the Cherokees against the British--his father's people, his mother's
people--no more than he could fight for the British against his adopted
tribe--the Cherokee--and he the "Man-killer!"
"They will fight each other," said Varney weightily, "and the day is not
far--the day is not far!"
For in 1753 the cumulative discontents of the tribe were near the
crisis, earnestly fostered by the French on the western boundaries, that
vast domain then known as Louisiana, toward whose siren voice the
Cherokees had ever lent a willing ear. The building by the British
government, two or three years later, of those great defensive works,
Fort Prince George and Fort Loudon, situated respectively at the eastern
and western extremities of the Cherokee territory, mounted with cannon
and garrisoned by British forces, served to hold them in check and
quieted them for a time, but only for a time. Jan Queetlee, by reason of
his close association with the chiefs, knew far more than Varney dreamed
of the bitterness roused in the hearts of the Indians by friction with
the government, the aggressions of the individual colonist, the
infringements of their privileges in the treaty, and in opposition the
influence of the ever seductive suavity of the French.
As with a sudden hurt, Jan Queetlee cried out with a poignant voice
against the government and its patent unfaith, striking his clinched
fist so heavily on the head of a keg of powder that the stout fibres of
the wood burst beneath the passionate blow, and in a moment he was
covered with the flying particles of the black dust. Realizing the
possibility of an explosion should a candle or a pipe be lighted here,
Varney did not wait for the return of one of the brawny packmen to
remove the keg to a cave beneath the trading-house, which he utilized
for storage as a cellar, but addressed himself to the job. Jan Queetlee
silently assisted, his face darker, more lowering with the thought in
his mind than with the smears of the powder.
Varney remembered this afterward, and that he himself, diverted by the
accident from the trend of his argument, had launched out in a tirade
against the government as they worked together, the young Briton's
energy, industry, and persistence so at variance with the aspect of his
tufted topknot of feathers on his auburn curls, and the big blue
warrior's marks on his broad white chest. For Varney too had his
grievances against the powers that were; but his woes were personal. He
vehemently condemned the reconciliation which the government had
effected between the Muscogees and the Cherokees, for although there
were more deerskins to be had for export when the Indian hunters were at
pacific leisure, Varney had considered the recent war between these
tribes an admirable vent for gunpowder and its profitable sale; and
since the savages must always be killing, it was manifestly best for all
concerned that they should kill each other. He could not sufficiently
deride the happy illustration which Governor Glen had given them (in his
fatuity, Varney thought) of the values of peace and concord. In the
presence of the two delegations the mediating Governor had taken an
arrow and shown them with what ease it could be broken; then how
impossible he found it to break a quiverful of arrows, thus
demonstrating the strength in union. Varney argued that the Indians
would readily perceive a further application of the principle and turn
it to account, combining against the colonists. In the same spirit he
animadverted upon a monopoly from which he was excluded in common with
the traders in general, and which had been granted to a mercantile
company seeking to establish posts among the Choctaws. The enterprise,
although favored by the government, obviously because, undertaken on a
scale of phenomenal magnitude, it promised to dislodge the French and
their long-established trade among the Choctaws, and bring that powerful
tribe to a British allegiance, had finally proved a failure; and with a
bitter joy in this fact he alternately contemned and pitied the
government, because it could not wrest this valuable opportunity from
the iron grasp of the "Mississippi Louisianians." He had, too, a
censorious word for the French commercially--called them "peddlers,"
celebrated their deceitful wiles, underrated the quality of their
cloths, and inconsistently berated them for their low prices, finding a
logical parity in all these matters in the tenets of their religion,
which they had so vainly and so zealously sought to instill into the
unreceptive hearts of the unimpressionable Choctaw.[4]
With the plethora of interest involved in these subjects, Varney grew
oblivious of the theme that had earlier occupied his mind. It recurred
no more to his thoughts until several days had passed. He then chanced
to be occupied with his new goods in his cavern. It was illumined only
from above; there was a trap-door in the floor of the trading-house, and
thence a pale tempered light drifted down, scarcely convenient, but
sufficient for his purposes. Once he noticed that a shadow flickered
across it. He experienced a momentary surprise, for he had left no one
in the building, and the outer door being locked, he imagined it could
not be forced without noise enough to rouse him. Again the shadow
flickered across the trap-door; then ensued a complete eclipse of the
scant glimmer of light. There was a step upon the ladder which served as
stairway--a man was descending.
Varney felt a sudden constriction about his throat. He realized an
impending crisis; the door above had been closed; by the sound he knew
that the ladder was now removed and laid upon the ground. He had an
idea--he could see naught--that the unknown invisible man had seated
himself on the ladder on the ground, where he remained motionless,
silent, in anger, in grief, or some strange savage whim hardly possible
for a civilized creature to divine.
The time that passed in this black nullity--he never could compute
it--moments, doubtless, but it seemed hours, tried to the utmost the
nerve of the entrapped trader, albeit inured by twenty years' experience
to the capricious temper of the Cherokee Indians. He felt he could
better endure the suspense could he only see his antagonist, identify
him, and thus guess his purpose, and shape his own course from his
knowledge of character. But with some acquired savage instinct he, too,
remained silent, null, passive; one might have thought him absent.
Perhaps his quiescence, indeed, fostered some doubt of his presence
here, for suddenly there sounded the rasping of flint on steel, the
spunk was aglow, and then in the timorous flame of the kindling candle,
taken from his own stores above, Varney recognized the face and figure
of the stately and imperious old chief Colannah. The next moment he
remembered something far more pertinent. He called out in an agitated
voice to the Indian to beware of the powder with which the place was
largely stocked.
"I came for that," said Colannah in Cherokee, with unaccustomed fingers
snuffing the wick as he had seen Varney perform the process, for the
Indians used torches and fires of split cane for purposes of
illumination.
"For God's sake, what have I done?" cried the trader in an agony of
terror, desirous to bring his accusation to the point as early as might
be and compass his release, thus forestalling the violent end of an
explosion.
"What do the English always?--you have robbed me!" said Colannah, the
light strong on his fierce indignant features, his garb of fringed
buckskin, his many rich strings of the ivory-like roanoke about his
neck, his gayly bedecked and feathered head, and in shadowy wise
revealing the rough walls of the cave, the boxes and bales of goods, the
reserve stock, as it were, the stands of arms, and the kegs and bags of
powder.
As Varney, half crouching on the ground, noted the latter in the dusk,
he cried out precipitately, "Robbed you of what? My God! let us go
upstairs. I'll give it back, whatever it is, twice over, fourfold! Don't
swing the candle around that way, Colannah! the powder will blow us and
the whole trading-house into the Tennessee River."
Colannah nodded acquiescence, the stately feathers on his head gleaming
fitfully in the clare-obscure of the cavern. "That is why I came! Then
the British government could demand no satisfaction for the life of the
British subject--an accident--the old chief of Tennessee Town killed
with him. And I should be avenged."
"For what? My God!" Varney had not before called upon the Lord for
twenty years. To hold a diplomatic conversation with an enraged wild
Indian, flourishing a lighted candle in a powder magazine, is calculated
to bring even the most self-sufficient and forgetful sinner to a sense
of his dependence and helplessness. The lighted candle was a more
subjugating weapon than a drawn sword. He had contemplated springing
upon the stanch old warrior, although, despite the difference in age, he
was no match for the Indian, in order to seek to extinguish it. He
reflected, however, that in the struggle a flaring spark might cause the
ignition of scattered particles of the powder about the floor, and thus
precipitate the explosion which he shuddered to imagine. "For what,
Colannah?" he asked again, in a soothing smooth cadence, "for what, my
comrade, my benefactor for years, my best-beloved friend--avenged on me
for what? Let's go upstairs!"
The flicker of the wavering candle showed a smile of contempt on the
face of the angry Indian for a moment, and admonished Varney that in
view of the Cherokees' relish of the torture his manifestations of
anxiety but prolonged his jeopardy. It brought, too, a fuller
realization of the gravity of the situation in that the Indian should so
valiantly risk himself. He evidently intended to take the trader's life,
but in such wise that no vengeance for his death should fall upon the
Cherokee nation. Abram Varney summoned all his courage, which was not
inconsiderable, and had been cultivated by the wild and uncertain
conditions of his life. Assured that he could do naught to hasten his
release, he awaited the event in a sort of stoical patience, dreading,
however, every motion, every sound, the least stir setting his expectant
nerves aquiver. Silence, quiescence, brought the disclosure earlier than
he had feared.
"When I took the boy Jan Queetlee--why do I call him thus, instead of by
the name he has earned for himself, the noble Otasite of Tennessee
Town?"--the old chief began as deliberately, as disregardfully of the
surroundings as if seated under the boughs of one of the giant oaks on
the safe slopes of Chilhowee yonder--"when I took him away from the
braves who had overcome the South Carolina stationers, I owed him no
duty. He was puny and ill and white and despised! You British say the
Indian has no pity. A man's son or brother or father or mother has
claims upon him. Otasite was naught to me, a mere _eeankke_!" (a
captive). "I owed the child no duty. My love was voluntary. I gave it a
free gift; no duty! And he was little, and drooping, and meagre, and ill
all the time! But he grew; soon no such boy in the Cherokee nation, soon
hardly such a warrior in all the land--not even Otasite of Watauga, nor
yet Otasite of Eupharsee; perhaps at his age Oconostota excelled"
(Oconostota always was preeminently known as the "Great Warrior"). He
paused to shake his head and meditate on difficult comparisons and
instances of prowess. After an interval which, long enough, seemed to
the trembling trader illimitable, he recommenced abruptly: "Says the
Goweno long time ago to me, 'Is not there a white youth among you?' I
say, 'He is content; he has no white friends, it seems.' Says the Goweno
to me, 'Ah, ah, we must look into this!' and says no more."
Colannah flung back his head and laughed so long and so loud that every
echo of the sarcastic guttural tones, striking back from the stone walls
of the cavern, smote Varney with as definite a shock as a blow.
"And now," the Cherokee resumed, with a changed aspect and a pathetic
cadence, "I am an old man, and I lean upon Otasite. My sons are all
dead--one in the wars with the Muscogee and two slain by the Chickasaw.
And the last he said to me, with his lingering latest breath, loath to
go and leave me desolate, 'But you have an adopted son, you have the
noble Otasite.' And now," his voice was firm again, "if I have him not,
I go too, and you go. We go together."
"I will not advise him to quit the nation--never again!" cried Varney,
suddenly enlightened, fervently repudiating his interference. "Since you
disapprove, he shall not return to Carolina. He _cannot_ go without
me--my help; he could not find a place--a home. Bold and fine as he is
here, he would be strange there; he knows naught of the ways of the
colonists. He would be poor, despised, while here he has been like the
first, the best. His pride could never stoop to a life like a slave's;
his pride would break his heart. Let me undo the mischief I have
wrought; let me unsay the unthinking, foolish words I have spoken."
It was perhaps with the faith that the artful trader could best turn the
young fellow's mind back to its wonted content, as his crafty arguments
had already so potently aroused this wild, new dissatisfaction, that
Colannah at last consented to liberate Varney for this essay, not
without a cogent reminder that he would be held responsible for its
failure. And indeed in recanting his former urgency, when he sought out
Otasite, Varney exerted himself to the utmost.
"You are satisfied here. You know the life. Like me, you love it. If I,
who can choose, prefer it, why not you?"
But Otasite shook his head.
"When I talk to you of the colonies I speak as a man does of a dream,"
Varney continued. "It is something true and something false. I add here
and I let slip there to make out the connection, and give the symmetry
of truth to the picture. But did I ever tell you how they love money in
the colonies, how they cheat and strive and slave their lives away to
add to their store; how they reverence and worship the wealth of others
till it seems that a rich man can do no wrong--if he is rich enough? Did
I ever tell you this? The poor, they are despised for being poor, and
they are let to suffer. Here poverty is not permitted. If a man lose his
dwelling by fire, the town builds him another house. You know this. If a
man fail in his winter hunt, the others give of their abundance. Here
one is rated by his personal worth. Here the deed is held to be fine,
not the mere thing. Here you are valued as the great Otasite, and all
men give you honor for your courage. There you are Jan Queetlee, a
penniless clod, and all men despise you and pass you by."[5]
But again Otasite shook his head.
It was no spurious flare of ambition, ineffectual, illusory; no
discontented yearning for a different, a wider life that the trader's
ill-advised words had roused. That sentiment of loyalty to the British
government, which had never sought to claim Jan Queetlee as a subject,
seemed bred in his bone and born in his blood. Perhaps it was the stuff
of which long afterward the Tories of the Revolution were made. He could
not lift his hand against this aloof, indifferent fetich. And yet take
part against the Cherokees, whom he loved as they loved him! For with
his facilities for understanding the trend of the politics of the day he
could no longer blind himself to the approach of the war of the tribe
with the British government, which, indeed, came within the decade. The
sons of Colannah, slain in the cruel wars with other Indians, had been
to him like brothers, and in their loss he had felt his full and bitter
share of the grief of a common household. Even yet he and Colannah were
wont to sadly talk of them with that painful elimination of their names,
a mark of Indian reverence to the dead, substituting the euphemism "the
one who is gone," and linger for hours over the fire at night or on the
shady river-bank in sunlit afternoons, rehearsing their deeds and
recalling their traits, and repeating their sayings with that blending
of affectionate pride and sorrow that is the consolation of bereavement
when time has somewhat softened its pangs and made memory so dear. And
Colannah had been like a father--it seemed to Jan Queetlee as if he had
had no other father. He could not leave Colannah, old, desolate, and
alone. Yet the war was surely coming apace, as they both knew, a war
which already tore his heart in sunder, in which he could evade taking
part against his own--his own of both factions--only by going at once
and going far. He could decide no such weighty matter.
At last he determined he would leave it to fate, to chance, showing how
truly a gambler his Indian training had made him. He would stake the
crisis on a game at chungke; if he won, as he told Varney, he would go
to Carolina, and take sides with neither faction; if he lost, he would
cast his future with the Cherokee nation.
Varney, thoroughly uneasy, had come to feel a personal interest
involved. If Otasite quitted the country, he felt his life would hardly
be safe here, since the craft of Colannah had drawn from the
unsuspecting young fellow the details of the plan of removal to
Charlestown which he had proposed. And yet Varney himself was averse to
any change, unless it was indeed necessary. When put to the test he felt
he would rather live in the Cherokee nation than anywhere else in all
the world, and he valued his commerce with the tribe and his license
from the government, under duly approved bond and security, to conduct
that traffic in Tennessee Town and Tellico as naught else on earth. He
manifested so earnest and genuine a desire to repair the damage of his
ill-starred suggestion that Colannah, showing his age in his haste and
his tremulousness and excitement, disclosed to him in a flutter of
triumphant glee that he had a spell to work which naught could
withstand--a draught from Herbert's Spring to offer to Otasite. Thither
some fifty miles he had dispatched a runner for a jar of the magic
water, and after drinking of it Otasite could not quit for seven years
the Cherokee nation even if he would.
It was in the council-house that the mystic beverage was quaffed. There
had been guests--head men from Great Tellico and Citico--during the
afternoon, received in secret conclave, and now that their deliberations
were concluded and they were gone, Otasite, not admitted to the council,
being one of those warriors who did the fighting of the battles devised
by the "beloved men," strolled into the deserted, dome-like place. Its
walls, plastered with red clay, were yet more ruddy for a cast of the
westering sun. The building was large enough to accommodate several
hundred people, and around the walls were cane seats, deftly constructed
and artificially whitened, making, according to an old writer, "very
genteel settees or couches." Tired with the stress of mental depression
and anxiety as physical effort could not tame him, and vaguely prescient
of evil, Otasite had flung himself down on one of these, which was
spread with dressed panther-skins, his hands clasped under his head, his
scalp-lock of two auburn curls dangling over them.
Through the tall narrow doorway the autumnal landscape was visible,
blazing with all the fervors of summer; the mountains, however, were
more softly blue, the sunlight of a richer glister; the river, now
steel, now silver, now amber, reflected the atmosphere as a sensitive
soul reflects the moods of those most dear; the forests, splendid with
color, showed the lavish predominance of the rich reds characteristic of
the Chilhowee woods; a dreamlike haze over all added a vague ideality
that made the scene like some fondest memory or a glamourous forecast.
"_Akoo-e-a!_" (summer yet!) said Colannah, his eyes too on the scene, as
he sat on a buffalo-rug in the centre of the floor drawing in the last
sweet fragrant breaths from his long-stemmed pipe, curiously wrought of
stone, for in the manufacture of these pipes the Cherokees of that day
were said to excel all other Indians. The young Briton experienced no
mawkish pang to note that it was ornamented at one end by a dangling
scalp, greatly treasured, the interior of the skin painted red for its
preservation. He had, in fact, a pipe of his own with a scalp much like
it. Indeed, his trophy was a fine specimen, and it had been a feat to
take it, for it had once covered a hot Chickasaw head.
"_Akoo-e-a!_ the day is warm!" remarked Colannah. He lifted his storied
pipe, and with its long stem silently motioned to a young Indian woman,
indicating a great jar of water. She quickly filled one of those quaint
bowls, or cups, of the Cherokee manufacture, and advanced with it to
Otasite; but the proffer was in the nature of an interruption of his
troubled thoughts, and he irritably waved her away.
"I am displeased with you," said Colannah sternly, lifting his dark,
deeply sunken eyes to where the "Man-killer" lay at full length on the
cane settee. "You set me aside. You have no thoughts for me--no words.
Yet you can talk when you go to the trading-house. You have words and to
spare for the trader. You can drink with him. You can sing, 'Drink with
me a cup of wine.'" He lifted his raucous old voice in ludicrous
travesty of the favorite catch, for sometimes the two Britons, so
incongruous in point of age, education, sentiment, and occupation,
cemented their bond as compatriots by carousing together in a mild way.
But this ebullition of temper had naught of the ludicrous in Jan
Queetlee's estimation. He was pierced to the heart.
"_Aketohta!"_ (Father!) he cried reproachfully. He had sprung to his
feet, and stood looking down at the old chief, who would not look at
him, but kept his eyes on the landscape without, now and then drawing a
long, lingering whiff from his pipe.
"_Aketohta_! I have no thought for _you_!--who alone have taken thought
for me! I have words for the trader and silence for _you_! You say keen
things, and you know they are not true! You know that I had rather drink
water with you than wine with him. I am not thirsty; but since it is you
who offer it"--His expression changed; he broke into sudden pleasant
laughter, and with a rollicking stave of the song, "Drink with me a cup
of wine," he caught the bowl from the girl's hand and drained it at a
draught.
"_Seohsta-quo_!" (Good!) cried Colannah, visibly refreshed, as if his
own thirst were vicariously slaked. But Otasite stood blankly staring,
the bowl motionless in his hand. "It is well for wine to be old," he
said wonderingly, "but not water."
For his palate was accustomed to the exquisite sparkle and freshness of
the mountain fountains, and this had come from far.
The crafty Colannah stolidly repressed his delight, save for the glitter
in his eyes fixed on the azure and crimson and silver landscape
glimmering beyond the dusky portals of the terra-cotta walls. "_Nawohti!
nawohti_!" (Rum!) he said, with an affectation of severity. "You drink
too much of the trader's strong physic! You have no love now for the
sweet, clear water." And he shook his head with the uncompromising
reproof of a mentor of present times as he growled disjointedly,
"_Nawohti! nawohti_!"