and she had occasion to make many sage observations on the inconsistency
and the unwisdom of man! That the prospect of killing some Frenchman, or
being themselves cruelly killed, in a national quarrel which neither
faction, the cow-drivers nor the Blue Lick Stationers, half understood,
should so endear men to each other was a sentiment into which she could
not enter. It was better, after all, to be a woman, she said to herself,
and sit soberly at home and sew the rational sampler, and let the world
wag on as it would and the cutthroats work their wild will on each
other. The least suggestion that brought the thought of the French to
their minds was received with eyes alight, and nerves aquiver, and blood
all in a rush. The favorite of the whole camp was a young fellow who had
achieved that enviable station by virtue of an inane yet inconceivably
droll intonation of the phrase, "Bong chure" _(Bon jour_), delivered at
all manner of unconformable times and in inappropriate connections, and
invariably greeted with shouts of laughter. And when at last the party
reached the vicinity of Blue Lick and the stationers swarmed out to meet
them, taking the news of the French invasion at second hand, each
repeating it to the other, and variously recounting it back again, never
dreaming that it was supposed to have originally issued from the
station, she meditated much upon this temperamental savagery in man, and
the difficulty it occasioned in conforming him to those sagacious
schemes for his benefit which she nourished in her inventive little
pate. The antagonisms of the Blue Lick Stationers and the cow-drivers
from the Keowee vanished like mist. On the one hand the stationers were
assured that the stampede of the cattle was now regarded as inadvertent,
and although it had occasioned an immense deal of vexatious trouble to
the ranchmen, all were now well rounded up and restored to the cow-pens
as of yore. And the ranchmen in turn received a thousand thanks for
their neighborly kindness in the restoration of the horses of the Blue
Lick Stationers, who knew that the animals had not been decoyed off by
the herders, as a malicious report sought to represent, but had merely
returned to their "old grass," according to their homing propensities.
And both parties loved the British soldiers, who had reinforced them,
and intended to go a-scouting with the military expedition; and the
soldiers earnestly reciprocated by assisting in the preparations for the
defense of the station. Especially active and efficient was the only
artilleryman among them, and the paradisaic peace amidst all the
preparations for war was so complete that his acrid scorn of that pride
of the settlement, the little swivel gun, and of the stationers' methods
of handling it, occasioned not even a murmur of resentment.
Peninnah Penelope Anne, although restored to private life and the
maternal domicile, having retired from statecraft and the functions of
linguister to the embassy, did not altogether escape public utility in
these bellicose preparations. The young gunner, who had had the
opportunity of observing her during the march hither, shortly applied to
her for assistance in his professional devoir. He wanted a deft-handed
young person to construct the cartridge-bags for the ammunition which he
was fixing for the little piece and the two coehorns. And thus it
chanced that she found herself in the blockhouse, cheek by jowl with the
little cannon, its grisly muzzle now looking out of the embrasure where
she herself had once been fond of taking observations of the stockade
entrance; the men came and went and speculated upon the chances of the
scouting quest, now about to set forth, while spurs clanking, ramrods
rattling down into gun-barrels, voices lifted in argument or joyous
resonance, made the whitewashed walls ring anew. The gunner, seated at a
table carefully and accurately measuring out the powder, now and again
urged strict cautions against the lighting of pipes or striking of
sparks from gun-flints. When he applied himself briskly to the cutting
out of more bags from flannel for his cartridges, he looked very
harmless and domestic in his solicitude to follow his wooden pattern, or
"pathron" as he called it, for the creature was Irish. He gave minute
and scrupulous directions to Peninnah Penelope Anne to sew the cylinder
with no more than twelve stitches to the inch, and to baste down the
seams, "now, moind ye that!--ivery wan!--that no powther might slip
through beyant!"
In the pride of the expert he was chary of commendation and eyed
critically the circular bottom of every bag before he filled it with
powder.
"See that, now," he said, snipping briskly with the scissors; "that
string of woolen yarn that yez left there, a-burnin' away outside, might
burst the whole gun, an' ivery sowl in the blockhouse would be kilt
intirely,--moind ye that, now!--an they would n't be the Frenchies,
nayther!" He gave her a keen warning glance at rather close range, then
once more renewed his labors.
The mockingbirds were singing in the woods outside. The sun was in the
trees. The leafage had progressed beyond the bourgeoning period and the
branches flung broad green splendors of verdure to the breeze. The Great
Smoky Mountains were hardly less blue than the sky as the distant
summits deployed against the fair horizon; only the nearest, close at
hand, were sombre, and showed dark luxuriant foliage and massive craggy
steeps, and their austere, silent, magnificent domes looked over the
scene with solemn uplifting meanings. Oh, life! life was so sweet, and
love and friendship were so easy to come by and so hard to part withal,
and glad, oh, glad was she that no men of the French nation or any other
were on their march hitherward to be torn in cruel lacerations by those
wicked cartridges, so cleverly and artfully and cheerfully
constructed,--men with homes, wives, mothers, sisters, children, every
soldier representing to some anxious, tender heart a whole world, a
microcosm of affection, all illuminated with hope and joy or to be
clouded with grief and terror and loss and despair,--oh, glad, glad was
she that the French invasion was but a figment,--a tissue of
misconceptions and vague innuendoes and groundless assumptions.
And yet she was sad and sorry and ashamed, because of the futile bustle
and bluster and cheerful courageous activity about her. Not a cheek had
blenched; not a hand had trembled; not a voice had been lifted to
protest or counsel surrender, despite their meagre capacities for
defense and their number, but a handful. What would these men say to her
if they knew that their patriotism and their valor were expended in
vain,--above all, their mutual cause of quarrel wasted!--as pretty a bit
of neighborhood spite as ever stopped a bullet--all foolishly and
needlessly reconciled without a blow! She had saved them from a bloody
feud, the chances of which were terrifying to her for their own sakes.
But what would they say when discovery should come!
Still, it might never come. And yet, should they patrol the woods in
vain and at last disperse and return each to his own home, she had no
placidity in prospect,--she was troubled and sad and her sorry heart was
heavy. Her scheme had succeeded beyond her wildest hopes. Her beneficent
artifice had fully worked its mission. And now, since there was no more
to be done, she had time to repent her varied deceits. Was it right? she
asked herself in conscientious alarm, not the less sincere because
belated. Ought she to have interfered, with what forces it was possible
for her limited capacity to wield? Had they an inalienable right to cut
each other's throats? Should she have so presumed? And now--
"Howly Moses!" a voice in shrill agitation broke in upon her
preoccupation. "An' is it sheddin' tears ye are upon the blessed
gunpowther? Sure the colleen's crazed! Millia Murther! the beautiful
ca'tridges is ruint intoirely! Any man moight be proud an' plazed to be
kilt by the loikes o' them! How many o' them big wathery tears have yez
been after sheddin' into aich o' them lovely ca'tridges?"
He had risen; one hand was laid protectingly upon the completed pile of
fixed ammunition as if to ward off the damping influences of her woe,
while he ruefully contemplated the suspected cartridge bags, all plump
and tidy and workmanlike, save for their possible charge of tears. She
made no answer, but sat quite motionless upon her low stool, a cartridge
bag unfinished in her lap, her golden brown curls against the cannon,
still weeping her large tears and looking very small.
His clamors brought half the force to the scene of the disturbance. A
keen question here, an inference heedfully taken there, and the
situation was plain!
In the abrupt pause in this headlong career it was difficult to sustain
one's poise. Now and again, indeed, sheepish conscious glances were
interchanged; for since the grievance of the cow-drivers had been
publicly annulled and the horses of the Blue Lick Stationers had been
restored in pure neighborly good-will, a resumption of the quarrel on
the old invalid scores was impossible. Perhaps some token of their
displeasure might have been visited upon her who had inaugurated so bold
and extensive a wild goose chase, but she looked so small as she sat by
the cannon weeping her large tears that she disarmed retaliation.
So small she looked, indeed, that certain of the young blades, who filed
in to gaze upon her and filed out again, would not believe that she
could have invented so large a French invasion, and for several days
they futilely scouted the woods in search of some errant "parlez-vous,"
all of whom, however, were very discreetly tucked away within the strong
defenses of Fort Toulouse.
The young gunner alone was implacable. He was the first of the returning
force to reach Fort Prince George, and he carried with him all the
powder that had been sent under mistake to the Blue Lick Station,
together with the tear-shotted cartridges, whose problematic interior
damage he explained to the amazed, chagrined, and nonplussed commandant.
"Oh, sor," the gunner said in conclusion, solemnly shaking his head,
"that gurl, sor!--she is a wily one! An' I should n't be surprised, sor,
if she is a dale taller than she looks!"
The Blue Lick Station in time recovered its equilibrium, and was
afterward prone to protest that of all frontier communities it bore the
palm for the efficiency of its "linguister."
A VICTOR AT CHUNGKE
At Tennessee Town, on the Tennessee River, there used to be a great
chungke-yard. It was laid off in a wide rectangular area nine hundred
feet long, two feet lower than the surface of the ground, level as a
floor, and covered with fine white sand. The ancient, curiously shaped
chungke-stones, fashioned with much labor from the hardest rock, perfect
despite immemorial use, kept with the strictest care, exempt by law from
burial with the effects of the dead, were the property of this Cherokee
town, and no more to be removed thence than the council-house,--the
great rotunda at one side of the "beloved square," built upon a mound in
the centre of the village.
Surely no spot could seem more felicitously chosen for the favorite
Indian game. The ground rose about the chungke-yard like the walls of an
amphitheatre, on every side save the slope toward the "beloved square"
and the river, furnishing an ideal position of vantage for spectators
were they even more numerous than the hundreds of Cherokees of all ages
that had gathered on the steep acclivities to overlook the game--some
ranged on the terrace or turfy ridge around the chungke-yard, formed by
the earth thrown out when the depressed area was delved down long ago,
others disposed beneath the spreading trees, others still, precariously
perched on clifty promontories beetling out from the sharp ascent. Above
all, Chilhowee Mountain, aflare with the scarlet glow of its autumnal
woods, touched the blue sky. The river, of a kindred blue, with a
transient steely change under the shadow of a cloud, showed flashes of
white foam, for the winds were rushing down from the Great Smoky
Mountains, which were revealed for an instant in a clear hard azure
against the pearl-tinted horizon--then again only a mirage, an illusion,
a dream of stupendous ranges in the shimmering mist.
In the idle, sylvan, tribal life of that date, one hundred and fifty
years ago, it might seem that there was scant duty recognized, imposing
serious occupation, to debar the population of Tennessee Town from
witnessing the long-drawn game, which was continued sometimes half the
day by the same hardy young warriors, indefatigable despite the hot sun
and the tense exercise, straining every muscle. A few old women, their
minds intent upon the preparation of dinner, a few of the very young
children, relishing their own pottering devices as of a finer flavor of
sport, a few old men, like other old men elsewhere, with thoughts of the
past so vivid that the present could show but a pallid aspect--these
were absent, and were not missed. For the most part, however, the little
dwellings were vacant. The usual groups of loungers had deserted the
public buildings, which consisted of a bark-and-log house of three
rooms, or divisions, at each angle of the "beloved square," and in which
were transacted the business affairs of the town;--one, painted red, was
the "war-cabin," whence arms, ammunition, etc., were distributed, the
divisions implying distinctions as to rank among the warriors; another,
painted white, was devoted to the priestcraft of the "beloved men"--head
men of note, conjurers, and prophets; the cabin of the aged councilors
faced the setting sun, as an intimation that their wars were ended and
their day done; and in the fourth cabin met the "second men," as the
traders called the subordinate authorities who conducted municipal
affairs, so to speak--the community labor of raising houses, and laying
off and planting with maize and pompions the common fields to be tilled
by the women, "who fret at the very shadow of a crow," writes an old
trader. All these cabins were now still and silent in the sun. The
dome-shaped town-house, of a different style of architecture, plastered
within and without with red clay, placed high on the artificial mound,
and reached by an ascent of stairs which were cut in regular gradations
in the earth, lacked its strange religious ceremonies; its secret
colloguing council of chiefs with the two princes of the town; its
visitors of distinction, ambassadors from other towns or Indian nations;
its wreaths of tobacco sent forth from diplomatically smoked pipes; its
strategic "talks;" its exchange of symbolic belts and strings of wampum
and of swans' wings--white, or painted red and black, as peace hovered
or war impended--and other paraphernalia of the savage government. Even
the trading-house showed a closed door, and the English trader, his pipe
in his mouth, smoked with no latent significance, but merely to garner
its nicotian solace, sat with a group of the elder braves and watched
the barbaric sport with an interest as keen as if he had been born and
bred an Indian instead of native to the far-away dales of Devonshire.
Nay, he bet on the chances of the game with as reckless a nerve as a
Cherokee,--always the perfect presentment of the gambler,--despite the
thrift which characterized his transactions at the trading-house, where
he was wont to drive a close bargain, and look with the discerning
scrupulousness of an expert into the values of the dressing of a
deerskin offered in barter. But the one pursuit was pleasure, and the
other business. The deerskins which he was wearing were of phenomenal
softness and beauty of finish, for the spare, dapper man was arrayed
like the Indians, in fringed buckskin shirt and leggings; but he was
experiencing a vague sentiment of contempt for his attire. He had been
recently wearing a garb of good camlet-cloth and hose and a bravely
cocked hat, for he was just returned from a journey to Charlestown, five
hundred miles distant, where he had made a considerable stay, and his
muscles and attitude were still adjusted to the pride of preferment and
the consciousness of being unwontedly smart. Indeed, his pack-train,
laden with powder and firearms, beads and cloth, cutlery and paints, for
his traffic with the Indians under the license which he held from the
British government, had but come in the previous day, and he had still
the pulses of civilization beating in his veins.
For this reason, perhaps, as he sat, one elbow on his knee, his chin in
his hand, his sharp, commercially keen face softened by a thought not
akin to trade, his eyes were darkened, while he gazed at one of the
contestants, with a doubt that had little connection with the odds which
he had offered. He was troubled by a vague regret, a speculation of
restless futility, for it concerned a future so unusual that no detail
could be predicted from the resources of the present. And yet this
sentiment was without the poignancy of personal grief--it was only a
vicarious interest that animated him. For himself, despite the
flattering, smooth reminiscence of the camlet-cloth yet lingering in the
nerves of his finger-tips, the recent relapse into English speech, the
interval spent once more among the stir of streets and shops, splendid
indeed to an unwonted gaze, the commercial validities, which he so
heartily appreciated, of the warehouses, and crowded wharves, and laden
merchantmen swinging at anchor in the great harbor, he was satisfied. He
was possessed by that extraordinary renunciation of civilization which
now and again was manifested by white men thrown among the Cherokee
tribe--sometimes, as in his instance, a trader, advanced in years, "his
pile made," to use the phrase of to-day, the world before him where to
choose a home; sometimes a deserter from the British or French military
forces, according to the faction which the shifting Cherokees affected
at the time; more than once a captive, spared for some whim, set at
liberty, free to go where he would--all deliberately and of choice cast
their lot among the Cherokees; lived and died with the treacherous race.
Whether the wild sylvan life had some peculiarly irresistible
attraction; whether the world beyond held for them responsibilities and
laborious vocations and irksome ties which they would fain evade;
whether they fell under the bewitchment of "Herbert's Spring," named
from an early commissioner of Indian affairs, after drinking whereof one
could not quit the region of the Great Smoky Mountains, but remained in
that enchanted country for seven years, fascinated, lapsed in perfect
content--it is impossible to say. There is a tradition that when the
attraction of the world would begin to reassert its subtle reminiscent
forces, these renegades of civilization were wont to repair anew to this
fountain to quaff again of the ancient delirium and to revive its potent
spell. Abram Varney had no such necessity in his own case; he only
doubted the values of his choice as fitted for another.
Apart from this reflection, it was natural that his eyes should follow
the contestant whom he had backed for a winner to the tune of more
silver bangles, and "ear-bobs," and strings of "roanoke," and gunpowder,
and red and white paint, than he was minded to lightly lose. He had laid
his wagers with a keen calculation of the relative endowments of the
players, their dexterity, their experience, their endurance. He was not
influenced by any pride of race in the fact that his champion was also a
white man, who, indeed, carried a good share of the favor of the
spectators.
A strange object was this champion, at once pathetic and splendid. No
muscular development could have been finer, no athletic grace more
pronounced than his physique displayed. The wild life and training of
the woods and the savage wars had brought out all the constitutional
endurance and strength inherited from his stanch English father and his
hardy Scotch mother. Both had been murdered by the Cherokees in a
frontier massacre, and as a boy of ten years of age, his life spared in
some freak of the moment, he had been conveyed hither, exhorted to
forget, adopted into the tribe, brought up with their peculiar kindness
in the rearing of children, taught all the sylvan arts, and trained to
the stern duties of war by the noted chief Colannah Gigagei, himself,
the Great Red Raven of Tennessee Town (sometimes called Quorinnah, the
name being a favorite war-title specially coveted). The youth had had
his baptism of fire in the ceaseless wars which the Cherokees waged
against the other Indian tribes. He had already won the "warrior's
crown" and his "war-name," a title conferred only upon the bravest of
the brave. He was now Otasite, the "Man-killer" of Tennessee Town. He
was just twenty years of age, and Abram Varney, gazing at him, wondered
what the people in Charlestown would think of him could they see him.
For a few days, a week, perhaps, the trader would refer all his thoughts
to this civilized standard.
Tall, alert as an Indian, supple too, but heavier and more muscular,
Otasite was instantly to be distinguished by his build from among the
other young men, although, like the Indians, he wore a garb of dressed
deerskin. His face, albeit no stranger to the use of their pigments and
unguents, still showed fair and freckled. His hair bore no resemblance
to their lank black locks; of an auburn hue and resolutely curling, it
defied the tonsure to which it had been for years subjected, coming out
crisp and ringleted close to his head where he was designed to be bald,
and on the top, where the "war-lock" was permitted to grow, it floated
backward in two long tangled red curls that gave the lie direct to the
Indian similitude affected by the two surmounting tips of eagle
feathers. He was arrayed in much splendor, according to aboriginal
standards; the fringed seams of his hunting shirt and leggings,
fashioned of fine white dressed doeskin, as pliable as "Canton silk
crape," were hung with fawns' trotters; his moccasins were white and
streaked with parti-colored paint; he had a curious prickly belt of
wolves' teeth, which intimated his moral courage as well as sylvan
prowess, for the slaying of these beasts was esteemed unlucky, and
shooting at them calculated to spoil the aim of a gun; many glancing,
glittering strings of "roanoke" swung around his neck.
Nothing could have been finer, athletically considered, than his
attitude at this moment of the trader's speculative observation. The
discoidal quartz chungke-stone[2] had been hurled with a tremendous
fling along the smooth sandy stretch of the yard, its flat edge, two
inches wide, and the curiously exact equipoise of its fashioning causing
it to bowl swiftly along a great distance, to fall only when the
original impetus should fail; his competitor, Wyejah, a sinewy, powerful
young brave, his buckskin garb steeped in some red dye that gave him the
look when at full speed of the first flying leaf of the falling season,
his ears split and barbarically distended on wire hoops[3] and hung with
silver rings, his moccasins scarlet, his black hair decorated with
cardinal wings, had just sent his heavy lance, twelve feet long,
skimming through the air; then Otasite, running swiftly but lightly
abreast with him, launched his own long lance with such force and nicety
of aim that its point struck the end of Wyejah's spear, still in flight
in mid-air, deflecting its direction, and sending it far afield from the
chungke-stone which it was designed in falling to touch. This fine cast
counted one point in the game, which is of eleven points, and the Indian
braves among the spectators howled like civilized young men at a
horse-race.
The sport was very keen, the contest being exceedingly close, for Wyejah
had long needed only one additional point to make him a winner, and when
Otasite had failed to score he had also failed. The swift motion, the
graceful agility, the smiling face of Otasite,--for it was a matter of
the extremest exaction in the Indian games that however strenuous the
exertion and tense the strain upon the nerves and grievous the
mischances of the sport, the utmost placidity of manner and temper must
be preserved throughout,--all appealed freshly to the trader, although
it was a long-accustomed sight.
"Many a man in Charlestown--a well-to-do man" (applying the commercial
standard of value)--"would be proud to have such a son," he muttered, a
trifle dismayed by the perverse incongruities of fate. "He would have
sent the boy to school. If there was money enough he would have sent him
to England to be educated--and none too good for him!"