to duplicate his dilemma. It was

variously contended that he should have stood his ground even had

his heart been cut out still pulsating, and _per contra_ that

his course was amply justified,--nay, that the obligation to save

the civilian commissioners as well as the men of his command was

imperative, and that it would have been criminal folly to fail to take

advantage of the opportunity to make off thus with something less than

the full honors of war, more especially as the expedition was not of a

strictly military character.

The licensed British traders, plying their vocation among the Catawbas,

Creeks, and Chickasaws, entertained the high and sanguinary view of

Lieutenant Everard’s duty in the premises, seeming to think that

blood spilled in their interest was well spent, and to resent any

precautionary measures that tended to hoard it. Whereas the officers of

the little flimsy forts believed the effort to protect the mercantile

monopoly of the Indian trade by the British government was not worth

the sacrifice of life and the effusion of blood when it came to the

hopeless odds of a thousand to some threescore.

The discomfiture of the British embassy to Great Tellico and the

inglorious return of Lieutenant Everard, failing to compass the

arrest he demanded, seemed to have imparted a certain assurance to

Indian prestige. A new and subtle arrogance of mind, covert and yet

perceptible, distinguished the attitude of the warriors toward the

British traders who had the opportunity to observe them. This did

not characterize individuals only, but appertained to a generally

diffused spirit among the tribes. It was peculiarly marked among the

few Cherokees seen in these days beyond their own boundaries, but

extended to the Muscogees and their sub-tribes, also the Choctaws, the

Choccomaws, and went even so far as to touch their inimical kindred

the Chickasaws,--always hitherto friendly to the British and averse

to the French. It suggested some treasured consciousness of latent

strength. As a portent of the quiet biding of an ultimate time of

reckoning, instances of patience and lenience on the part of Indians

under provocation became more menacing than open protest or violent

wrath. A subtle lurking triumph could be discerned, nevertheless,

in their manner,--the proud glance, the arrogant carriage, the

crafty turn of a phrase, charged with a double meaning. Especially

prominent and perceptible were these _indicia_ when many of

various nationalities, some of the tribes now extinct, chanced to be

congregated together at a trading-station such as the one beginning to

be organized anew under the guns of Fort Prince George.

As yet public confidence in the restoration of peace in the Cherokee

country had not been reëstablished. An outbreak seemed imminent at

any moment, albeit indeterminate, vaguely in the air. Constant rumors

of the machinations of French emissaries, especially the two officers

Latinac and Laroche, deterred capital, always conservative, and the

hideous character of Indian vengeance daunted the hardiest British

trader from essaying a premature effort. Up to this time, therefore,

no trading licenses had been applied for or issued for the towns of

the upper country since the burning of Jock Lesly’s trading-house

on the Tennessee River. In the neighborhood of Fort Prince George,

however, a degree of reassurance was felt since a military defense was

possible and a refuge at hand. Moreover, in case the fort itself should

be besieged, as it lay on the southeastern confines of the Cherokee

country, relief could be sent out from Carolina before famine would

compel a capitulation. It is true that in the war just concluded the

blow fell here first of all, fourteen white men being suddenly murdered

within a mile of the fort. However, the advantages of trade were now

peculiarly great by reason of this absence of marts in the upper

region, and for a season or so the Cherokee village of Keowee, within

gunshot of the fort, attracted a great concourse of Indian hunters bent

on the barter of deerskins, furs, and pearls.

Jock Lesly, one of the most experienced of the early traders, had

foreseen and seized this advantage, and albeit he still ostentatiously

sighed for his old home on the Tennessee River and fondled his sorrow

as an exile, and was wont in financial pride and vainglory to recount

the value of his stock and “gude will,” on the last of which he laid

particular stress, being so well acquainted with the country,--to use

his phrase, “wi’ baith man an’ beast, wi’ ilka buck on twa legs or

four that roamit the woods,”--he had ample opportunity in the lack of

competition to recoup himself for the losses that he had sustained.

Moreover, he had the trade of the officers and men at the fort, for

those days in no wise differed from these in the necessities suddenly

developed as soon as one is out of reach of the usual sources of supply.

The trader was cheerful in these fair prospects, rosy and jocund, and

in this connection said “oh fie” many times to call his daughter’s

attention to the fact how “fat and well-liking he was,” needing none of

her care, and to urge her return to the colonies.

“I’ll e’en bide here,” she averred firmly. “There’s but the twa o’ us.

I maun hae my hame where ye be, for ye are gettin’ auld; your pow is

fu’ gray!”

“Ye are a graceless bairn to say as muckle!--oh fie!--I was born wi’ a

tow head!” exclaimed Jock Lesly, who although flattered by her filial

affection felt that she would be safer in Charlestown. “I to be ca’d

gray an’ auld!--when I hae ne’er been sae weel-favored,--comelier, I

trow, than ony o’ thae young lads at the fort, though a’ dressed out in

their flim-giskies.”

He sometimes wondered vaguely if any of them could be the attraction

that held her here, and then reflected sagely that there were more

lads still in Charlestown. He had experienced a vague regret to

notice--and he had often tried to recall when it had first arrested his

attention--that there had been a gradual averse change in her manner

toward MacIlvesty and a certain glum dourness in his reception of it.

“That’s no the way to win a high-sperited lass like Lilias,” he

reflected impatiently. “I wonder that the callant has na mair sense. He

suld be sonsy an’ gay, an’ mak a braw show wi’ his Hieland coats an’

kilts that he thinks sae fine, an’ that set off sae weel his buirdly

round handsome legs. Sic a spindle-shanks as that chiel Tam Wilson now

wad aye be glad o’ the fringed leggings.”

And then he paused again. For why must he be always thinking of Tam

Wilson presently when his mind was busy with the subject of the

differences which he vaguely perceived had arisen between Callum and

Lilias? He frowned heavily to note anew the connection of ideas.

Surely, surely, the Highlander could not think that she preferred this

man,--this stranger, of whom they knew naught save that his name was

Tam Wilson, and that he hailed from some far-away region of Virginia.

Adventurous, experimental himself, Jock Lesly, in common with many

of the empiric temperament, was the most conservative of men in his

views controlling others. He had scorned and contemned a title as

“fitten neither to eat nor drink,” but he was exceedingly tenacious

of the fact that he himself came of good honest folk, who could trace

their ancestors, although of humble station,--farmers, fishers, and

traders,--for many and many a generation without a reproach or blemish,

and thus he had perceived no incongruity that Callum MacIlvesty with

his gentle blood should become the husband of Lilias. He knew, of

course, that the Highlander’s inherited right to lands and lineage

was in these days of attainder and forfeiture absolutely valueless,

disregarded, and forgotten, but it was a secret delight to him that

these immaterial honors should elevate and embellish the young

soldier’s attachment to Lilias and render him in her father’s eyes

more worthy of her. Being a widower with an only child, Jock Lesly

could afford to care little for Callum’s lack of fortune or prospects.

As he was fond of saying to himself, “Auld Jock hinna warked for

naething!--the little lassie isna sae tocherless!” and in this view he

would redouble his haste to be rich in the increasing opportunities of

the Indian trade. It was this belated realization of a change in the

sentiments of Callum and Lilias that made Jock Lesly observe the young

fellow somewhat keenly when Callum returned from the upper country with

the commissioners’ force and found that she had been domiciled here

with her father.

It was late on a gray and misty afternoon when the expeditionary

force, pushing on with added speed in the fear of being belated in

such close proximity to the intermediate station in their long march

to Charlestown, came at last within sight and sound of Fort Prince

George,--a grateful sight, the block-houses looking stanch and burly

in the angles of the four bastions, the ramparts surmounted with

tall palisades, all the works trig and stout, having been put in

repair by Colonel Grant the previous year while he lay here with his

army awaiting the overtures of the vanquished Cherokees for peace.

The fife and drum resounded from the works; the light glanced on the

steel bayonets and scarlet uniforms of the men drawn up to welcome

the commissioners with fitting ceremony, for it was but seldom that

the commandant had the opportunity to greet aught but wild Indians,

and he made the most of the occasion; the little cannon, of which

there were four on each bastion, thundered a salute, and the troops

presented arms as the commissioners rode through the gate. The honors

concluded, the escort and the soldiers of the garrison, breaking ranks,

surged this way and that about the parade, interchanging the news from

Charlestown for reports from the Tennessee River, and the gossip of the

barracks for the details of the various chances of the march, while the

officers of the fort, with evident convivial intent, took charge of the

commissioners and Lieutenant Everard.

Although the barracks of Fort Prince George had accommodations for a

hundred men, the garrison often fell short of the complement. Therefore

it was no surprise to Everard to meet here orders, in view of the

disquiet of the upper country, to leave to reinforce the garrison such

men as he could spare from his command, since the commissioners were

now on the border of the frontier, and the region through which they

were yet to pass was more or less settled with a white population and

with friendly Indian tribes, the Chickasaws and Catawbas. Everard was

instructed to select for this purpose those of the soldiers who could

not soon rejoin their regiments from which they had been detached for

service in the Cherokee country. Into this category fell the Highland

contingent, for the Forty-Second had just landed in New York,--a

winter in garrison at Fort Prince George seemed a bitter contrast.

Everard was reminded of Callum and his equivocal position as he was

going over the roll, and he felt a qualm of regret. It was not merely

because of that partisan Damon-and-Pythias-like friendship to which

young men are prone, soldiers most of all, and that this change would

necessitate their parting, but that upon the lieutenant’s restoration

to the fitting companionship of his brother officers the man of the

ranks had of course sunk back out of notice and into his proper place.

Everard could not feel himself to blame, yet the incongruity pained

him. Despite Callum’s intrinsic equality with the best of the officers,

Everard knew that it would be futile to urge upon them his own example

in the exceptional circumstances, and indeed this had been fraught with

much discomfort not to say danger in his instance.

Nevertheless, recollecting the episode of the Ancient Warrior’s

disguise and the tender solicitude which the soldier had shown for

his friend’s safety at so great a jeopardy of his own, risking not

only death but the torture, the lieutenant felt very kindly to Callum

and was minded to bestow upon him some parting gift. As he was

canvassing in generous thoughts the character of this testimonial, he

was beset by a sudden monition of the concomitant pride and penury

of the Highlander. Everard would not wound him on either account for

the world. He congratulated himself as on an escape, and as he was

strolling from his quarters to the mess-hall, suddenly meeting Callum,

he abruptly turned about and passed his arm fraternally through the

soldier’s.

“Come, Callum Bane,” he said gayly. “I’m off to-morrow. Let’s go to the

trader’s and get a keepsake. I’ll give you an Indian pipe if you will

give me one, and as long as the _Nicotiana Tabacum_ holds out to

burn we will never forget the big Injun at Chilhowee.”

Callum had no sense of supersedure or resentment upon his sudden

dismissal from his friend’s society. He was too entirely the soldier

to cavil at the obligations which the gradations of rank necessarily

impose. He had himself some sharp experience that these restrictions

cannot be ignored without involving a corresponding subversion of

military subordination. Therefore he was not grudging nor envious, but

accepted as the natural sequence of events the fact that Everard should

be happily carousing with the young officers of the garrison while he,

so lately the lieutenant’s chosen friend, stood guard on the ramparts

in the chill midnight. Hence he cordially and smilingly assented, and

the two, arm in arm, set forth together.

The weather still held lowering and gloomy. On the rampart at Fort

Prince George one could scarce see through the chill mists, and beyond

the bare space encircling the works, to the dense, leafless wilderness.

At the verge of these woods, and looking backward, one could only make

out the fort like a sketch in sepia, with its shadowy block-houses, its

blurred barrack roofs sleek with sleet, its tall palisades surmounting

the rampart with their pointed summits serrating the gray sky. The only

note of color amidst all the dreary neutral tints was the red uniform

of a squad of soldiers returning with several deer from the hunt that

kept the post in fresh meat.

The trading-house was well within sight of the works and close on

the river bank. The boughs of several leafless trees, white with the

morning’s rime, although it was now past noon, swayed above its high

peaked roof; within this seemed to hold great merchandise and store of

shadows, for however the light might stream in at the broad barn-like

door, or the fire flare on the hearth at the further extremity, only

vague outlines of struts and rafters and interdependent timbers could

be seen, while from the beams below swung various goods appropriate

to the time and trade,--saddles, bridles, ropes, chains, blankets,

cloths of various bright tints of red and yellow, all interwoven and

rich of effect. Arms glittered on the shelves and racks below, and

axes, hatchets, knives,--all sending out a metallic glitter here and

there as the firelight flickered. Always about this fire stood or

crouched at least half a dozen braves of various tribes, reveling in

its luxury, albeit so well inured to the cold elsewhere, their presence

necessitating cautious surveillance from the under-traders. For the

Indians of the lower grades, it is said, considered it no derogation

to steal, but infamy to be caught in stealing. A variety of articles

calculated to attract the favorable regards of the officers and men at

the fort were displayed,--buttons, hose, buckles, brushes, snuffboxes,

ribbons, candlesticks and snuffers, mirrors, gambadoes,--even books,

over the slow sale of which Jock Lesly often shook his head. “The

carles at the fort are no readers.” Some exquisite feather-wrought

mantles, Indian baskets, hemp-woven rugs, and quaint pottery were

offered. There were a number of stone pipes showing an extraordinary

skill in carving, for the material, soft when quarried, hardened on

exposure to the air. The Cherokees excelled all other tribes in this

branch of aboriginal art, and some of their work of this date may now

be seen in museums or decorating the rooms of historical societies.

Before the trader’s collection of pipes the two friends paused.

Jock Lesly had met Callum with no apparent diminution of their earlier

cordiality when first he had returned to the fort. But it nettled

the proud Highlander now to observe how obsequious was the trader’s

manner to Everard, taking scant notice of his “far awa’ kinsman.”

And why indeed should he not be attentive to the officer? Jock Lesly

cared naught for him but to sell him an Indian pipe, and if the one

found for him did not please him to diligently persuade him that it

did. “Surely, surely, sir, a bonny bauble. Here, sir, is a fearsome

cur’osity if you favor the heejus in Injun carving. That, sir,--why it

stays in a corner, bein’ broken. An’ here, sir--look at this--a braw

specimen, a real bit of sculpchur.” As far as Jock Lesly was concerned

John Francis Everard was born and brought into this world expressly

to buy that pipe, for Jock Lesly was essentially a trader--so superior

a salesman, in fact, with an eye so keenly and accurately adjusted to

the main chance, that without the least ceremony he abruptly deserted

them for a matter of more moment, and Callum, angered but an instant

since by the adroit pressure of these small wares by a man able to

care naught whether the sale was made or lost, was inconsistently

irritated, affronted, when Jock Lesly’s attention wavered. A couple

of Indians bargaining their peltry for gear had become embroiled in

rancorous words with the under-trader, who was about to lose his temper

under great provocation and, what was worse in the estimation of Jock

Lesly, the advantages of the trade. As he stepped swiftly to the

rescue, suavely inquiring into the point at issue, the Cherokee words

embellished with his Scotch accent, the two military men at the counter

where the pipes were laid out, in the design of which they each sought

something reminiscent of their experiences together, hesitated, at a

loss, and a trifle out of countenance. Callum trembled lest by reason

of this cavalier treatment aught disrespectful of auld Jock Lesly pass

the lips of the officer, whom he supposed to be entirely ignorant

of any concern or interest that he had in the trader’s household.

But Jock Lesly was amply competent to maintain his own standing, and

Everard, exacting as he might be, was no man to quarrel with a trader

for postponing the sale of a trifle lest he lose the bargain for a

hundredweight of choice peltry.

As they idly waited the firelight flickered in their faces; the steel

of the weapons in the racks flashed in long, slender lines about the

building; the wind, wet, fragrant with the odor of bark and dead

leaves, came in from the wilderness without at the open door, and set

all the gloomy dusk awavering; and suddenly, as if evolved from the

necromancy of these immaterial elements, a slight shape compounded of

light and shadow, of the sheen of golden hair and a dull brown dress,

a pink and white face, with dark blue eyes and eyelashes still darker,

stood on the other side of the counter with a submissive “What’s your

wull?”

Everard stared speechless. Doubtless the girl was uncommonly pretty,

but it had been full three months since he had seen a fair white brow

in a woman, a blue eye, and a wealth of curling blond hair. She looked

in the shadow an angel for beauty, a princess for dignity, and a nun

for ascetic gravity. Yet she was only the trader’s daughter, ably

seconding her father, whose heart she knew must be fairly rent for

failure of the opportunity to sell the pipes. “John, Duncan, Malcom,”

he had roared, and they came not; therefore gliding out from some

hidden recess appeared Lilias.

Once more Callum trembled for the false position, for instantly the

handsome Everard must needs seek to commend himself personally, and

essay the language of gallantry.

“This represents, you say, an Indian queen with black locks,” he said,

turning over in his hand one of the pipes curiously tinted that she had

offered. “I should not care for that. It seems to me that the only hair

for beauty is yellow, gilded as if with refined gold.”

He boldly lifted his handsome eyes to her fair tresses devoid of the

concealing cap of the fashion and rolled, richly waving, high up from

her forehead and held with a blue ribbon.

She did not even change color. It seemed that the image carved on the

stone pipe might have smiled as readily. She only laid it aside with

supreme gravity as a rejected commodity, and he was at once ill at

ease, for he would have liked well to own it.

“May I ask you to choose one for me and one for my friend,” he

persisted in the personal note, partly to cover his confusion. Then he

added, “You understand the degree of aboriginal art they represent and

what is most worth while.”

If he had expected to prolong the interview by reason of her

vacillations in the discharge of this commission, he was mistaken. In

two minutes he was furnished with an effigy of the head of a warrior

crowned with a war-bonnet. Through its rudely simulated circle of

feathers the smoke would curl as if merely an extension of their

flamboyant glories. Callum had assigned to him a similitude of a

bird, curiously wrought and with an elaborately decorated stem. Then

she suddenly vanished, as if a vision of such delicate consistency

could hardly withstand the freshening of the breeze. As it came in,

flaring the fire and fluttering the fine show of fabrics swinging from

the beams and circling about the building, it seemed as if it had

extinguished the fair and dainty fancy that she must have been.

“The trader’s beautiful daughter, Miss Lilias, no doubt,” said Everard

to Callum in a low voice, as they turned to settle for the pipes with

Jock Lesly.

Although so low a voice, her father heard it.

“And I should be glad to know, sir, from whom you had her name so pat

upon your tongue?” he demanded surlily.

He could not have said why, but he was angered by the phrase, “the

trader’s beautiful daughter,” although he was not expected to

overhear it. With his mind averse to Callum as it had lately grown,

he speculated upon the possibility that it was he who had descanted

upon her beauty to this young lordling, and that Everard, perhaps, had

caused himself to be brought here that he might judge for himself.

For once Callum subjected himself to no misapprehension. “I hae never

mentioned her name,” he said stiffly.

“No, no, indeed!” protested Everard hastily; for although he revolted

at the pother over so slight a matter as he esteemed it, he wished to

occasion no awkwardness to Callum, whose position seemed to bristle

with unexpected difficulties. “I never heard of her from Callum--nor

from any one at the fort. She--your daughter, Miss Lilias--was

mentioned to me by a Virginian whom we saw in the Overhill towns--who

claimed to be well acquainted with you. His name was--Tam Wilson--was

it not, Callum?”

“I dinna ken his name,” said the dour Callum shortly.

“Ou, ay--Tam Wilson--I mind Tam Wilson weel enow,” said the trader

curtly, his red face now blotched with white.

He took his money for the pipes, and as the two young men trudged

away in the closing mist he took himself to task. He did not know

what he would be at, he said to himself. He could not expect the

trader’s beautiful daughter Lilias never to be mentioned among young

men--why, the girl was celebrated for her beauty wherever she went.

But somehow he knew that if Callum had been seriously in love he was

of that earnest, reserved nature that would have guarded her name from

other lips as if it had been a sacred thing; that her beauty would

have been to him only an incident of her personality, dear because it

characterized her, and never to be vaunted abroad by him.

Analyzing thus his anger, Jock Lesly discovered that he was not excited

because her name was mentioned, but because he thought that it had come

from Callum. This marked the measure of disappointment and discontent

he experienced, to suspect that Callum’s attachment to Lilias was not

of the serious nature hitherto supposed.

“But hegh, sirs,” he said to himself, “it’s no for the puir callant’s

betterment that the lassie’s father hae aye a kind heart till him when

Lilias hersel’ looks so glum an’ dour at him. I marked the glance o’

her eye whilst I was dealin’ with thae carles o’ Injuns. Lord--Lord!”

he exclaimed in dismay, “man is but mortal an’ fitted for mortal wark!

I canna trade wi’ the Injuns an’ yet hae the wisdom an’ leadin’ to

guide the luve affairs o’ that freakish Lilias, that I’se warrant dinna

ken her own mind! I’se e’en commit it a’ to Providence, that dootless

hae mair experience than this puir tradin’ body, that disna even ken

what will become o’ the station if they still hand otters at the price

they are askin’ the noo!”

Having thus discharged his mind of the responsibility, although now

and again he sighed heavily because of the soreness that the stress of

his anxiety had left in his consciousness, he busied himself in the

multitude of his duties, ever and anon returning to the haranguing of

Duncan and Malcom and John, that they should have all been out of the

way and left him with no one to wait on a wheen o’ callants frae the

fort, it requiring both himself and Dougal to drive a bargain with the

discerning chief of Nequassee.

This line of thought bringing up again the recollection of Callum’s

offended face and wounded mien because of his ungracious and groundless

suspicions, Jock Lesly grew pricked in conscience and desirous to be

reconciled formally.

“Zounds!” he muttered, “I maun hae my friends, Lilias or no Lilias, an’

the man is my far awa’ cousin--sae far awa’ it canna be counted--but

that’s neither here nor there. Hegh, Duncan,” he called out, “ye can

gae ower to the fort an’ ask Callum MacIlvesty if he’ll no sup wi’ me

the night if he isna on duty.”

It had been Callum’s impression during the few days that he had

now been at the fort that the trader’s domicile must be one of the

unoccupied cabins within the works, for he knew that during the

earlier alarms of the Cherokee War certain houses had been placed at

the disposal of the settlers’ families flocking there for safety. In

his opinion this would have been much the safest method of sheltering

the trader’s family, but his invitation to the domestic board at the

trading-house itself was a definite negation to this supposition.

“Surely auld Jock is clean wud,” he said to himself as, furnished duly

with leave, he went out from the fort and crossing the bridge of the

fosse took his way over the glacis beyond the fields and those broad

spaces filled with the stumps of the trees which Grant’s troops had

felled while the army lay in camp outside the works.

He stumbled over one of these, so dim was the light of the chilly,

misty dusk. As he regained his footing he turned to look back at the

fort. It was but dimly outlined against the dreary evening sky; a

steady gleam of light came from the window of the guard-house near the

gate, while hovering above the works was a vague suffusion of rays

that doubtless issued from various undiscriminated sources,--doors

ajar, unseen windows, a lantern perchance swinging here and there,--all

combining in this faint, dimly discerned aureola beneath the dense,

overpowering weight of the blackness of the night. He heard the

sentinel challenge the officer of the day on his rounds and then the

measured tramp as the guard turned out. The lonely wind was sighing

among the sad, rifled woods; the river’s dash over the rocks that

fretted its currents came distinct to his ears; and just as he was

thinking that without more guidance in the darkening gloom he might

walk off its steep bluffs he perceived suddenly a light in front of him

and heard the opening of a door. He was already at the trading-house,

and here was Jock Lesly coming out to speculate on his delay, but

seeing him at hand, he pretermitted this to reprove his tardiness.

“Hout, man! ye’ll get no sic vivers at the fort as I sail set before

ye! My certie, when I was your age the board ne’er waited for my teeth

to be sharpened.”

There was, however, no convivial board spread in the trading-house,

where Callum now expected to see it. While he waited for Jock Lesly

to rearrange a barricade at the door which could not be removed from

without except with great clamor, he noted instead that the fire had

died down almost to embers. Only now and again a feeble white flare,

starting up from a mass of red coals, showed the proportions and usage

of the trading-house, and set up such a flicker among the glancing arms

and swaying fabrics as gave an uncomfortable suggestion of half seen

figures lurking and ready to spring.

“Hegh, callant,” cried Jock Lesly’s voice with a tremor of relish and

triumph in the disclosure he meditated. “Come along, and we’se see

what we’se see!”

Lighting a lantern he pulled aside a secret door in the counter, and

as he crept into the box-like place, Callum MacIlvesty heard the sound

of another door opening in the flooring. The swaying light in the

hand of the host began to slowly descend, and the young Highlander,

following closely, bidden to slam the door of the counter behind him,

found with his feet the rungs of a ladder but dimly discerned as the

lantern swung. Presently, however, there was scant need of this humble

illumination. A gush of red light from below revealed the long extent

of the ladder, a stone floor at the bottom, the walls of a grotto of

impenetrable unbroken rock, and naught besides. A projection of the

rugged wall like a buttress shielded the apartment from view, while

they themselves were fully visible throughout their descent. Jock Lesly

barely gave the young fellow time to leap down without touching the

last half dozen rungs, and lowered the ladder swiftly by means of a

rope and pulley; the door which it had held open shut quickly, and if

a man should seek to lift it or to descend thence, he could be picked

off by a rifle from below before he could gain a glimpse of the place

beneath or the group in the chamber beyond. If an intrusive foot should

be placed on the ladder when in position, a mere touch from below

would dislodge that structure, and the invader, falling from the great

height, pay for his temerity with his life.

This was a device put into practice by those constrained to dwell among

the inimical Indians in Tennessee, both before and afterward, but to

Callum it was an undreamed-of expedient, and he must needs pause to

admire the completeness of its features before Jock Lesly, pointing

them out in detail, would permit him to turn to survey the subterranean

home.

“The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the

rock,” the trader quoted.

A lofty but narrow chamber had its elements of comfort. Hickory logs

were flaring in a great fireplace, and remembering the plan of the

building above Callum realized that the flue connected with the chimney

of the trading-house, and thus no smoke or light betrayed the cavern

to the Indians or, if it were already known to them, this usage of it.

The walls, roof, and floor, of rock of unimaginable thickness, were

without a break, save that on the side next the river, in a passage

like an anteroom, was a series of apertures high among the shadows and

round like portholes, affording ample ventilation,--a curiosity that

occurs here and there among the bluffs of this region, relics of some

forgotten cataclysmal period when the outbursting waters sculptured

the rocks. Beyond another arch or tunnel seemed a more limited chamber

adjoining the main grotto, whence a golden glow of lamplight betokened

occupation, and a wooden partition and door added to its seclusion. “A

cubby hole yon where Lilias sleeps an’ keeps her bit duds, an’ rins

awa’ to sulk, an’ here on this end is a passage where the gillies

foregather an’ ane always is on watch to guard the door. An’ this

big room is the parlor, an’ we sit here to receive our company like

gentles. Hegh, callant, if we had only had sic a ha’ house on the sweet

Tennessee River!”

Before the fire now Lilias sat as if she were indeed in some safely

guarded and softly lined parlor. She was arrayed in a brilliant yet

dainty gown of striped sarcenet, blue and white, with pink roses

scattered at intervals down the white stripe. Her shining golden hair

was rolled high from her forehead and a long thick curl hung to her

shoulder at one side. An embroidered cape of sheer cambric made visible

the white neck that it affected to shield. Her feet were cased in

high-heeled red slippers, over one of which the old collie had put a

restraining paw, that she might not move without his knowledge, as he

lay on the rug beside her spinning wheel. She was now busy with this

little flax wheel, while the supper was cooking under the ministrations

of an elderly wrinkled Scotch dame, the mother of one of the gillies,

who officiated in the household in many capacities,--cook, laundress,

dairy woman,--and not the least valued by Jock Lesly as his adviser how

to manage the fractious Lilias, whose nurse she had been.

“Gude guide us!” she would exclaim. “Maun ye always be harryin’ the

bairn’s life out? Let her alane! Let her alane! or else since ye are

sae cruel jus’ tak your big fist an’ knock her harns out at ance!”

Thus berated Jock Lesly would feel that he was indeed a disciplinarian

and must needs moderate his severities, or Luckie Meg, as she was

called, would be telling at the fort and elsewhere how he tyrannized

over his household.

Here Lilias, in the unbounded wisdom of eighteen years, had elected

to set up her staff, and hither had she transported the bulk of her

effects. She ordered her life much as she would if yet in Charlestown,

and seemed incongruously content. If the sight of her in her plain dark

brown serge had been overwhelming to Everard, what would be the effect

of this vision of dainty loveliness Callum wondered.

Very serious she was when she sat at the table, with a sort of absolute

impervious dignity that was not even impaired when the collie stood

up on his hindlegs beside her chair with his forepaws on the cloth,

looking about him with eager curiosity, and betraying like an ill-bred

child that there were more elaborate “vivers” for this occasion than

he was in the habit of seeing. Callum could hear the rushing of the

river so close outside that he thought their cavern of refuge must

be lower than the surface of the water. The flames flared and roared

up the chimney; the young packmen or gillies laughed and talked with

muttered gibes and boyish sniggers and chuckles in their anteroom;

the shadows flickered over the lofty vault; Jock Lesly was once more

his old genial self, and Callum felt that the fort was so far away

that it was garrisoned in another existence, that the Indians were

extinct, that sorrow and pain and loss were but the untoward incidents

of an old dream called life, and that he had entered into Paradise,--a

bit doubtful, a bit tremulous, a bit prayerful, and very humble, for

Lilias, though quite casual, though only carelessly kind, had smiled at

him!

“Tam Wilson, now,” said Jock Lesly.

And all at once this grim old world of troubles and fears, of grief and

gloom, had whisked back again.

“Now that chiel, Tam Wilson!” reiterated Jock Lesly.

He was amazingly comfortable, the trader, still sitting at the table

thrown back in a seat, cleverly constructed to imitate a cushioned

armchair, drinking Scotch whiskey till the smell of the peat of the

still fires seemed to fill the room, and then a fine French brandy that

but inflamed his patriotism and insular prejudice. “What’s that callant

doing all this long time in the Cherokee country?”

Callum glanced down at the firelight flashing through his own glass,

now like a ruby and now like a topaz. He dared not meet the eyes of

Lilias. But when he looked up at last, as he needs must at a repetition

of the question, she was busied with a comfit.

“I hae my ain thoughts,” he said.

Jock Lesly was beginning to nod. It had been a long hard day, and now

warmth and comfort and “vivers” and brandy were telling on his powers

of discrimination.

“Seems strange! Remember Callum,” he said suddenly, “how afeared o’

Moy Toy the callant was!” He laughed sleepily. “He fairly pined to get

us out o’ reach o’”--He paused, nodding.

Once more Callum glanced furtively at Lilias. She sat idly toying with

her spoon in the red glow, her blue and white apparel, her golden

head, her glimmering neck and shoulders, half revealed by their sheer

broideries, all indescribably dainty, fairy-like of effect amid

these rude surroundings. Her soft and delicate countenance was calm,

inexpressive, inscrutable.

“Hegh, Callum,” said Jock Lesly, seizing the subject again in a waking

interval, “that captain-lieutenant--what’s his name? Everard? Aye,

Everard! A-weel, Everard was saying that chiel was bein’ passed off

on him for a Frenchy. Hegh! my certie! Tam Wilson a Frenchy--Johnny

Crapaud”--

His head fell more definitely forward--he was gone at last; the low

luxurious susurrus of his breath, almost a snore, filled the room at

regular intervals.

Afterward Callum could not appraise the impulse, the instinct, that

animated him. The room had dulled to a deep crimson glow; in the waning

light of the fire the gray walls of the cave showed without shadows,

for the light was not so strong as to duplicate an image. Luckie Meg

slept on her stool by the hearth, the collie snored under the table,

the gillies were silent in the antechamber; the only suggestion of the

world outside was the sound of the river rushing on like life to its

ultimate destination, to be lost in the tides of the sea like eternity.

In the red gloom Callum was hardly aware if her face were yet so

distinct, or because in his memory never a shadow could rest upon it.

He gazed directly into her eyes and beheld them dilate expectantly.

“_You_ knew that he was French, Lilias. _You_ knew it all the

time!”

She replied as to an accusation. “No--not all the

time--_no_--Callum!”

“And you knew how I loved you--so long--so true--never one else--never

another thought! And to cast me aside for him--for _him_! A spy,

an emissary, sent to spirit up the Indians against the frontier--for

the hideous massacres of women and children.”

“He declared it was not for that. He said his government only sought

to utilize the Indians in the same way that the English hae used them

in our armies, as soldiers. He only obeyed his orders, as you do

yours--being a soldier, forbye an officer.”

“An officer! O Lilias, war is one thing and this is another!”

“I think like you, Callum; though after I heard him tell his plan it

didna seem the same; that is--forbye”--Lilias hesitated, sore beset--“I

could see how it all had a different face to him. An’ he was na cruel

to us--he keepit the Injuns aff us.”

“Because the French plans were not ripe enough for our murder then--and

Lilias, you knew it! And let your father warm this serpent by his

hearth--in his bosom!”

“I didna ken it at first. No, Callum,” exclaimed Lilias, eager in

self-defense, her own fealty to the hamely ingle-neuk in question.

“No, and not till the last,” she protested, her voice trembling as she

remembered that he had offered to renounce king and country, duty and

honor for her. This was not Tam Wilson, however. Tam Wilson would never

have done this. And it was Tam Wilson who had been so dear!

“He told me at the last!--the last day but twa or three!--or else I

couldna hae abided him!”

Callum, fingering his glass, looked off drearily into the glowing

mass of red coals. He was recalling the details of that memorable

journey,--those days when she declared that she had had dreams.

Dreams, dear indeed, since their tenuity warranted the bitter realities

of those hot despairing tears. Dreams, alas, which could not come true!

Callum doubted if his persistence had won for him much of value,--the

certainty that she had wept for Tam Wilson, because he was not--Tam

Wilson!

Jock Lesly was beginning to stir. He snorted, yawned, stretched his

arms, then sat up straight and opened his eyes. The walls of the

cavern first caught his attention. “Hegh, Callum lad, this is like

thae auld days fowk are sae fond o’ talkin’ about, the Feifteen an’

the Forty-five, when the attainted Jacobites hid about in caves an’

hollows, an’ limekilns an’ cellars. Remind ye o’ it?”

Callum slowly appraised the glowing dream-light, the luxurious warmth,

the comfortable “vivers,” the half emptied decanters, and thought of

the ditch in the moorland and the crevice in the mountain, the cold and

the starvation, the loss of fortune and favor, the end in exile or on

the scaffold. No--he could not just say that he was reminded of it.

And as Jock Lesly was about to demonstrate the points of similarity in

the situation a sudden iterative throbbing shook the earth, and the

Highlander sprang to his feet, recognizing the vibrations of the drum

beating the tattoo, and saying that he would have a run for it to reach

the fort, the barracks, and bed by taps.

XVI

THE detachment of Highlanders that Lieutenant Everard left to

reinforce Fort Prince George proved of no great interest to the troops

already stationed there pining in the weariness of long inaction. The

natural expectation of the revival of zest in life incident to new

companionship, fresh experiences, stories still untold, and songs as

yet unsung all fell flat in the reality; for few of the newcomers could

speak aught but the Gaelic, and they clung together with a pertinacity

and a suspiciousness of the “Sassenach sidier,” with whom they were

thus unequally yoked, that threatened faction in the little garrison.

Hence, to accustom them to their new comrades and break up the clique

whenever it was possible, the Highlanders were separately detailed to

duty among the English, although on parade, at roll call, and at drill

they were segregated and kept within their own ranks.

Callum MacIlvesty was one of the few who could speak English; but

although, being a “gentleman ranker,” his lowly station involved

association with his military equals, he seemed hardly likely to

contribute notably to the mirth of nations. He was preoccupied, gravely

brooding much of the time, and even when roused showed a temperament

averse to the familiar horseplay of the jocund Britisher. Among his

Scotch comrades he was little subject to the irksome constraints of

his position as a common soldier. They could gauge and realize his

claims to a higher station, and, more than conceding them, showed him

a consideration and respect to which he had been accustomed from his

earliest youth. He returned their kindness, which thus manifested

a touch of the magnanimous, with earnest fellow feeling, and his

relations with them were affectionate and even fraternal. To the

English contingent at the fort, however, he was merely “a bare-kneed

Sawney who held his head stiff and stepped high,” with no justification

that they could discriminate, for he, like them, shouldered a musket

for pay.

Even in this humble station it seemed to him that fortune was

singularly adverse, and that his enforced absence from his regiment

had cost him the signal opportunity of his life to achieve distinction

or aught of value. Recovering from a wound, but yet unfit for duty,

he had been granted a furlough early in the year, which he had spent

at Jock Lesly’s trading-house, and afterward, at the moment of eager

expectation of sailing to join the Forty-Second in the West Indies,

he had been ordered with the small detachment of Highlanders in

Charlestown to reinforce the commissioners’ escort because of previous

familiarity with the Cherokee country. While he was engaged in this

distasteful pacific duty, Moro Castle had been carried by storm and the

city of Havanna had capitulated, and the Forty-Second, returning to

America, was flushed with victory and elated with glory. There was to

be no more fighting, it seemed, and in this tame inaction the winter at

Fort Prince George was but a dreary prospect.

The inglorious return of the commissioners’ force from the Cherokee

country, and the futile arrest which Everard had attempted, were

matters of great moment to the garrison, lying as it did within the

borders of the Cherokee possessions; but since the event had been all

bloodless, the defeat had been esteemed something of a farce. The

English soldiers of the escort, who could understand the fun poked

at them, one of the essential constituents of mirthful ridicule, had

been mercilessly guyed before their departure for Charlestown; and one

memorable night the subject came up anew in the guardroom, when, in

pursuance of the plan of detailing the Highlanders to duty separately

among the English, Callum chanced to be one of the main-guard.

The firelight from the great stone chimney place flashed on the

whitewashed walls and with a metallic glitter was reflected from the

stack of arms, in the centre of the puncheon floor, ready for instant

use, although the cry “Guard, turn out!” seemed many hours distant down

the watches of the night, unless indeed some unforeseen chance should

betide. There were several bunks against the wall, which were somewhat

superfluous at this hour, for at night the guard were not permitted

to seek repose thereon, although not a vigilant eye should be closed.

A large door led without to the parade, and a smaller one gave upon

an inner apartment which bore the huge lock common to that day and a

curiosity in this. The key was evidently turned upon some wight who

had found liberty joyous while it lasted, and who now and again sent

forth drunken snatches of song, occasionally varied with vociferous

affectations of woe, weeping and sniffing and groaning by merry turns,

till a freshened joyous impulse would set the catch trolling once more.

The group about the guardroom fire took slight note of these

aberrations from the regulation deportment appropriate to the

rôle of melancholy prisoner. They were all used to these frequent

incarcerations of their jolly comrade, and realized that the rigor

of his punishment would befall him when he should be sober enough to

profit by it.

A heavy rain beating tumultuously against the walls and splashing from

the eaves added zest to the luxury of the great blazing logs and the

talk of the group ranged around on the broad hearth of flagstones.

“An’ d’ ye mean to say, Callum,” began a leathern-visaged,

weather-beaten soldier, the corporal of the guard, leaning his elbows

on his knees as he sat on a great billet of wood, “that as soon as

old Moy Toy sneezed three times your Lieutenant Everard give the word

‘_Double-quick while ye can! For’ard, by the rear!_’ and the whole

command faced right about and footed it out of the Cherokee country?”

He winked jovially at the others as the big Highlander, half reclining

on the floor at one side of the hearth, turned his head slowly and came

gradually to a realization of his surroundings.

“I said naething o’ the sort, an’ ye ken it full weel,” Callum replied

gruffly.

“That’s not the way to answer your s’perior officer,” the jolly

corporal admonished him, with a leer.

“Ye never asked no sic a fule question as my superior officer,” Callum

deigned to respond after a pause. “Ask me now if my firelock is clean

an’ my cartouch box is ready, an’ I’se gie ye a ceevil answer; but my

superior officer hae naught to do wi’ Moy Toy’s sneeshin’.”

“There!” exclaimed the corporal with the affectation of delighted

triumph and discovery. “He have said it! He said that Moy Toy sneezed

and fairly frighted Lieutenant Everard out of the Cherokee country!”

A roar of laughter rewarded this pleasantry, and hearing the gay sound,

the incarcerated soldier struck up with rather a dreary quaver, “‘I’ll

ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross!’”

“You will ride a wooden horse as soon as you are sober enough to mount

one!” called out the corporal.

A great whining and wheezing and affectations of lamentation ensued on

the other side of the door, at which all the guard laughed uproariously.

One of the English contingent, a short, stocky fellow, who had been

carefully greasing a pair of feet always kept in the prime order for

marching essential to the regular infantry-man, now presented those

members glistening and perfect on the edge of the hearth, that the

unguents might take full effect by aid of the heat of the fire. He had

just been admonished by the corporal of that regulation which forbids

the guard to lay aside any of their clothing or accoutrements. He first

argued that stockings were neither arms nor garments, then pleaded with

the corporal for a momentary respite that the grease might soak into

the flesh instead of the fabric of his hose. To take full advantage of

the official clemency he sought to create a diversion by resuming with

animation the previous subject.

“I wonder,” he said, “if that furriner up there in the Cherokee country

is French or a Spaniard. When I was stationed at Gibraltar I learned a

deal o’ the lingo of that country.”

A long silence ensued. No surprise was intimated at the extent of the

soldier’s service, for so often had he recounted the details of his

experiences at Gibraltar and the observations he had collated from

Spain that they had grown a burden and had earned for him the sobriquet

of “the Señor,”--appropriately, perhaps, mispronounced “the Sinner.”

The recent hostilities between England and Spain gave additional and

phenomenal interest to his prelections now.

“The Spaniards are a great people for all that’s come an’ gone,” he

resumed presently. “’Twas them strengthened the fortifications at

Gibraltar so they are now what they be,” he added significantly.

“They did so! An’ they done it well, begorra!” retorted a big Irishman.

“An’,” with a rollicking laugh from his full red lips, “bedad, by the

same token we tuk it away from ’um.”

“The Sinner” took no notice of this pertinent corollary of his

proposition. He was looking reflectively at his feet, stretched out

straight before him as he sat flat on the hearth. His hair stood up

straight from his brow and was tied in a thin queue behind. He had

small bright eyes, heavy-lidded and downcast now. His face was clear

and youthful, with a large jowl, that narrowed toward the mouth, and

a short blunt nose. He was a good soldier by line and rule, and of a

particularly clean aspect. In fact he had so fresh, scraped, washed

an appearance that with his porcine resemblance he suggested, as he

sat with his plump pink and white feet and shins bare of hose to the

knee, some punctual pig that had accommodatingly cleaned and scalded

himself--if such a process were ever possible in the lifetime of swine.

The flames flared furiously up the chimney. Outside the roar of

water that intimated the swift flow of the Keowee River could be

differentiated from the sound of the rain in a fusillade on the roof

and its splashing sweep from the eaves. A roll of thunder far away

shook the earth, unseasonable, seemingly irrelevant to the occasion,

hardly appurtenant to this steady torrent of wintry rain.

“If that furriner is one of them Dons,” said “the Sinner,” resuming his

speculations, his eyes critically on the contour of his great toe, “he

knows what’s what. He ain’t there among them Injuns for nothin’. They

are the strategists--them Spaniards.”

“Arrah,” exclaimed the Irishman, blowing out his contempt with a cloud

of strong tobacco as he smoked his little cutty pipe, “it is just as

well, thin, that they have got nothin’ I want. Cubia will contint

me--that is, for the presint,” he added, with a bland air of moderation.

For this was before the treaty restoring “the Havannah” to Spain.

“I’m talkin’ about the hold they are takin’ on this country,” argued

“the Sinner.” “They are surrounding us”--an apprehension at that time

entertained by wiser men than he--“amongst all these wildernesses an’

with no defenses but two or three flimsy mud forts. They will retaliate

for the Havannah an’ Manilla on the frontier of the British colonies

in Ameriky. _Diablo!_ I tell you now, if that man in the Cherokee

country is one o’ them caballeros, what between the Spaniard an’ the

French an’ the Injuns the southern colonies is crushed.”

He brought his two shining feet together with a clap, the smart impact

denoting the small chance that aught intervening would have of escape.

The other men looked reflectively at the fire. They were as brave

as soldiers need to be, but the conditions of the frontier were of

various adverse interpretations. While they could march against an open

enemy readily enough, the chances of traps and massacres, of torture

and slavery in captivity, supplemented by the wiles of a civilized

power coalescing with the savages, and the ever recurrent doubt of

the ability of distant superior officers to cope with these untoward

circumstances so far removed from their observation, all combined to

give the soldiery many a more serious thought than appertained to their

humble functions as the hands that execute rather than the brain that

devises.

The corporal eyed “the Sinner” rancorously.

“Ye must be gittin’ them feet ready to gallopade up an’ down on extra

drill,” he said. “I’ll report you for spreading discontent among the

troops with your tomfool talk about them Dons.”

“Why,” said “the Sinner,” with a look of innocent surprise, “I was just

thinkin’ about all this talk o’ silk wums in Carolina an’ Georgia--when

in Spain--why you ought jus’ to see the wum farms amongst the

mulberries on the”--

“No--no--ye were talkin’ about that fellow up in the Cherokee country!”

persisted the corporal.

“Oh, yes,” admitted the wily “Sinner,” perceiving the evasion was

useless. “I was wonderin’ if the lad was a Spaniard to be stirrin’ up

such a commotion. There’s a deal too many o’ them on the continent now

to make it surprisin’ if he is one too!”

“I’ll tell ye, thin, me bye! ’tis Oirish he is,” declared the Hibernian

genially. “One o’ me own pattern. Whenever ye meet a distinguished

compatriot an’ don’t know wher he comes from, set him down for an’

Oirishman, bein’ a man o’ ganius!”

“He is a Scotchman I’ll wager,” said a native South Carolinian, for

already the leaven of disaffection against that nationality that had

helped to make the province strong and thrifty was beginning to work.

“A Scotchman, and not just one too many, either. A Scotch trader, I’ll

be bound, turned Cherokee. Some o’ the French get regularly adopted

into the tribes. I know some Scotch fellows among the Chickasaws that

are trying it, to trade the more handily, and I dare be sworn that this

makebate among the Cherokees is another Injun Sawney!”

This stirred Callum’s patriotism, the master key of a Scotchman’s heart.

“The man’s a Frenchman,” he said curtly.

“Did he sneeze in French?” demanded the jocose corporal.

Callum did not laugh. His eyes were fixed on the masses of red coals

beneath the flames of the fire that cast their continual flicker over

his dreamy retrospective face.

“I wad hae thought mysel’ he had been an Englishman, that is, a

Firginian,” he said reflectively, as if speaking to himself. “But no,

the man is French!”

The corporal scarce drew a breath. “Hey, Callum lad,” he contrived to

say with a casual intonation, “had ye ever seen him afore that day?”

“Ou, ay, many a time,” replied Callum, intent on his memories.

“Where, lad? where?”

Callum roused himself in returning consciousness.

“In the Cherokee country, man! At Ioco Town, at Jock Lesly’s

trading-house. We a’ took him for a Firginian.”

“And why do you think now he is French? Lieutenant Everard gave that

p’int up, they tell me.”

Callum hesitated. “I hae my ain reasons,” he said, but with such

finality of tone that the corporal pressed the matter no further.

When the guard was relieved the next morning, the officer of the day

found a point of importance noted in the written report of the officer

of the guard, and as a consequence Callum was surprised by a summons to

the presence of the commandant of the fort, to reply to a very queer

and childish question, as it seemed to him.

“How do you know that that man in the Cherokee country whom Lieutenant

Everard was--about to arrest”--Captain Howard put it as euphemistically

as possible, out of respect to a brother officer--“how do you know that

he is French?”

“I heard him speak French, sir, to himself--when he thought he was

alane.”

“But you know that an Englishman, any one who can learn the language,

can speak French.”

“Not like a Frenchman, sir,” persisted Callum.

Captain Howard hesitated. Of all things he would like to secure this

makebate, this formidable influence among the Cherokees, nay among

all the tribes, that had rendered the costly peace which had been

so difficult to secure, so long sought, but a hollow semblance, a

menacing sham. Moreover, he would be very glad to succeed where Everard

had failed. A very close clutch on distinction had the dapper young

lieutenant let slip. And here was the man who in the first instance had

afforded information.

“Have you no other reason for your belief?” Captain Howard asked

anxiously.

“Aye, sir, I ken he is French frae himsel’,” Callum replied calmly. “He

tauld a woman, sir, an’ she tauld me; but you will no ask me to mention

her name.”

“Certainly not,” said the officer, thinking that he wished to avoid

implicating others in responsibility; “a noncombatant in any event.

But,” eagerly, “would you know the fellow if you should see him again?”

“I wad, sir.”

“In any disguise?” the officer persisted.

“I wad indeed, sir, fu’ weel.”

“That is all for the present,” said Captain Howard. Callum gave him

an amazed stare, then saluted and withdrew, wondering at this puerile

futility. Would he know the man indeed!

XVII

WITH all its advantages civilization bears also its disadvantages to

the postulant of culture. Perhaps no one has adequately appreciated

the stress of that period to the mental and moral nature of the Indian

when, detached from his _ancien régime_, its methods and manners,

growing scornful of its sanctities and questioning its values, he was

yet unaccustomed to the new order of things, unversed in its utilities,

incompetent of its comprehension--alienated from the one and not

acclimated to the other.

Many an Indian roamed about the little mart, beginning to gather under

the guns of Fort Prince George, alike surly with contempt for the old

and aversion for the new, unsettled, dissatisfied, dull, and dangerous.

Now and again, with a dark, restless eye, one would pause and look out

unallured to the forest and river--not the same, never again to be the

same! Then he would turn his gaze, with loathing disgust, to the busy

mercantile Europeans, with their quick trading talk, their bearded

faces, their knee breeches, and the long woolen stockings on their

stout, thick calves. A queer and odious presentment of humanity they

seemed. Even the military did not impress the Indians as the soldiers

whirled and ranged about to the sound of fife and drum in that close

order so favorable to being mowed down by the very musket and ball

with which they themselves were armed. A strange mental atmosphere it

was--charged with the fumes from the embers of the burned-out past and

the miasma exhaled from the poisonous present. No wonder their outlook

was beclouded and drear.

All the conditions of life hitherto were reversed for many of them.

Never had they met the representatives of certain tribes, immemorial

enemies, save with weapons in their hands. Now, because of the

intrusion of the white man and the diversion of interest that he had

effected, a hollow peace or a simulated indifference had been patched

up. Between many the semblance was fast growing into reality under

the influence of that secret hope, nay, that earnest, triumphant,

almost holy expectation of national independence that had been

held in abeyance of late and which the colonists perceived without

interpreting. It made for a universal friendship among them, and the

traders chafed at its result, for intertribal war sold gunpowder,

utilized the venomous activities of the savages against each other, and

thus gave immunity to the white settlers. This almost visible bond in

the unity of friendship of these hereditary enemies was a menace to all

the English colonies from the mountains to the Atlantic, outnumbered

by their negro slaves, and with the threatening Spaniard on the south

and the inimical French on the west. The frontier traders scanned the

horizon that showed so strange a portent, and muttered much together

and shook their heads.

To Mingo Push-koosh this prospect of universal brotherhood among the

tribes promised little. He wandered drearily about the world, a vagrant

indeed, almost an outcast. There had been much ill blood between the

Cherokees and Choctaws on his account, although no definite national

war was inaugurated, since the French influence had been exerted

to maintain intertribal peace and secure satisfaction. However,

sundry individual reprisals for the iniquities that celebrated the

_congé_ of Mingo Push-koosh at Great Tellico had resulted in

counter-reprisals till, when two braves of the respective factions

chanced to meet in the settlement about Fort Prince George, nervous

people instinctively dodged in expectation of the smartly sped arrow or

the impulsively hurled tomahawk, and prudent people sought the nearest

shelter. Indeed Mingo Push-koosh would not have ventured here within

the borders of the Cherokee country but for the protection of the guns

of the British fort. He was not safe inside the French boundaries, his

wonted sphere, for he had been bereft of all the honors and privileges

he had once enjoyed. In fact he had been sought with a view to condign

punishment, a price being placed on his head when the authorities at

New Orleans had learned of his betrayal of trust and desertion of

Laroche, leaving him after the massacre in the hands of the Cherokees,

which must have proved fatal to him and the interests he represented

but for his own perseverance and address.

An exile thus, Mingo Push-koosh affected the English settlements, an

avowed deserter to the British interest, protesting that his eyes were

opened to the French wiles and that the French spoke with the tongue

of a snake _seente soolish_, the mere sound of which made his

heart weigh very heavy within him. These statements were received with

a certain indifference, for by reason of his exile he could not bring

any great personal following to the English flag; in fact, but for the

hope that his presence might decoy others of his tribe to imitate his

example, Mingo Push-koosh[11] would scarcely have been regarded at

all. Proud and ambitious, he realized the necessity of pressing more

efficaciously his own cause, and would have embraced the opportunity of

any military service--but how? and whither?

Poor Push-koosh! Disregarded by the English, and in actual danger

from the French, the pompous Prince Baby had now naught in hand of

more import than the mercantile venture of selling a dozen or so fine

horses, which he had caused to be driven from his old home at Yowanne,

through the southern country, to Jock Lesly, who desired them for

use in his pack-trains to Charlestown in the spring, laden with the

skins from this winter’s hunt. The sale accomplished to-day, Mingo

Push-koosh strolled about, forlorn, friendless, among the boxes and

bales on the platform of Jock Lesly’s trading-house at Keowee Town.

His thick long hair floated in the breeze; his silver arm-plates and

headband were as bright as of yore, but a deep dejection showed in his

large surly eyes, and he had the effect of a drooping crest, albeit the

flamingo feathers still flaunted high.

“_Ish la chu, angona?_” (Are you come, friend?) A Chickasaw who

passed offered the conventional salutation, knowing of the Choctaw’s

defection from the French interest, for the sub-tribes (including the

Choccomaw) of the ancient Chicimecas have almost a common language.

“_Arahre-O angona!_” (I am come indeed, friend!) Push-koosh

replied, although he could hardly refrain from springing upon the

Chickasaw as he passed and tearing the scalp from his head with his

teeth, if need were.

The incident concluded, he continued to idle about the trading-house,

standing on the platform and gazing at the gray river under a gray sky.

The water was dark--all the light in the landscape seemed concentrated

in the icy flicker in the leafless forests near the Indian town of

Keowee which lay on both banks. Then he shifted his position and stood

on the other end of the platform and gazed silently at the bastions of

the fort. Whenever he saw the British flag he could not refrain from

spitting his disdain openly, obviously, on the ground. Fearing lest

this demonstration be observed, as the flag flaunted from the fort,

he once more turned impatiently and changed his position to the other

end of the platform, as before. He was absorbed in the reflection that

the great coalition of Indian tribes would at last become a triumphant

fact and that he would have no share in it. This fair prospect he had

forfeited, with the favor of the French; as for the English, they would

have none of him, would trust him with no opportunity of value.

So long he stood there that the under-trader grew a trifle solicitous

as to his designs. The degenerate among the Indians had become most

expert thieves, and it is recorded that while engaged in conversation

with the merchant they could abstract what articles they would from

under his eyes. Alas, poor Push-koosh--whose thoughts were of empire!

Dougal Micklin, the under-trader, a pursy, unimaginative man, all of

whose mental processes could be discerned in his round face and his

merry dark eyes, with his round, burly body encased in buckskins and

wearing a coonskin cap set rather far back from his placid brow, was

loath to take his eyes from the Choctaw, visible through the wide

barn-like door, and therefore mentioned his identity to Captain Howard,

the commandant of the fort, who chanced to be in the house purchasing

some buttons for his own personal use.

“Aye, sir, three and sax the dozen, sir,” Dougal Micklin said, as he

glanced again out of the door; then, as if to excuse his evidently

wandering attention, he continued, “That Choctaw buck is an unco gret

prince, Captain,” his red lips curling with good-natured sarcasm at the

idea. “He used to be in high favor wi’ the French, but he fell out wi’

the mounseers at Tellico Gret, and now seems to have his finger in his

mouth.”

Captain Howard turned suddenly and surveyed the figure of the Indian,

as Push-koosh, unconscious of this keen scrutiny, stood sullen and

dreary on the platform. The fringes of his saffron-hued buckskin shirt

and leggings were all borne backward in the breeze, his stiff scarlet

flamingo feathers and his long black hair were aslant also without

other stir, as if he might have been pictured thus on a canvas. His

heavily embroidered belt, shot pouch, and tobacco bag, his silver

headband and bracelets, his necklace of pearls and many strings of

“roanoke,” the fine silver-mounted pistols at his side, all seemed to

confirm the truth of the trader’s representations as to his high rank.

“’Tis Mingo Push-koosh!” the trader added.

“Call him in,” said Captain Howard. Then with an afterthought, “No,

I’ll speak to him myself!”

The officer striding out confronted the Choctaw just as again, catching

a glimpse of the British flag, Mingo Push-koosh was about to spit his

disaffection upon the ground.

“How?” said Captain Howard, smiling agreeably.

Push-koosh was visibly surprised, but looked inconceivably haughty.

“How?” he returned with half covert, scornful disapprobation, and

waited in doubt.

Now Captain Howard’s education was lamentably defective as far as the

Choctaw, practically the Chickasaw language was concerned, although the

latter Indians were those with whom he had had most dealings, as they

had repeatedly served in the campaigns in this region with the British

troops. Nevertheless, in the delicate and tentative bit of business

which he had in contemplation, he did not desire the offices of an

interpreter lest a bird of the air carry the matter.

Lending himself to the effort to compass speech as it were without

words, he smiled again blandly with a distinctly mollifying effect.

“Big Mingo!” he said, waving his hand with a free gesture to impart

added grace to his compliment.

He was a tall, bony, angular man of forty-five, and the demonstration

ill suited the stiff military dignity of his habitual carriage and the

impressive effect of his scarlet uniform.

“_Capteny Humma Echeto!_” (Great red captain!) responded the

Mingo, complimentary in turn.

Then they both paused and stared hard at each other.

“Mingo love British?” demanded the captain at length.

Nothing could have been more sardonic than the languishing smile with

which Push-koosh laid his hand upon his true heart.

“Mingo hate French?” the political catechism proceeded.

The face of Push-koosh suddenly darkened. He spat his contempt on the

ground.

“_Hottuk ookproose!_” (The accursed people!)

“Why hate French?” the inquisitor proceeded.

The heart of Push-koosh swelled. His eyes burned hot in their sockets.

The veins of his throat were distended and tense as cords. He could

hardly speak even fragmentarily, and but for the straining of every

sense to hear, to distinguish, to interpret, Captain Howard might have

made but little of the jargon of broken English that the Choctaw hissed

out in the intervals between his gasps of rage.

The ugly French “beloved man” had betrayed him, had ruined his

prospects! He had slandered him to the headmen of Great Tellico! And

because he had quitted the Cherokee country on account of their ill

usage, and left the French ugly “beloved man” there,--who had sustained

no harm whatever!--the indescribably ugly French governor in New

Orleans was angry.

Captain Howard had caught so eagerly at the words “Great Tellico” that

although his ears were not of such a conformation and flexibility that

they could be described as “pricked up,” his countenance had that vivid

accession of intelligence that seems concomitant.

“Mingo go Tellico?”

Push-koosh’s face, gradually brightening in the expectation of a

commission of some important sort, fell suddenly. He remembered that

fierce onset upon the unoffending Cherokee tribesmen, that bloody

massacre! No, not to Tellico, as he valued his life! Never again to

Tellico, never again!

“Capteny much wants Mingo go Tellico!” urged Captain Howard

persuasively.

The passionate mobile countenance of Push-koosh, with naught firm in

its lines save the determination to go no more to Tellico, was turned

toward the river, the wind blowing backward his long loose hair, so odd

of effect here among the Cherokees, whose heads were all polled, his

great eyes absent and anxious, his earnest hope of employment in the

British interest slipping beyond his reach. But not to Tellico--never

again!

“Capteny much wants French ‘beloved man’!” Captain Howard murmured

plaintively.

Push-koosh brought his small even teeth together with so sudden a snap

and gasp that the officer instinctively drew back a step.

“Does the beast bite?” he said to himself.

“Fort Prince George? Bring ‘beloved man’? Capteny wants?” Push-koosh

asked, the words coming one after another, one upon another, in the

joyous turbulence of sudden comprehension.

Push-koosh could do this for the _Capteny Humma Echeto_ without

the necessity to repair to Great Tellico. In that secret knowledge

of the scheme of the now almost united tribes, many details, seeming

of but scant significance, were obvious to those who had with them

but little concern. For instance, the gossip brought by the tribesmen

who had driven hither his horses had not till now seemed of moment

to Push-koosh. A conference was in contemplation, to be held at

_O-tel-who-yau-nau_ (Hurricane Town), in the country of the Lower

Muscogees, and several noted chiefs were to be present, especially

certain disaffected spirits who desired to lay their views before the

French governor through the medium of his “beloved man,” Lieutenant de

Laroche, who with an escort of Cherokees was to come down expressly

from Great Tellico. The choice of Hurricane Town had been in honor and

placation of Padgee (the Pigeon), its mico, for he was well known to

have hesitated and to be grievously ill at ease at the renunciation

of British favor and British trade. The journey of the “beloved man”

Laroche would lie, it is true, through a country especially friendly

to him and his plans, but Push-koosh knew when the fleet of canoes and

pettiaugres would be expected on Flint River, and it might be--lurking

near--some opportunity--

His deft fingers trembled upon the trigger of his fine pistol.

Captain Howard touched his arm.

“No!” the officer said with the ringing tones of authority. “Alive!”

“Alive?--the French ‘beloved man’?” Push-koosh faltered.

Captain Howard was thinking very fast. In those days when rewards were

offered for the scalps of various nationalities of Indians and white

men one could hardly be more certain of the genuineness of a head of

hair than if it were a wig. Captain Howard had some knowledge of a

flaxen scalp riven from the head of an unoffending German colonist and

of the effort to make it pass current for a Spaniard’s jetty hair by an

Indian more disingenuous than discerning. The astute Push-koosh would

never so far disregard the probabilities, but Captain Howard wanted no

cheap English auburn locks from the nearest convenient British station.

He must needs be sure of that subtle brain beneath the thatch. The man

in person--naught else would satisfy him. “Alive--well--the ‘beloved

man’ all in one piece!” he declared slowly, definitely.

He took his netted silk purse from his pocket and began to

significantly count the golden guineas from one hand to the other.

Push-koosh seemed scarcely to notice. For a moment he was as if in a

daze. The breath came quick from between his parted lips; his teeth

showed slightly, giving him a strange savagery of aspect; his eyes

glanced hither, thither restlessly, as if he were seeking to gauge the

various points of difficulty in the undertaking. He had not moved, but

the wind still fluttered in the fringes of his saffron buckskin suit

and in the crest of scarlet flamingo feathers, and the light of the

dull day gleamed with a white metallic glister upon the silver headband

above his dark flat forehead.

His eyes seemed suddenly afire when Captain Howard, eager that there

should be no mistake in identity, asked abruptly, “Are you sure that

you would know this French ‘beloved man’ of Tellico if you should see

him again?”

Push-koosh stared for a moment motionless. Then he bent himself

suddenly backward as if struck by a flaw of wind. He caught both hands

to his lips as if to intercept the cry that escaped,--a fierce, shrill,

tremendous note expanding through all the heavy silence of the gray

day, and seeming to strike with the clamors of its savage joy against

the gates of heaven.

XVIII

WHEN very quietly in the sombre depths of the midnight Callum

MacIlvesty, according to orders communicated abruptly to him by the

commandant, groped down to the river bank, the vague current barely

glimpsed by the scintillation of some star in the ripples soon obscured

by the scudding clouds, he took his seat in a boat with only two dark

figures, motionless, unknown, invisible, for traveling companions. The

river under the shadow of the banks was as black as Styx, and as silent

as Charon was the boat’s crew. On the opposite side, the Indian town of

Keowee lay hushed and absolutely still. Once a dog barked, apprised in

some subtle manner of the enterprise going forward, for there was no

noise of movement, no word spoken. At the fort only the window of the

guardroom was alight, and one listening might hear or fancy the vague

footfall of the sentry walking his limited beat. The gleam from the

window was but a twinkle in the gloom, and only now and again a star

shone out responsive from the clouds. The muffled oars did not rattle

in the locks; there was hardly a perceptible impact as the blades were

immersed in the water. The vague sense of gliding in the darkness away,

swiftly away, from all the familiar world, from all that represented

his experience hitherto and civilized life, whither he hardly knew,

with whom he could not imagine, impressed Callum MacIlvesty’s mind with

a very definite repugnance for his errand, and for all the secrecy and

mystery with which it had been invested. He wondered, as the sense

of distance increased, as the shadow that marked the site of the

town merged indistinguishably into the darkness, as the twinkle that

indicated the fort glimmered afar off, then was extinguished utterly,

whether his invisible and silent companions knew more of him than he of

their identity.

“Captain Howard needna hae feared I’d set mysel’ a-talkin’,” he said

to himself, realizing that the party had been thus unexpectedly and

silently hustled off in order that naught might transpire of their

mission, nay, that their absence might not even be noticed at the fort,

till the scheme was well on its way to execution. “I’m nane o’ the sort

to be given to idle clavers.”

His companions might have this failing, however, he reflected, and thus

he drew his plaid about him and wrapped himself in silent cogitation as

in the garment.

Each of the party was himself too surly, or perhaps too proud, or

it may be too doubtful of the others to express curiosity. Without

a whisper, hearing each other breathe, now and again touching one

another, a knee, an elbow, in moving in the strait quarters, they

slipped like a phantom craft, a crew of shadows, past the wharf and the

trading-house, past the group of canoes and pettiaugres anchored or

beached there, past a great Indian camp of the peltry hunters, down and

down the river, the current aiding the regular strokes of the oars and

bearing them swiftly on.

Naught was roused along the banks except an owl, that hooting after

them sent a gibing echo full of quaint vocables far along the reaches

of the darkling river; and once a great splash in the water close

at hand startled the oarsman, and the craft shot further out toward

the centre of the stream. It was a wolf marauding in the woods and

springing into the water’s edge, but although he howled for a space

naught seemed to hear save the solitary night and the stars now

venturing forth and now lost in the tumult of the unquiet clouds. The

dank wind grew chillier; the darkness more dense; then came a semblance

of vision in which one realized rather than saw great gusty bursts of

rain and erratic flaws of wind striking across the surface of the river.

At length two vague pallid strata of dull clear sky revealed to Callum

an old cornfield, a vast plain whose evidence of agriculture was but

a memento of the past; a charred skeleton of a burnt Indian town, now

without a tenant, a relic of the Cherokee War; the brown rain-soaked

forests beyond with voluminous clouds bulging down among the treetops;

the steely expanse of the river swirling under the fall of the torrents

and the rush of the wind; and opposite to him, crouching in the bottom

of the boat, Mingo Push-koosh!

The Choctaw, too, had been keenly watching for the earliest glimmer

of dawn that should discover to him the faces of his silent comrades,

and Callum, although knowing naught of the name or rank or nature of

the man, recoiled from the look in the Indian’s eye. Push-koosh stared

angrily yet maliciously at his changing expression, then daunted a

trifle by the arsenal of arms which the Highlanders of that day bore,

dirk, claymore, pistols, musket and bayonet, marking the stalwart

strength evinced by the soldier’s attitude as he lay at his ease in the

bow, the Mingo smoothed his ruffled crest, as if he would treacherously

bide his time.

“Does Captain Howard count me no human that he suld send me campaigning

wi’ a panther?” Callum asked himself in amazement.

“The big Capteny thinks the two white men will make short work of poor

Prince Baby,” Push-koosh reflected, and when he addressed himself to

rearranging his arms, as he shortly did on the pretext of protecting

them from the weather, he reloaded his pistols with balls previously

dipped in poison and thus rendered deadlier than before, by reason of

the extraordinary aptitude which the Indians possessed in toxicology.

Only one other was of the party,--the English soldier floutingly

called, from his oft-told experiences in Spain, the Señor,--“Sinner”

Kenney. To him the Highlander seemed hardly less savage than the

Choctaw. The vast wilderness, in this strange and solitary duty,

impressed him as appalling; the character of the hardships and dangers

to be encountered was not what he had expected; his spirits had sunk

immeasurably low.

All day long they held their course in the chill invisibilities of the

mist and rain, two now rowing continually, with the third to lighten

the labor by alternating regularly with the others. The night passed

in the same dreary fashion, each sleeping by turns, that the craft

might make all the speed possible. Little good-fellowship prevailed.

The Choctaw hated them both alike with the rancor of his race and his

prejudice against aught that was British, which he had acquired from

his service with the French; and yet they were formidable soldiers, and

their prowess awed him. “The Sinner” scorned the Choctaw as altogether

beneath his notice, although he repented swiftly any word or act that

might be accounted overt aggression, for the Indian was obviously

dangerous. Connected conversation was practicable only between the

two white men; but “Sinner” Kenney resented the Highlander’s repute

of superiority to his station, and was by turns flippantly offensive

in manner or surlily rude. There being no solid substratum of

good-heartedness and comradeship in him, Callum felt that there was no

pulse in common between them that might atone for the English soldier’s

boorishness and coarse manners, repugnant to a man of refined breeding.

MacIlvesty therefore had little or nothing to say except as regarded

the expediting of their progress, and “the Sinner’s” alternating

jocularities and impertinences failed for the most part to take effect

by reason of the impassiveness of the Highlander and the lack of

comprehension on the part of the Choctaw.

After they had entered the Savannah River “the Sinner” began to

flatter himself with the prospect of meeting other river craft--this

broad stream being a highway of trade--and of seeing denizens of

the world hailing from the region below; but his hopes of social

interest and cheery converse were dashed by the rain and the mist

which closed down impenetrably. More than one settlement they passed

wrapped in invisibility in the cloud, as if they themselves were some

undiscriminated element of the atmosphere. When at last the vapors

began to shift and the sun to shine with a warmth all at variance

with the calendar, as it was interpreted at Fort Prince George, where

November, chill and drear, had worn away, they were once more in the

density of the wilderness; and suddenly one day, Push-koosh, who was

steering, gave the boat a deft turn, sent it swiftly shooting in to the

bank, letting it run up a little inlet. Then he sprang out; and as it

was lightened of the weight of Callum, who had stepped on shore, the

Choctaw pulled the craft up on land with the amazed “Sinner” sitting in

it.

He protested. “_Diablo!_ Are we to leave the boat here?” he cried

aghast, looking about him at the pathless subtropical wilderness.

“This gude man kens the way,” said Callum with frigid staidness. “Here

is the captain’s chart he gied me his nainsel’.”

The round head of the experienced English foot-soldier bent over the

paper. There was no mistaking the place. The inflowing of a little

tributary on the Carolina side, the proximity of a ridge hard by, a

series of prehistoric tumuli at no great distance, all sufficiently

identified the locality. And what was that indicated toward the

southwest, across the breadth of what is now the State of Georgia--a

path marked out in red ink? But there was no corresponding suggestion

on the face of the tangled wooded country.

“_Voto á Dios!_ I wish his ‘nainsel’ was in perdition! An’ this

is the ‘gude man’ who knows the way! He looks ‘gude’ enough to guide

us to hell! _Dios mio!_” suddenly catching himself, “the Injun

doesn’t understand the lingo, does he? _Cielos!_ he is a fearsome

beast!”

Callum imperiously cut short his complaints by striking off through

the swamp. Push-koosh, whose outlook at life had brightened since

discovering that his comrades were each as obnoxious to the other as

to him, and that all three were of a mind only in antagonism to the

personnel of the expedition, did not hesitate to imitate the example.

With the peculiar easy gait of the Choctaw he set out at a speed that

bade fair to try the mettle of the tall Highlander.

“Sinner” Kenney lingered. He looked up the broad, sunny expanse of the

brimming river, then over to the Carolina side, noting the bright,

soft aspect of the wintry world that would fain emulate the tender,

restful peace of early spring. The flowers were not dead, it seemed

to say, only asleep, and this bland zephyr might well rouse them with

its sweet blandishments. The ripples played within an oar’s length of

the boat. He could with his single strength slide it down into the

water and in five minutes be rowing briskly on his return trip to Fort

Prince George. He would doubtless be able to devise some plausible

explanation that would pass muster; for instance, that he had been

accidentally separated from his companions; that the Highlander carried

the chart and compass; that thus lost in the trackless wilderness his

only possibility of extrication had been to take the boat and forthwith

return up the river to Fort Prince George.

And indeed as he gazed adown the shadowy region of the swamp on the

Georgia side, he thought it looked much like a country in which a man

might easily disappear never to return. Albeit heavily wooded, it was

in great part submerged with water of varying depth. At the nearest

verge he marked a long loglike protuberance, which he realized was an

alligator half sunken in mud and ooze. A white heron gleamed amidst

the dusky aisles, standing motionless among those curious roots of the

cypress called “knees,” which projected high above the dim surface

of the black water wherein they grew. The long stately stems of the

tall trees themselves were reflected, pallid and columnar, by myriads

from the glimmering dark expanse of the swamp, thus duplicating the

densities of the half submerged forests, funereally draped with hanging

gray moss in endless festoons. It seemed to stretch out illimitably,

this nondescript world that was neither navigable nor yet practicable

as dry land. And what might be the result of a failure to compass a

fair passage?--and what were the conditions of the region on the other

side? All were dependent upon the accuracy of Captain Howard’s chart

of this untried, unknown world, and the good faith and fair dealing of

Mingo Push-koosh! And still gazing, motionless, intent, “the Sinner”

hesitated.

Down the vistas of the forest the soldier’s eye was suddenly caught

by the vanishing figures of the Highlander and the Choctaw, and the

extraordinary speed and ease of their gait struck his attention and

roused his emulation.

“Do they think they can beat me on a forced march--that Sawney,

stepping like a crane, and the Choctaw with his little bandy dogtrot?”

He critically appraised their powers. His professional pride was

enlisted. He suddenly set his hands one on each side of his trig little

body, and like machinery fell the sure even lengths of the military

double-quick; and so, speedily overhauling his companions, he went with

them down into the depths of the dank forests.

The sun rose high above the river and gilded the tip of every lustrous

dark wavelet and illumined the live oaks with an emerald splendor.

In the shadowy swamp where the “snowy” heron stood among the cypress

knees, the hanging wealth of gray moss caught the enriching beams and

glistered, fibrous and silver, from the branches of the tall white

marble-like pillars of the trees. The little boat still lay empty,

motionless, within an oar’s length of the dancing water.

“Sinner” Kenney thought of the craft many times afterward, and sighed

for its relinquishment as for a folly; for the dreary, mutinous,

fatiguing experience set at naught all the numerous previous hardships

of his chequered career. The physical stress in itself was great. The

Choctaw, who set the pace, could keep the same gait all day and cover

the same great distance day after day, a task under which the two

white men languished and flagged and almost succumbed. It would have

been impossible to support the contempt of Mingo Push-koosh in their

failure, and his triumph in his own superiority, had it not been for

the counter-opportunity to jeer in turn, which was afforded them by the

oft recurrence of the watercourses in the Creek country; for Push-koosh

could not swim. Sometimes an opportune tree uprooted by a storm

afforded a footbridge for crossing a stream. More frequently the rivers

were of a breadth that rendered this impossible, especially since the

autumn floods from the mountains had swollen them beyond all precedent.

Push-koosh must have drowned or turned back but for the assistance of

his comrades, unwillingly given, by no means a friendly service, and

only in the interests of the expedition.

With a hand on the shoulder of each stalwart swimmer, Push-koosh, limp

with terror and horror, was propelled through the water. He was spared

much, however, in that he could speculate only vaguely on the meaning

of “the Sinner’s” fleer while in transit, half intended to frighten the

Choctaw and half from natural and involuntary malice. “_Vamos poco

á poco, amigo!_ Let’s drop him now, Sawney! Here is a deep hole!

_Porqué no?_”

They suffered much from the weight of their arms and provisions,

for Captain Howard had wisely decreed that each should be his own

commissariat and none the burden bearer of the others, and when

the Highlander lost his salt in the river neither of the other two

would give him of their store, and the food of Callum MacIlvesty was

bitter for a more æsthetic reason, as he ate it unsalted beside the

fire at night, each man cooking for himself. They wrangled much,

despite their lack of verbal facilities; they quarrelled over their

chart, their compass, the possibilities of shortening the way by

deviating from their instructions and essaying a more direct route,

and sometimes their relations during the day would become so strained

that as they lay down by the camp-fire at night, they were fairly

afraid of one another, lest malice develop into menace. The Scotchman

had his national quarrel with the Englishman, and called him “pock

pudding,” and threatened to “knock his harns out.” The Englishman

derided the poverty of the Scots, and told gleeful tales of the lack

of sophistication of “Highland recruities” in his experience, in

comparison with whom, he declared, Push-koosh, the Choctaw, was a

man of the world. Push-koosh laughed alike at the Highlander’s kilt

and the English soldier’s scarlet breeches. “The Sinner” twitted the

Choctaw for his artificially flattened head; and they all would decline

to mend the camp-fire to keep off the wolves until green eyes would

be glistening close at hand in the underbrush, and the growl that

heralds the pouncing spring would sound threateningly on the chill

night air. But the preëminent triumph of Push-koosh came when they

encountered more savage denizens of the woods than wolves. His was the

craft to detect the approach of other Indians; to avoid rencontre; to

erase all trace of their passage through the woods; to slip like a

ghost, invisible as it were, between camps under cover of darkness;

to skirt with infinite skill the verges of Indian towns. Once they

were followed by a dog, baying discovery at every step, at last coming

so close that only the discharge of an arrow stilled his telltale

cry. Once, strangely enough, a little child tottered along the deer

path after them, with some vague mistake of identity in its infantile

brain, and Push-koosh, being minded to thus effectively stop its

approach,--“’Tis but a Muscogee,” he said,--Callum placed his pistol

at the Mingo’s temple, and even “the Sinner” threatened reprisal. In

the midst of the wrangle some aboriginal instinct of danger stirred in

the adventurous three-year-old, and after one long dismayed, open-eyed,

and open-mouthed stare, it turned about on its fat legs and took its

tottering flight homeward, too young to recount what it had seen or to

understand what it feared.

As they neared the southern confines of the Muscogee country the Indian

towns became more frequent, and detection by bands of Creeks coming

and going through was imminent. This was the extreme crisis of peril,

for naught could save the lives of the two British soldiers and their

Choctaw guide if captured in this expedition through the country of

the inimical Muscogees, who now were impatiently awaiting the signal

of their French liberator to rise with all the united Indian tribes

against the English rule.

Now it was that the individual traits of each of the party were

asserted in such wise as to demonstrate the wisdom of the commandant’s

choice of the personnel of the expedition,--the long-headed Callum’s

cool and adroit adaptation of even disasters to the common advantage,

and his steady endurance in the face of dangers; the resources of

the pluck and experience of the English soldier; the woodcraft, the

knowledge of Indian wiles and Indian counterwiles of the Mingo. The

hardy, invincible courage of all three animated them like a common

pulse, and they clung together now with a unanimity of sentiment that

might hardly have been expected from their earlier lack of all the

sterling qualities that make up good comradeship. Howard had expected

only one of the two white men to endure to the end, to survive the

hardships of the march, the inimical chances of environment, or

internecine strife amongst the three; but the trio were still together

one afternoon when they emerged from the woods on a bluff overhanging

the Flint River on the east, and there lay prone upon the ground,

silent, not so much as moving a muscle, invisible, save to the floating

American vulture circling high in the air in the majestic curves of its

strong flight. The opposite banks were low and fringed with woods, and

beyond and above, the red sunset of the lonely aboriginal days deployed

through the sky like a pageant. Naught broke the infinite stretch of

the wilderness, no shadow of cloud impinged on the glister of the

river. That the foot of man had ever touched these deep reclusive

solitudes only a great mound, artificially constructed, silent,

imposing, surmounted with forest growths nurtured by the summers of a

thousand years, attested his presence, his hopes, his griefs, and the

futility of all. Somehow its outline, imposed with such significance

against the range of purple hills in the distance, stretching afar

off under the red and amber sky, added a melancholy to the languorous

burnished haze, the slow down-dropping of the royal sun, so splendidly

vermilion, and bespoke a mysterious past and a future to come as

unrevealed.

The air was bland with all the suavity of a southern winter. The

foliage had changed as the successive stages of their journey had led

them on, as though they bore with them some benignant, embellishing

secret that blessed the world as they advanced. No more the ice-girt

bare bough, the sere leaf flying before the blast. The live oak, the

magnolia, the laurel, lifted splendid redundant foliage to glitter

glossy in the sun’s last rays, and the flutter of the paroquets made

the pecans merry. At a distance a palmetto tree stood out against the

sky, all solitary, as if some invisible sandy beach stretched below.

The subtle, alluring fragrance of the anise-tree was filling the air,

and the mocking-bird sang in the eternal spring, elated, even though

the night was coming on apace.

The woods had grown a gray purple; the river chanted a sylvan rune; a

star came out in the vermilion sky and shone aloft with a clear white

glister; and suddenly in the red and gray and green crystal lines of

the stream an alien sound was borne.

A sound it was as of paddles, rythmically striking the water. As it

grew nearer, louder, a deer that had led her fawn down to drink on the

opposite shore lifted her head, snuffed the air, stamped with her feet

all together, and with a bound was off, her fawn beside her, a mile

away, while still the concentric circles that her muzzle had stirred in

the water widened to larger circumference, while still the echo of the

fawn’s vague bleat of alarm and surprise floated softly to the bluff on

the summit of which the three emissaries lay silent.

And at last, rounding a point, came a fleet of canoes, gaudily

decorated, an incident of vivid color beneath the flaring sunset, and

as vividly reflected in the smooth water, tinged with all the secondary

splendors of the evening glow. Beneath an umbrella-shaped fan of

eagle feathers artificially mottled with crimson reclined the French

officer Laroche, recognizable by his keen Gallic features, his arrogant

military alertness of pose, albeit painted and arrayed with all the

aboriginal splendor appertaining to his adoptive state as a great

“beloved man” of the Cherokee nation. His weapons were a silver-mounted

dirk and ivory-handled pistols, while fully armed stalwart Cherokees

officiated as bodyguard and paddled the boat. The fleet shot so swiftly

along that three cautious heads, craftily lifted, with cautious eyes

keenly peering, could with difficulty distinguish the fact that the

other canoes were manned by Muscogees; the song that they half chanted,

half recited, was a pæan of greeting to the beloved officer of the

great French king and compared him with favor to sundry celebrities of

much note and value of their own tribe.

The three barely waited till this incident of the sunset was past,

seeming in its swiftness, its unreality, some shimmering illusion

of the haze-freighted air; in its wild chromatic grotesquerie, some

necromancy of the gorgeous zenith of amber and red, and the responsive

dream of the mirroring water. Then without one word they rose, struck

off by a short cut through the dank and darkening woods, and night

had hardly fallen before the chief of Hurricane Town, individually

averse to the French interest, was amazed by the trooping in of these

incongruous and irrelevant figures announcing themselves as the

accredited emissaries of Captain Richard Howard, and producing letters

from that officer in support of their assertion, duly confirmed when

read by the interpreter.

XIX

THE crash seemed afterward to Laroche like the fall of a castle of

cards, like the wreck wrought by the wind in the gossamer symmetries

of a cobweb, like a sudden awakening to the conditions of reality from

the allurements of a dream, so potent seemed the force, so tenuous the

fine-spun scheme when all its fibres were rent apart.

So unprescient had he been!

It was at _O-tel-you-yau-nau_ (Hurricane Town) that he met his

fate.

Following the many windings of the river, pausing at sundry villages

by the way to receive the protestations and rivet the adherence of the

gladly harkening Muscogees, he came to his objective point late the

next afternoon. A great black cloud seemed to have accompanied him; in

its midst were vivid darting lightnings, frequent and menacing for a

time, ever and anon showing convolutions of the vapor lighter in hue

and texture, superimposed, as it were, upon the denser darker masses.

Then all was dulled to a uniform consistency of tone and portent. The

huts of the town, the public square, the _chooc-ofau-thluc-co_,

or rotunda, the fields, whence the late harvests had been gathered,

all were overshadowed thus, and the forest surrounding them seemed to

support this canopy amongst its branches.