noontide, bobbed about in dwarfish caricature along the smooth sandy
stretch. The great chungke-pole, an obelisk forty feet high planted on a
low mound in the centre of the chungke-yard, and with a target at its
summit used for trials of skill in marksmanship, cast a diminished
simulacrum on the ground at its base scarcely larger than the
chungke-lances. Now and again these heavy projectiles flew through the
air, impelled with an incredible force and a skill so accurate that it
seemed impossible that both contestants should not excel. There was a
moment, however, when Otasite might have made the decisive point to
score eleven had not the chungke-stone slipped from the hand of Wyejah
as he cast it, falling only a few yards distant. Otasite's lance, flung
instantly, shot far beyond that missile, for which, had the stone been
properly thrown, he should have aimed. Wyejah, disconcerted and shaken
by the mischance, launching his lance at haphazard, almost mechanically,
struck by obvious accident the flying lance of his adversary, deflecting
its course--the decisive cast, for which he had striven so long in vain,
and which was now merely fortuitous.
The crowds of Indian gamblers, with much money and goods at hazard upon
the event, some, indeed, having staked the clothes upon their backs, the
rifles and powder for their winter hunt that should furnish them with
food, were at once in a clamor of discussion as to the fair adjustment
of the throw in the score. The backers of Wyejah claimed the accidental
hit as genuine and closing the game. The backers of Otasite protested
that it could not be thus held, since Wyejah's defective cast of the
chungke-stone debarred their champion from the possibility of first
scoring the eleventh point, which chance was his by right, it being his
turn to play; they met the argument caviling at Otasite's lack of aim by
the counter-argument that one does not aim at a moving object where it
is at the moment, but with an intuitive calculation of distance and
speed where it will be when reached by the projectile hurled after it,
illustrating cleverly by the example of shooting with bow and arrow at a
bird on the wing.
Otasite and Wyejah both, preserved an appearance of joyous indifference.
With their lances poised high in the right hand they were together
running swiftly up the long alley again to the starting-point, Otasite
commenting on the evident lack of intention in Wyejah's lucky cast with
a loud, jocosely satiric cry, "_Hala! Hala_!" (signifying, "You are too
many for me!")
"Lord! how the boy does yell!" Abram Varney exclaimed, a smile pervading
the wrinkles wrought about his eyes by much pondering on the problems of
the Indian trade, feeling incongruously a sort of elation in the youth's
noisy shouts, which echoed blatantly from the rocky banks of the
Tennessee River, and with reduced arrogance and in softer tones from the
cliffs of towering Chilhowee.
A sympathetic sentiment glowed in the dark eyes of an Indian chief on
the slope hard by, the great Colannah Gigagei. He was fast aging now;
the difficulties of diplomacy constantly increasing in view of
individual aggressions and encroachments of the Carolina colonists on
the east, and the ever specious wiles and suave allurements of the
French on the west, to win the Cherokees from their British alliance;
the impossibility, in the gentle patriarchal methods of the Cherokee
government, to control the wild young men of the tribe, who, as the
half-king, Atta-Kulla-Kulla said, "often acted like madmen rather than
people of sense" (and it is respectfully submitted that this peculiarity
has been observed in other young men elsewhere); the prophetic vision,
doubtless, of the eventual crushing of his people in the collisions of
the great international struggle of the Europeans for the possession of
this country,--all fostered tokens of time in the face of Colannah, and
bowed his straight back, and set an unwonted quiver in the nerves of his
old hand that had been firm in his heyday, and strong and crafty and
cruelly bloody. But his face now was softened with pleasure, and the
pride it expressed was almost tender.
"When a few years ago the Governor of South Carolina," he said
majestically, speaking in the Cherokee tongue but for the English names
(he pronounced the title "Goweno"), "offered to take some Cherokee
youths to train in his schools and make _scholars_ of them, I thanked
him with affection, for his thought was kind. But I told him that if he
would send some South Carolina youths to the Cherokee nation to be
trained, we would make _men_ of them!"
His blanket, curiously woven of feathers and wild hemp, requiring years
of labor in its intricate manufacture, fell away from one gaunt arm as
he lifted it to point with a kingly gesture at the young white man as
the illustration of his training. Every muscle of strength was on parade
in the splendid pose of hurling the great chungke-spear through the air,
as Otasite thus passed the interval while waiting the decision of the
umpire of the game. Then, with a laugh, oddly blent of affection and
pride, Colannah took his way down the slope and toward the
council-house: the council sat there much in these days of 1753, clouded
with smoke and perplexity.
Judging by this specimen of his athletic training to feats of prowess,
Colannah Gigagei might boast to the "Goweno" of South Carolina. It was
not, however, merely in muscle that the young captive excelled. As Abram
Varney thought of certain sterling manly traits of the highest type
which this poor waif had developed here in this incongruous environment,
one might suppose from the sheer force of heredity, he shook his head
silently, and his eyes clouded, the pulses of Charlestown still beating
in his veins. For he was wont to leave for months the treasures of his
trading-house, not merely a matter of trinkets and beads, but powder,
lead, and firearms, sufficient for accoutring an expedition for the
"war-path," and great store of cloths, cutlery, paints, in the charge of
this valiant gamester of chungke, stanch alike against friend and foe,
as safely as if its wealth were beneath his own eye. So insecure had
become the Cherokee allegiance to the government that it was impossible
now under its uncertain protection to retain white men from the colonies
here in his employ as agents and under-traders, or, indeed, those whose
interest and profits amounted to an ownership in a share of the stock.
The earlier traders in neighboring towns one by one had gone, affecting
a base several hundred miles nearer the white settlements. Some had
shifted altogether from the tribe, and secured a post among the
Chickasaws, who were indubitably loyal to the British. While their
withdrawal added to Varney's profits,--for each trader was allowed to
hold at this time a license only for two Indian towns, it being before
the date of the issuance of general licenses, and the custom which they
had relinquished, the barter with the Cherokees for deerskins, now came
from long distances, drawn as by a magnet to his trading-house at
Tennessee Town,--it had resulted in his isolation, and for years he had
been almost the only British subject west of the Great Smoky Mountains.
He had no fear of the Cherokees, however--not even should the political
sky, always somewhat overcast, become yet more lowering. He had long
been accustomed to these Indians, and he felt that he had fast friends
among them. His sane mercantile judgment appraised and appreciated the
added opportunities of his peculiar position, which he would not lightly
throw away, and the development of Otasite's incongruous commercial
values not only removed the possibility of loss during his absence, but
added to his facilities in enabling him to secure the fidelity of
Indians as packmen, hitherto impracticable, but now rendered to Otasite
as one of the tribe. He had recognized with satisfaction, mingled with
amusement, national traits in the boy, who, despite his Indian training,
would not, like them, barter strings of wampum measuring "from elbow to
wrist" without regard to the relative length of arm. Yet he had none of
the Indian deceit and treachery. He was blunt, sincere, and bold. His
alertness in computation gave Varney genuine pleasure, although they
wrangled much as to his method, for he used the Cherokee numeration, and
it set the trader's mercantile teeth on edge to hear twenty called
"_tahre skoeh_"--two tens.
"And why not?" Otasite would demand, full of faith in his own education.
"The Chickasaw will say '_pokoole toogalo_'--ten twos"--and he would
smile superior. This was his world, and these his standards--the
Cherokees and the Chickasaws!
He was not to be easily influenced or turned save by some spontaneous
acquiescence of his own mind, and Varney found himself counting "_skoeh
chooke kaiere_" (the old one's hundred) before he ever induced Otasite
to say instead "one thousand."
The boy even ventured on censorship in his turn. "You say 'Cherokee_s_'
and 'Chickasaw_s_' when you speak of the Tsullakee and the Chickasaw;
why don't you then say the English-_es_ and the French-_es_?" For the
plural designation of these tribes was a colonial invention.
His bulldog tenacity, his orderly instincts, his providence, so contrary
to the methods of the wasteful Indian, his cheerful industry, his
indomitable energy and perseverance,--all were so national that in days
gone past Varney used now and again to clap him on the shoulder with a
loud, careless vaunt, "British to the marrow!"
A fact, doubtless--and all of a sudden it had begun to seem a very
serious fact. So very serious, indeed, that the old trader did not
notice the crisis in the chungke-yard, the increasing excitement in the
crowds of spectators, the clamors presently when the game was declared a
draw and the bets off, the stir of the departing groups. It was silence
at last that smote upon his senses with the effect of interruption which
the continuance of sound had not been able to compass. He drew himself
up with a perplexed sigh, and looked drearily over the expanse of the
river. Its long glittering reaches were vacant, a rare circumstance, for
the Cherokees of that date were almost amphibious in habit, reveling in
the many lovely streams of their mountain country; on the banks their
towns were situated, and this fact doubtless contributed to the neatness
of their habitations and personal cleanliness, to which the travelers of
those times bear a surprised testimony. The light upon the water was
aslant now from a westering sun, and glittering on the snowy breasts of
a cluster of swans drifting, dreaming perhaps, on the current. The
scarlet boughs on the summit of Chilhowee were motionless against the
azure zenith. Not even the vaguest tissue of mist now lingered about the
majestic domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, painted clearly and
accurately in fine and minute detail in soft dense velvet blues against
the hard polished mineral blue of the horizon. The atmosphere was so
exquisitely luminous and pellucid that it might have seemed a fit medium
to dispel uncertainty in other than merely material subjects of
contemplation. Nevertheless he did not see his way clearly, and when he
came within view of his trading-house he paused as abruptly as if he had
found his path blocked by an obstacle.
There, seated on the step of the closed door which boasted the only lock
and key in Tennessee Town, or for the matter of that in all the stretch
of the Cherokee country west of the Great Smoky Range, was Otasite, the
incongruity of his auburn curls and his Indian headdress seeming a
trifle more pronounced than usual, since it had been for a time an
unfamiliar sight. He was awaiting the coming of the trader, and was
singing meanwhile in a loud and cheerful voice, "Drink with me a cup of
wine," a ditty which he had heard in his half-forgotten childhood. The
robust full tones gave no token of the draught made upon his endurance
by the heavy exercise of the day, but he seemed a bit languid from the
heat, and his doeskin shirt was thrown open at the throat, showing his
broad white chest, and in its centre the barbarous blue discolorations
of the "warrior's marks." These disfigurements, made by the puncturing
of the flesh with gars' teeth and inserting in the wound paint and
pitch, indelible testimonials to his deeds of courage and prowess,
Otasite valued as he did naught else on earth, and he would have parted
with his right hand as readily. The first had been bestowed upon him
after he had gone, a mighty gun-man, against the Muscogees. The others
he had won in the course of a long, furious, and stubborn contest of the
tribe with the Chickasaws, who, always impolitic, headlong, and brave,
were now reduced by their own valor in their many wars from ten thousand
fighting men to a few hundred. He had attained the "warrior's crown"
when he had shown their kindred Choctaws a mettle as fierce and a craft
as keen as their own. And now he was looking at Abram Varney with kindly
English eyes and an expression about the brow, heavily freckled, that
almost smote the tears from the elder man. The trader knew from long
experience what was coming, but suddenly he had begun to regard it
differently. Always upon the end of each journey from Charlestown he had
been met here within a day or two by Otasite on the same mission. The
long years as they passed had wrought only external changes since, as a
slender wistful boy of eleven years, heart-sick, homeless, forlorn,
friendless, save for his Indian captors, likely, indeed, to forget all
language but theirs, he had first come with his question, always in
English, always with a faltering eyelash and a deprecatory lowered
voice, "Did you hear anything in Charlestown of any people named
'Queetlee'?"
This was the distorted version of his father's name that Colannah had
preserved. As to the child himself, his memory had perhaps been shaken
by the events of that terrible night of massacre, which he only realized
as a frightful awakening from sleep to smoke, flames, screams, the
ear-splitting crack of rifle-shots at close quarters, the shock of a
sudden hurt--and then, after an interval of unconsciousness, a
transition to a new world of strange habitudes that grew speedily
familiar, and of unexpected kindness that became dear to a frank,
affectionate heart. Perhaps in the isolations of the frontier life he
had never heard his father addressed by his surname by a stranger; he
was called "Jan" by his wife, and her name was "Eelin," and this Otasite
knew, and this was all he knew, save that he himself also had been
called "Jan."
"They don't want you, my buck, or they would have been after you," the
trader used to reply, being harder, perhaps when he was younger.
Besides, he honestly thought the cadaverous brat, all legs, like a
growing colt, and skinny arms, was better off here in the free woodland
life which he himself considered no hardship, and affected long after
necessity or interest had dictated his environment. The little lad was
safe in the care of the powerful chief Colannah Gigagei of Tennessee
Town, who had adopted him, and who was a man of great force and
influence. Why should the child seek a home among his own people,
unwelcome doubtless, to eat the meagre crust of charity, or serve as an
overworked drudge somewhere on the precarious frontier? The trader did
not greatly deplore the lack of religious training, for in the remote
settlements this was often still an unaccustomed luxury, albeit some
thirty years had now gone by since Sir Francis Nicholson, then the
Governor, declared that no colony could flourish without a wider
diffusion of the gospel and education, and forthwith ordered spiritual
drill, so to speak, in the way of preaching and schooling. Although
himself described as "a profane, passionate, headstrong man, bred a
soldier," as if the last fact were an excuse for the former, he
contributed largely to the furtherance of these pious objects, "spending
liberally all his salary and perquisites of office," for which generous
trait of character an early and strait-laced historian is obviously of
the opinion that General Nicholson should have been suffered to swear in
peace and, as it were, in the odor of sanctity.
More than once, when in Charlestown, Varney, notwithstanding his
persuasions on the subject, had been minded to inquire concerning the
"Queetlees," who he understood from Colannah had come originally from
Cumberland in England. With his mercantile cronies he had canvassed the
question whether the queer, evidently distorted name could have been
"Peatley" or "Patey" or "Petrie,"--for the Cherokees always substituted
"Q" for "P," as the latter letter they could not pronounce,--and after
this transient consideration the matter would drop.
As the child, running about the Indian town with his new-found
playmates, grew robust and merry-hearted, and happiness, confidence, and
strength brought their embellishing influence to the expression of his
large dark gray eyes and straightened the nervous droop from his thin
little shoulders, the trader noticed casually once or twice how comely
the brat had become, and he experienced a fleeting, half-ridiculing pity
for his mother--how the woman would have resented and resisted the
persistent shearing and shaving of those silken, loosely twining red
curls! Then he thought of her no more. But when the child had come to
man's estate, when he was encased in a network of muscle like elastic
steel wires, when stature and strength had made him alike formidable and
splendid, when the development of his temperament illustrated virtues so
stanch that they seemed the complement of his physical endowment and a
part of his resolute personality, the old trader thought of the boy's
father, and thought of him daily--how the sturdy Cumbrian yeoman would
have rejoiced in so stalwart a son! Thus, with this vague bond of
sympathy with a man whom he had never seen, never known, so long ago, so
cruelly dead, this intuitive divination of his paternal sentiment,
Varney's fatherly attitude grew more definite daily and became
accustomed, and he was jealous of the influence of Colannah, who in turn
was jealous of his influence.
Now as Varney stood in the dusky trading-house among the kegs and bags
and bales of goods, the high peak of the interior of the roof lost in
the lofty shadows, he felt that he had been much in default in long-past
years, and he experienced a very definite pang of conscience as Otasite
swung abruptly around a stack of arms, a new rifle in his hand, the
flint and pan of which he had been keenly examining.
He lifted his eyes suddenly with that long-lashed dreary look of his
childhood.
"Did you hear of any Queetlees in Charlestown?" he asked.
"It is _you_ who should seek your kindred, Jan Queetlee!" Varney said
impulsively, calling him by his unaccustomed English name. "It is _you_
who should go to Charlestown to find the Queetlees!"
Otasite's face showed suddenly the unwonted expression of fear. He
recoiled abruptly, and Abram Varney was sensible of a deep depression.
It was as he had thought. The wish for restoration to those of his name
and his kindred which had animated the boy's earlier years had now
dwindled to a mere abstract sentiment of loyalty as of clanship, but was
devoid of expectation, of intention. All the members of his immediate
family had perished in the massacre, and he had been trained to regard
this as the fortunes of war, cherishing no personal antagonism, as
elsewhere among civilized people reconciliations are frequent between
the victors and the friends of the slain in battle. Moreover, he was not
brought close to it. The participators in the affray were of the distant
Ayrate settlements of the tribe, southeast of the mountains, and not
individualized. The Indians of Tennessee Town, which was then one of the
most remote of the Cherokee villages of the Ottare division, and this
perhaps was the reason it was selected as his home, were not concerned
in the foray, nor were any others of the Overhill towns. Thus he had
grown up without the thirst for vengeance, which showed how little the
methods of his Cherokee environment had influenced his heart. And truly
the far-away Queetlees, if any such were cognizant of his existence, had
troubled themselves nothing about it, and had infinitely less claim on
his gratitude and filial affection than Colannah. They had left him to
be as a waif, a slave. He had been reared as a son, nursed and tended,
fed and fostered, bedecked in splendor, armed in costly and formidable
wise, given command and station, carefully trained in all that the
Indian knew.
"Colannah would never consent!" he said at last.
Abram Varney afterward wondered why he should then have had a
vision--oh, so futile, so fleeting, so fantastic!--of the twenty, the
forty, nay, the sixty years that this man, so munificently endowed by
nature, might pass here among the grotesque, uncouth barbarities of the
savage Cherokee, while his heritage--his religion, the religion into
which he was born of Christian parents, his name and nation, his tongue
and station, his opportunity--doubtless some fair, valid, valuable
future--all lay there to the eastward but scant five hundred miles away
on the Carolina coast. He said as much, and the retort came succinctly,
"You live here!"
Otasite's English speech was as simple as a child's, but he thought as
diplomatically as Colannah himself, whom he esteemed the greatest man in
all the world, and he could argue in the strategic Cherokee method.
Nevertheless, to give him full sway, that everything possible might be
said in contravention of the proposition, the old trader lapsed into the
Indian speech, that was indeed from long usage like a mother tongue to
them both. He stayed here, he said, from choice, it was true, but for
the sake of the trade that gave him wealth, and with wealth he could
return to the colonies at any time, and go whither he would in all the
world. But Otasite was restricted; he had no goods for trade, no
adequate capital to invest; he could only return to the colonies while
young, to work, to make a way, to secure betimes a place appropriate to
his riper years. Even this could not be done without great
difficulty,--witness how many settlers came empty-handed to barely exist
on the frontier and wrest a reluctant living from the wilderness,--and
it could not be done at all without friends. Now he, Abram Varney, was
prepared to stand his friend; Otasite could take a place in the service
of the company, in the main depot of the trade at Charlestown. His
knowledge of the details of the business of which Abram Varney's long
absences had given him experience; of the needs of the Cherokee nation;
of the ever-continued efforts of the French traders, by means of the
access to the Overhill towns afforded by the Cherokee and Tennessee
rivers, despite the great distance from their settlements on the
Mississippi, to insinuate their supplies at lower prices, in the teeth
of the Cherokee treaty with the British monopolizing such traffic, and
bring down profits--all would have a special and recognized value and be
appreciated by his mercantile associates, who would further the young
man's advancement. Thence he could at his leisure make inquiries
concerning his father's family, and doubtless in the course of time be
restored to his kindred.
Otasite listened throughout with the courteous air of deliberation which
his Indian training required him to accord to any discourse, without
interruption, however unwelcome or trivial it might be esteemed. Then,
smiling slowly, he shook his head.
"You cannot be serious," he said. "It would break old Colannah's heart,
who has been like a father to me."
Abram Varney too had the British bulldog tenacity. "What will you do,
then," he asked slowly and significantly, "when Colannah takes up arms
against the British government? Will you fight men of your own blood?"
He was reinforced in this argument by the habit of thought of the
Indians--the absolute absence of tribal dissensions, of internecine
strife, so marked among the Cherokees: here no man's hand was lifted
against his brother.