await with what patience he might the appearance of the British
vanguard, who in the sheer vaunt of victory would march from one end of
the unresisting territory to the other, that all might witness and bow
before the triumph of the royal authority. As yet remote from the
advance of the troops, he dared not quit his captor in these sequestered
regions lest he fall into the power of more inimical Cherokees, maddened
by disaster, overwhelmed in ruin, furious, and thirsting for revenge for
the slaughter of their nearest and dearest, and the ashes of their
homes.
Attusah made known his reason for his own uncharacteristic leniency to a
soldier of this ruthless army, as they sat together by the shady
river-side. He went through the dumb show of repeatedly offering to his
captive guest the fish they had caught, pressing additional portions
upon him, laughing significantly and joyously throughout his mimicry.
Then suddenly grave, he seized the Highlander's left arm, giving it an
earnest grasp about the wrist, the elbow, then close to the shoulder to
intimate that he spared him for his gift to the needy and helpless.
But Kenneth MacVintie, remembering his ill-starred generosity, flushed
to the eyebrows, so little it became his record as a soldier, he
thought, that he should be captured and stand in danger of his life by
reason of the unmilitary performance of feeding a babbling pappoose.
Attusah, however, could but love him for it; he loved the soldier for
his kind heart, he said. For great as he himself was, the Northward
Warrior, he had known how bitter it was to lack kindness.
"It is not happy to be an ada-wehi!" he confessed, "for those who
believe fear those who do not!"
And tearing open the throat of his bead-embroidered shirt to reveal the
frightful gashes of the wounds in his breast, he told the story of his
legal death, with tears in his gay eyes, and a tremor of grief in the
proud intonations of his voice, that thus had been requited a feat, the
just guerdon of which should have been the warrior's crown,--in the
bestowal of which, but for a cowardly fear of the English, all the tribe
would have concurred.
"_Akee-o-hoosa!_" (I am dead!) he said, pointing at the scars. And the
Highlander felt that death had obviously been in every stroke, and
hardly wondered that they who had seen the blows dealt should now
account the appearance of the man a spectral manifestation, his unquiet
ghost.
Then, Attusah's mood changing suddenly, "_Tsida-wei-yu!_" (I am a great
ada-wehi!) he boasted airily.
That he was truly possessed of magical powers seemed to MacVintie least
to be questioned when he angled, catching the great catfish, after the
manner of the Indians, with the open palm of his hand. In these fresh
June mornings he would dive down in some deep shady pool under the dark
ledges of rock where the catfish are wont to lurk, his right arm wrapped
to the fingers with a scarlet cloth. Tempted by the seeming bait, the
catfish would take the finger-tips deep in its gullet, the strong hand
would instantly clinch on its head, and Attusah would rise with his
struggling gleaming prey, to be broiled on the coals for breakfast.
But for these finny trophies they too might have suffered for food, in
the scarcity of game and the lack of powder; but thus well fed, the two
enemies, like comrades, would loiter beside their camp-fire on the
banks, awaiting as it were the course of events. The dark green
crystalline lustre of the shady reaches of the river, where the gigantic
trees hung over the current, contrasted with the silver glister of the
ripples far out, shimmering in the full glare of the sun. The breeze,
exquisitely fragrant, would blow fresh and free from the dense forests.
The mockingbird, a feathered miracle to the Highlander, would sway on a
twig above them and sing jubilantly the whole day through and deep into
the night. The distant mountains would show-softly blue on the horizon
till the sun was going down, when they would assume a translucent
jewel-like lustre, amethystine and splendid. And at night all the stars
were in the dark sky, for the moon was new.
So idle they were they must needs talk and talk. But this was an
exercise requiring some skill and patience on the part of each, for the
Scotchman could only by the closest attention gather the meaning of the
Cherokee language as it was spoken, and the magic of the ada-wehi
compassed but scanty English. Attusah was further hampered by the
necessity of pausing now and then to spit out the words of the tongue he
abhorred as if of an evil taste. Nevertheless it was by means of this
imperfect linguistic communication that Kenneth MacVintie, keenly alive
to aught of significance in this strange new world, surrounded with
unknown unmeasured dangers, was enabled to note how the thoughts of his
companion ran upon the half king Atta-Kulla-Kulla. Yet whenever a
question was asked or curiosity suggested, the wary Attusah diverted the
topic. This fact focused the observation of the shrewd, pertinacious
Scotchman. At first he deemed the special interest lay in a jealousy of
artistic handicraft.
Atta-Kulla-Kulla's name implied the superlative of a skillful carver in
wood, Attusah told him one day.
"An' isna he a skilly man?" MacVintie asked.
"Look at that!" cried the braggart, holding aloft his own work. He was
carving a pipe from the soft stone of the region, which so lends itself
to the purpose, hardening when heated. "_Tsida-wei-yu!_"
There was a long pause while the mockingbird sang with an exuberant
magic which might baffle the emulation of any ada-wehi of them all.
MacVintie had almost forgotten the episode when Attusah said suddenly
that the colonists translated the name of Atta-Kulla-Kulla as the
"Little Carpenter."
"Hegh! they hae a ship named for his honor!" exclaimed the Highlander.
"I hae seen the Little Carpenter in the harbor in Charlestoun, swingin'
an' bobbin' at her cables, just out frae the mither country! Her
captain's name wull be Maitland."
This evidence of the importance of the Cherokee magnate in the opinion
of the British colonists did not please the ada-wehi. He spat upon the
ship with ostentatious contempt as it were, and then went on silently
with his carving.
The mockingbird paused to listen to a note from the hermit thrush in the
dense rhododendron, still splendidly abloom on the mountain slope. The
Scotchman's eyes narrowed to distinguish if the white flake of light in
the deep green water across a little bay were the reflection of the
flower known as the Chilhowee lily, or the ethereal blossom itself.
Attusah's mind seemed yet with the seagoing craft. He himself knew the
name of another ship, he said presently; and the Highlander fancied that
he ill liked to be outdone in knowledge of the outer world.
But it was immediately developed that in this ship Atta-Kulla-Kulla had
sailed to England many years before to visit King George II. in
London.[8] Attusah could not at once anglicize the name "Chochoola," but
after so long a time MacVintie was enabled to identify the Fox, then a
noted British man-of-war.
In these leisurely beguilements the days passed, until one morning
Attusah's fears and presentiments were realized in their seizure by a
party of Cherokees, who swooped down upon their hermitage and bore them
off by force to the council-house of the town of Citico, where
Atta-Kulla-Kulla and a number of other head men had assembled to discuss
the critical affairs of the tribe, and decide on its future policy.
So critical indeed was the situation that it seemed to MacVintie that
they might well dispense with notice of two factors so inconsiderable in
the scale of national importance as the ada-wehi and his captive. But
one was a British prisoner, calculated to expiate in a degree with his
life the woe and ruin his comrades had wrought. The more essential was
this course since the triumph of putting him to the torture and death
would gratify and reanimate many whose zeal was flagging under an
accumulation of anguish and helpless defeat, and stimulate them to
renewed exertions. For before the Cherokees would sue for peace they
waited long in the hope that the French would yet be enabled to convey
to them a sufficient supply of powder to renew and prosecute the war.
As to the arrest of the other, Attusah of Kanootare, this was necessary
in the event that submission to the British government became
inevitable. For since he claimed to be a ghost, surely never was spectre
so reckless. He had indeed appeared to so many favored individuals that
the English might fairly have cause to doubt his execution in
satisfaction of his crimes against the government; and the breach of
faith on the part of the Cherokee rulers in this conspicuous instance
might well preclude the granting of any reasonable terms of peace now,
and subject the whole nation to added hardship.
This was the argument advanced by Atta-Kulla-Kulla as he stood and
addressed his colleagues, who sat on buffalo-skins in a circle on the
floor of the council-house of Citico,--the usual dome-shaped edifice,
daubed within and without with the rich red clay of the country, and
situated on a high artificial mound in the centre of the town.
The council-fire alone gave light, flashing upon the slender figure and
animated face of this chief, who, although of slighter physique and
lower stature than his compeers, wielded by reason of his more
intellectual qualities so potent an influence among them.
The oratorical gifts of Atta-Kulla-Kulla had signally impressed
Europeans of culture and experience.[9] Imagine, then, the effect on the
raw young Highland soldier, hearing the flow of language, watching the
appropriate and forceful gestures, noting the responsive sentiment in
the fire-lit countenances of the circle of feather-crested Indians, yet
comprehending little save that it was a masterpiece of cogent reasoning,
richly eloquent, and that every word was as a fagot to the flames and a
pang to the torture.
Attusah of Kanootare, the Northward Warrior, rose to reply in defense of
himself and his captive, and Atta-Kulla-Kulla listened as courteously as
the rest, although the speech of the ada-wehi depended, like the oratory
of many young men, chiefly on a magical assurance. He had an ally,
however, in the dominant superstition of the Cherokees. Numbers of the
warriors now ascribed their recent disasters to the neglect of various
omens, or the omission of certain propitiatory observances of their
ancient religion, or the perpetration of deeds known to be adversely
regarded by the ruling spirits of war.
Moreover, they were all aware that this man had been killed, left for
dead, reported as dead to the British government, which accepted the
satisfaction thus offered for his crimes,--the deeds themselves,
however, accounted by him and the rest of the tribe praiseworthy and the
achievements of war.
And here he was protesting that he was dead and a ghost. "_Akee-o-hoosa!
Akee-o-hoosa! Tsida-wei-yu!_" he cried continually.
Indeed, this seemed to be the only reasonable method of accounting for
the renewed presence in the world of a man known to be dead. This was
his status, he argued. He was a dead man, and this was his captive. The
Cherokee nation could not pretend to follow with its control the actions
of a dead man. They themselves had pronounced him dead. He had no place
in the war. He had been forbidden, on account of his official death, to
compete for the honors of the campaign. Apart from his former status as
a Cherokee, merely as a supernatural being, a spirit, an ada-wehi, he
had captured this British soldier, who was therefore the property of a
dead man. And the Cherokee law of all things and before all things
forbade interference with the effects of the dead.
Despite the curling contempt on the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council
did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered
the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the
details of this choice argument. There was an illogical inversion of
values in the experience of the tribe, and while they could not now
accept the worthless figments of long ago, it was not vouchsafed to them
to enjoy the substantial merits of the new order of things. Reason,
powder, diplomacy, had brought the Cherokee nation to a point of
humiliation to which superstition, savagery, and the simplicities of the
tomahawk had never descended in "the good old times." Reason was never
so befuddled of aspect, civilization never so undesired as now. In their
own expanded outlook at life, however, they could not afford to ignore
the views of Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the advocate of all the newer methods, in
so important a matter as the release of a British prisoner of war on the
strange pretext that his captor was a ghost of a peculiar spectral
power, an ada-wehi, although this course would have been more agreeable
to the "old beloved" theories of their halcyon days of eld, when the
Cherokee name was a terror and a threat.
Therefore, averse as they were to subscribe to the modern methods which
had wrought them such woe and humiliation and defeat, the dominant
superstition of the race now fell far short of the fantasy of liberating
a British prisoner at this crisis under the influence of any spectral
manifestation whatsoever. The council was obviously steeled against this
proposition, as MacVintie shortly perceived, and equally determined that
the ada-wehi must needs exert phenomenal and magical powers indeed to
avoid yet making good the nation's pledge of his death to the British
government, and becoming a ghost in serious earnest. MacVintie's heart
sank within him as he noted the hardening of the lines of their grave
harsh faces and the affirmative nodding of the feather-crested heads,
conferring together, as the decision was reached.
It accorded, however, with their ancient custom to postpone over a night
the execution of any sentence of special weight, and therefore the
council adjourned to the next day, the two prisoners being left in the
deserted building, each securely bound with a rope to a pillar of the
series which upheld the roof of the strange circular edifice. This
colonnade stood about four feet from the wall, and the interval between
was occupied by a divan, fashioned of dexterously woven cane, extending
around the room; and as the prisoners could seat themselves here, or lie
at full length, they were subjected to no greater hardship than was
consistent with their safe custody.
A sentinel with his musket on his shoulder stood at the door, and the
sun was going down. Kenneth MacVintie could see through the open portal
the red glow in the waters of the Tennessee River. Now and then a flake
of a glittering white density glided through it, which his eyes,
accustomed to long distances, discriminated as a swan. Thunder-heads,
however, were gathering above the eastern slopes and the mountains were
a lowering slate-toned purple, save when a sudden flash of lightning
roused them to a vivid show of green.
The dull red hue of the interior of the council-house darkened
gradually; the embers of the council-fire faded into the gray ash, and
the night came sullen and threatening before its time.
The young Highlander sought to bend his mind to the realization that his
days on earth were well-nigh ended, and that it behooved him to think on
the morrow elsewhere. He had an old-fashioned religious faith presumed
to be fitted for any emergency, but in seeking to recall its dogmas and
find such consolation in its theories as might sustain a martyr at the
stake, he was continually distracted with the momentous present.
The two prisoners could no longer see each other, and the little
gestures and significant glances which had supplemented their few words,
and made up for the lack of better conversational facilities were
impracticable in the darkness.
The silent obscurity was strangely lonely. MacVintie began to doubt if
the other still lived.
"Attusah!" he said at length.
"_Tsida-wei-yu!_" (I am a great ada-wehi) murmured the ghost
mechanically.
He was quite spent, exhausted by the effort to logically exist as a
ghost in a world which had repudiated him as a live man.
MacVintie, who found it hard enough to reconcile himself to die once,
felt a poignant sympathy for him, who must needs die again. But the
Highlander could not think. He could not even pray. He desisted from the
fitful effort after a time. He had a depressing realization that a good
soldier relies upon the proficiency acquired by the daily drill to serve
in an emergency, not a special effort at smartness for an occasion. The
battle or the review would show the quality of the stuff that was in
him.
Despite the stunned despair which possessed his mental faculties, his
physical senses were keenly acute. He marked unconsciously the details
of the rising of the wind bringing the storm hitherward. A searching
flash of lightning showed the figure of the sentinel, half crouching
before the blast, at his post in the open portal. The rain was presently
falling heavily, and ever and anon a great suffusion of yellow glare in
its midst revealed the myriads of slanting lines as it came. He inhaled
the freshened fragrance it brought from the forests. He noted the
repeated crash of the thunder, the far-away rote of the echoes, the
rhythmic beat of the torrents on the ground, and their tumultuous swift
dash down the slope of the dome-shaped roof, and suddenly among these
turmoils,--he could hardly believe his ears,--a mild little whimper of
protest.
The sentinel heard it too. MacVintie saw his dark figure in the doorway
as he turned his head to listen. A woman's voice sounded immediately,
bidding a child beware how he cried, lest she call the great white owl,
the Oo-koo-ne-kah, to catch him!
The flare of the lightning revealed a pappoose the next moment, upright
in his perpendicular cradle, as it swung on his mother's back, in the
drenching downpour of the rain, for the woman had advanced to the
sentinel and was talking loudly and eagerly.
Kenneth silently recognized the small creature who had moved him to a
trivial charity which had resulted in so strangely disproportionate a
disaster. Doubtless, however, the squaws would never have been able to
return to their accustomed place but for the food which he had given
them, sustaining them on the journey home.
It would imply some mission of importance surely, he thought, to induce
the woman to expose the child to a tempest like this; and indeed the
pappoose, buffeted by the wind, the rain full in his face, lifted up his
voice again in a protest so loud and vehement that his mother was
enabled to see the great white owl, whose business it is to remove
troublesome little Cherokees from the sphere of worry of their elders,
already winging his way hither. One might wonder if the Oo-koo-ne-kah
would do worse for him than his maternal guardian, but pelted by the
pitiless rain he promptly sank his bleatings to a mere babble of a
whimper. Thereby Kenneth was better enabled to hear what the woman was
saying to the sentinel.
An important mission indeed, as MacVintie presently gathered, for she
must needs lift her voice stridently to be heard above the din of the
elements. Some powder, only a little it was true, had been sent by the
French to the town, and a share had been left at the house of the
sentinel that night in the general distribution. But there was no one at
home. All his family were across the mountains, whither, according to
the custom of the Cherokees, they had gone to find and bring back the
body of his brother, who had been killed in the fight at Etchoee. And
the leak in the roof! She, his nearest neighbor, had just bethought
herself of the leak in the roof! Would not the powder, the precious
powder, be ruined? Had he not best go to see at once about it?
He hesitated, letting the butt of his gun sink to the ground. She seized
the weapon promptly. She would stand guard here till he returned, she
promised. The prisoners were bound. They could not move. It would
require but an instant's absence,--and the powder was so scarce, so
precious!
The next moment the sentinel was gone! The darkness descended, doubly
intense, after a succession of electric flashes; the rain fell with
renewed force. MacVintie suddenly heard the babbling whimper quite close
beside him, somewhat subdued by a fierce maternal admonition to listen
to the terrible voice of the Oo-koo-ne-kah, coming to catch a Cherokee
cry-baby!
A stroke of a knife here and there, and the two prisoners were freed
from their bonds. The Highland soldier did not know whether Attusah
looked back while in flight, but his last glimpse of the Cherokee town
of Citico showed the broad glare of lightning upon the groups of conical
roofs in the slanting lines of rain; the woman on the high mound at the
portal of the council-house, with the pappoose on her back and the gun
in her hand; the sentinel once more climbing the ascent to his post. And
the last words he heard were chronicling the adverse sentiments
entertained toward bad children by the Oo-koo-ne-kah, the mysterious
great white owl.
The escape was not discovered till the next day, and was universally
attributed to the magic of the ada-wehi. Even the sentinel himself
doubted naught, having left a trusty deputy in his stead, for the
devotion of the Cherokee women to the tribal cause was proverbial, and
gratitude, even for a rescue from starvation, is not usually an urgent
motive power.
Kenneth MacVintie was seen again in the Cherokee country only in his
place as a marker in the march of his regiment, and as he was evidently
exceedingly desirous to permit no one to incur penalties for his
liberation, his officers spared him questions concerning his escape,
save in a general way.
When the ada-wehi next reappeared in a remote town of the district and
was sedulously interrogated as to how his freedom had been achieved, he
threw out his right hand at arm's length in his old, boastful, airy
gesture.
"_Cheesto kaiere!_" (An old rabbit!) he exclaimed. "A little old rabbit
ran down the slope. I turned the soldier into a rabbit, and he ran away.
And I turned myself into a fish, and I swam away. Ha! _Tsida-wei-yu!_"
(I am a great ada-wehi!)
THE FATE OF THE CHEERA-TAGHE
Along the old "trading-path" that was wont to wind from the Cherokee
country among the innumerable spurs and gorges of the Great Smoky
Mountains, and through the dense primeval forests full five hundred
miles to the city of Charlestown, was visible for many years, on the
banks of the Little Tennessee, an "old waste town," as the abandoned
place was called in the idiom of the Indians. An early date it might
seem, in 1744, in this new land, for the spectacle of the ruins of a
race still in possession, still unsubdued. Nearly twenty years later,
after the repeated aggressive expeditions which the British government
sent against the Cherokees, such vestiges became more numerous. This
"waste town," however, neither fire nor sword had desolated, and the
grim deeds of British powder and lead were still of the future. The
enemy came in more subtle sort.
Only one of the white pack-men employed to drive a score of well-laden
horses semi-annually from Charlestown to a trading-station farther along
on the Great Tennessee--then called the Cherokee River--and back again
used to glower fearfully at the "waste town" as he passed. He had ample
leisure for speculation, for the experienced animals of the pack-train
required scant heed, so regularly they swung along in single file, and
the wild whoops of their drivers were for the sake of personal
encouragement and the simple joy which very young men find in their own
clamor. It grew specially boisterous always when they neared the site of
Nilaque Great, the deserted place, as if to give warning to any vague
spiritual essences, unmeet for mortal vision, that might be lurking
about the "waste town," and bid them avaunt, for the place was reputed
haunted.