Indians as intrusive, and, keeping the secret, they made haste to get
out of the country with even more speed than their wont. Cuthbert
Barnett, however, carried his information to the authorities in
Charlestown, who, promptly acting upon it, solved the mystery of the
fate of the cheera-taghe.
Since peace with the Cherokees was becoming more and more precarious,
some satisfaction was experienced by the Royal Governor of South
Carolina, James Glen, at that time, in being able to urge upon the
attention of the head-men of the tribe the fact that, although the two
white strangers had obviously been captured in the act of robbing
Cherokee soil of its gold, they had as evidently been unarmed, and the
Irishman, a British subject, had been shot down by one of the
cheera-taghe, for there was the bullet still imbedded firmly in the
sternum of his broad chest. Thus a political crisis, which the event had
threatened, was averted.
Despite the evil chance that had befallen the gold-seekers, now widely
bruited abroad, stealthy efforts were ever and anon made by the hardy
frontier prospectors of those days, already busy in the richer deposits
of the Ayrate division of the Cherokee country, to pan also the sands of
the banks of the Tennessee; but the yield here was never again worth the
work, and the interest in the possibility of securing "pay gravel" in
this region died out, until the later excitements of the discovery of
the precious metal in a neighboring locality, Coca Creek, during the
last century.
The old "waste town" long remained a ruin, and at last fell away to a
mere memory.
THE BEWITCHED BALL-STICKS
At no time in the history of mankind, except during that brief
Paradisiac courtship in the Garden of Eden, has the heart of a lover
been altogether unvexed by the presence, or even the sheer suspicion, of
that baleful being commonly denominated "another." Here, however, it
would seem that the field must needs be almost as clear. The aspect of
the world was as if yet young; the swan, long ago driven from the
rivers, still snowily drifted down the silver Tennessee; the deer, the
bear, the buffalo, the wolf in countless hordes roamed at will
throughout the dense primeval wildernesses; the line of Cherokee towns
along the banks represented almost the only human habitations for many
hundred miles, but to Tus-ka-sah the country seemed to groan under a
surplus of population, for there yet dwelt right merrily at Ioco Town
the youthful Amoyah, the gayest of all gay birds, and a painful sense of
the superfluous pressed upon the brain at the very sight of him.
This trait of frivolity was to Tus-ka-sah the more revolting, since he
himself was of a serious cast of mind and possessed of faculties, rare
in an Indian, which are called "fine business capacity." He was esteemed
at an English trading-house down on the Eupharsee River as the best
"second man" in any of the towns; this phrase "second man" expressing
the united functions of alderman, chief of police, chairman of boards of
public improvements, and the various executive committees of
civilization. His were municipal duties,--the apportionment of community
labor, the supervision of the building of houses and the planting of
crops, the distribution of public bounty, the transaction of any
business of Ioco Town with visitors whom individual interest might bring
thither. So well did he acquit himself when these errands involved
questions of commercial policy that the English traders were wont to
declare that Tus-ka-sah, the Terrapin, had "horse sense"--which
certainly was remarkable in a terrapin!
His clear-headed qualities, however, valued commercially, seemed hardly
calculated to adorn the fireside. In sensible cumbrous silence and
disastrous eclipse he could only contemplate with dismayed aversion the
palpable effect of Amoyah's gay sallies of wit, his fantastic lies, his
vainglorious boastings, and his wonderful stories, which seemed always
to enchant his audience, the household of the damsel to whom in
civilized parlance they were both paying their addresses. These
audiences were usually large, and far too lenient in the estimation of
Tus-ka-sah. First there was present, of course, Amoyah himself, seeming
a whole flock instead of one Pigeon. Then must be counted Altsasti, who
although a widow was very young, and as slight, as lissome, as graceful
as the "wreath" which her name signified. She was clad now in her winter
dress of otter skins, all deftly sewn together so that the fur might lie
one way, the better to enable the fabric to shed the rain; the petticoat
was longer than the summer attire of doeskin, for although the tinkle of
the metal "bell buttons" of her many garters might be heard as she
moved, only the anklets were visible above her richly beaded moccasins.
She seldom moved, however; sitting beside the fire on a buffalo rug, she
monotonously strung rainbow-hued beads for hours at a time. Her glossy,
straight black hair was threaded with a strand of opaque white beads
passing through the coils, dressed high, and copiously anointed with
bear's oil, and on her forehead she wore a single pendant wrought of the
conch-shell, ivory-white and highly polished. She maintained a busy
silence, but the others of the group--her father, sometimes her mother
and grandmother and the younger sisters and brothers--preserved no such
semblance of gravity, and indulged in appreciative chuckles responsive
to Amoyah's jests, idly watching him with twinkling eyes as long as he
would talk.
It would be difficult to say how long this might be, for there were no
windows to the winter houses of the Cherokees; in point of architecture
these structures resembled the great dome-shaped council-house,
plastered within and without with red clay; the floor was some three
feet lower than the surface of the ground outside, and the exit
fashioned with a narrow winding passage before reaching the outlet of
the door. The sun might rise or set; the night might come or go; no
token how the hour waxed or waned could penetrate this seclusion. The
replenishing of the fire on the chimneyless hearth in the centre of the
floor afforded the only comment on the passage of time. Its glow gave to
view the red walls; the curious designs of the painted interior of the
buffalo hides stretched upon them, by way of decoration; the cane divans
or couches that were contrived to run all around the circular apartment,
and on which were spread skins of bear and panther and wolves, covering
even the heads of the slumbering members of the household, for the
Cherokees slept away much of the tedious winter weather.
The fire would show, too, how gayly bedight and feather-crested was
Amoyah, wearing a choice garb of furs;--often, so great was his vanity,
his face was elaborately painted as if for some splendid festive
occasion, a dance or the ball-play, instead of merely to impress with
his magnificence this simple domestic circle. Tus-ka-sah dated the
events that followed from one night when this facial decoration of his
rival was even more fantastic than usual. Like a fish was one side of
the young Cherokee's profile; the other in glaring daubs of white and
black and red craftily represented the head of a woodpecker. The effect
in front was the face of a nondescript monster, that only a gleeful
laughing eye, and now and then a flash of narrow white teeth, identified
as the jovial Amoyah, the Pigeon of Ioco.
The snow lay on the ground without, he said as he shook a wreath of it
from a fold of his fur and it fell hissing among the coals. The shadows
were long, he told them, for the moon was up and the world was dimly
white and duskily blue. The wind was abroad, and indeed they could hear
the swirl of its invisible wings as it swooped past; the boughs of the
trees clashed together and ice was in the Tennessee River. The winter
had come, he declared.
Not yet, Tus-ka-sah pragmatically averred. There would be fine weather
yet.
For the snowfall so early in the season was phenomenal and the red
leaves were still clinging to the trees.
Had they been together among men Amoyah would not have cared enough for
the subject to justify contention, but in the presence of women he would
suffer no contradiction. He must needs be paramount,--the infinitely
admired! He shook his head.
The winter had surely come, he insisted. Why, he argued, the bears
knew,--they always knew! And already each had walked the round with his
shadow.
For in the approach of winter, in the light of the first mystic, icicled
moon, the night when it reaches its full, a grotesque pageant is afoot
in that remote town of the bears, immemorially fabled to be hidden in
the dense coverts of the Great Smoky Mountains,--the procession of the
bears, each walking with his shadow, seven times around the illuminated
spaces of the "beloved square."
The bears knew undoubtedly, the "second man," the man of facts and
method and management, soberly admitted. But how did Amoyah know that
already they had trodden those significant circles, each with his
shadow? He smiled triumphant in his incontrovertible logic.
And now Amoyah's face was wonderful to view, whether as a fish on one
side or a woodpecker on the other, with that most human expression of
surprise and indignation and aversion as distinctly limned upon it as if
in pigments, for he loved the "second man's" facts no more than the
"second man" loved his fancies. How did he know, forsooth? Because,
Amoyah hardily declared, he himself had witnessed the march,--he had
been permitted to behold that weird and grotesque progress!
He took note of the blank silence that ensued upon this startling
asseveration. Then emboldened to add circumstance to sheer statement he
protested, "I attended the ceremony by invitation. I had a place in the
line of march--I walked beside the Great Bear as his shadow!"
For, according to tradition, each bear, burly, upright in the moonlight,
follows the others in Indian file, but at the side of each walks his
shadow, and that shadow is not the semblance of a bear, but of a
Cherokee Indian!
Now, as everybody has heard, the bears were once a band of Cherokee
Indians, but wearying of the rigors and artificialities of tribal
civilization they took to the woods, became bears, and have since dwelt
in seclusion.
The thoughts, however, persistently reach out for the significance of
the fact that in the tradition of this immemorial progress each creature
is accompanied by the shadow, not of the thing that he is, but of the
higher entity that he was designed to be.
Whether this inference is merely the mechanical deduction of a lesson,
or a subtlety of moralizing, with a definite intention, on the part of
the Cherokees, always past-masters in the intricacies of symbolism, it
is difficult to determine, but the bears are certainly not alone in this
illustration of retrogression, and memory may furnish many an image of a
lost ideal to haunt the paths of beings of a higher plane.
The picture was before the eyes of all the fireside group,--the looming
domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, where the clouds, white and opaline,
hung in the intervals beneath the ultimate heights; the silences of the
night were felt in the dense dark lonely forest that encompassed the
open spaces of that mysterious city, with the conical thatched roofs of
its winter houses and the sandy stretch of the "beloved square; "--and
there was the line of bears, clumsy, heavy-footed, lumbering, ungainly,
and beside each the feather-crested similitude of what he had been,
alert, powerful, gifted with human ingenuity, the craft of weapons,
mental endowment, and an immortal soul,--so they went in the wintry
moonlight!
There was naught in this detail of the annual procession of the bears,
always taking place before the period of their hibernation, that
surprised or angered Tus-ka-sah; but that they should break from their
ancient law, their established habit of exclusiveness, single out Amoyah
(of all the people in the world), summon him to attend their tribal
celebration, and participate in their parade, as the shadow of Eeon-a,
the Great Bear,--this passed the bounds of the possibilities. This
fantasy had not the shreds of verisimilitude!
Yet even while he argued within himself Tus-ka-sah noted the old
warrior's gaze fix spellbound upon Amoyah, the hands of Altsasti
petrify, the bead in one, the motionless thread in the other. The eyes
of the more remote of the group, who were seated on rugs around the
fire, glistened wide and startled, in the shadow, as Amoyah proceeded to
relate how it had chanced.
A frosty morning he said it was, and he was out in the mountain
a-hunting. He repeated the song which he had been singing, and the wind
as it swirled about the house must have caught his voice and carried it
far. It was a song chronicling the deeds of the Great Bear, and had a
meaningless refrain, "_Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!"_ But
when he reached the advent upon the scene of the secondary hero, the
Great Bear himself, very polite, speaking excellent Cherokee ("since we
are alone," he said), very recognizant of the merits of Amoyah,--the
fame of which indeed was represented to have resounded through the
remotest seclusions of the ursine realm,--fiction though it all
obviously was, the man of facts could no longer endure this
magnification of his rival.
"The great Eeon-a said all that to you?" he sneered. "The fire-water at
the trading-house makes your heart very strong and your tongue crooked.
This sounds to me like the language of a simple seequa, not the Great
Bear--a mere bit of an opossum!"
Amoyah paused with a sudden gasp. He was not without an aggressive
temper, albeit, persuaded of his own perfection, he feared no rival, and
least of all Tus-ka-sah.
"You, Tus-ka-sah," he retorted angrily, "have evidently strongly shaken
hands with the discourse of the opossum, speaking its language like the
animal itself, and also the wolfish English. You have too many tongues,
and, more than all, the deceitful, forked tongue of the snake, which is
not agreeable to the old beloved speech. For myself, the Great Bear made
me welcome in the only language that does not make my heart weigh
heavy,--the elegant Cherokee language."
The spellbound listeners had broken out with irritated protests against
the interruption, and Tus-ka-sah said no more.
As the blasts went sonorously over the house and the flames swirled anew
into the murky atmosphere of the interior, a weird, half-smothered voice
suddenly invaded the restored quiet of the hearthstone: "_Eeon-a,
Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!_"
Like an echo the barbaric chant vibrated through the room. One of the
sleepers, a half-grown youth, had semi-consciously caught the familiar
refrain and sang it in that strange uncanny voice of slumber. The tones
gave fitting effect to the grotesque details of the supernatural
adventure, and as Tus-ka-sah rose and surlily took his way toward the
door his departure did not attract even casual notice from the
listeners, hanging enthralled upon the words of the Great Eeon-a, so
veraciously repeated for their behoof. Their eyes showed intent even in
the murky gloom and glistened lustrous in the alternate fitful flare;
the red walls seemed to recede and advance as the flames rose and fell;
the sleeping boy on the broad bed-place stirred uneasily, flinging now
and again a restless arm from out the panther skins in which he was
enveloped, and ever and anon his cry, "_Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a,
Ha-hoo-jah!"_ punctuated the impressive dramatic tones of the raconteur.
The next instant Tus-ka-sah was in the utter darkness of the narrow
tortuous little passage, but after threading this he came out of the
doorway into the keen chill air of a snowy world, the scintillations of
frosty stars, the languid, glamourous radiance of the yellow moon, low
in the sky, and his accustomed mental atmosphere of the plainest of
plain prose. His thoughts were with the group he had just left, and he
marveled if no influence could be brought to reduce the prestige with
which the immaterial chief of the bears, the fabled Eeon-a, had
contrived to invest the illusory Amoyah.
Tus-ka-sah's expectations concerning the weather were promptly
justified. A continual dripping from the roofs and trees pervaded the
early hours of the morning, and soon the snow was all gone here in the
valley; even the domes of the mountains so early whitened with drifts
showed now a bare, dark, sketch-like outline against the horizon and
above the garnet tint of the massed sere boughs of the forests of the
slopes. A warm sun shone. Not a summer bird was yet lingering, but here
and there a crisp red leaf winged the blue sky as gallantly as any
crested cardinal of them all. The town of Ioco was now astir, and
Tus-ka-sah noted how the softening of the air had brought out the
inhabitants from their winter houses. Children played about the
doorways; boys in canoes shot down the shimmering reaches of the river;
warriors congregated in the council-house and the half-open buildings
surrounding the "beloved square," and in its sunny sandy spaces sundry
old men were placidly engaged in the game of "roll the bullet."
It was at this group that Tus-ka-sah looked with an intent gaze and a
sort of indignant question in his manner, and presently an elderly
Cherokee, one of the cheera-taghe of the town, detached himself from it
and came toward him. Despite this show of alacrity Cheesto distinctly
winced as he contemplated the sullen and averse mien of his client or
parishioner, for the relation in which Tus-ka-sah stood toward him
partook of the characteristics of both. The professional wiseacre,
however, made shift to recover himself.
"I will tell you what you have come to tell me," the prophet said
quickly. "The spell on Amoyah does not work."
Tus-ka-sah assented surlily, gazing meanwhile at the face of the
conjurer. It was a face in which the eyes were set so close together as
to suggest a squint, although they were not crossed. He had an uncertain
and dilatory tread, the trait of one who hesitates, and decides in
doubt, and forthwith repents; being in his prophetic character an
appraiser of the probable, and the sport of the possible. He wore many
beads in strings around his neck, and big earrings of silver, heavy and
costly. His fur garments reached long and robe-like almost to his feet,
the shaggy side of the pelt outward, the weather being damp, for when it
was dry and cold it was customary to wear the fur turned inward.
The wise man had been recently unfortunate in his sorcery. The corn crop
had been cut short by reason of a lack of rain which he had promised
should fall in June. He had justified the drought, in the opinion of
most of the Indians, by feigning illness and taking to his bed; for by
these it was believed that if he had been able to be up and about his
ordinary vocations the preposterous conduct of the weather must needs
have been restrained. The fields about Ioco had suffered especially, and
Tus-ka-sah, as the chief business man of that town, had manifested half
veiled suspicions that the art of the conjurer was incompetent; this
rendered Cheesto particularly solicitous to succeed when his magic had
been invoked to reduce the attractions of Amoyah in the eyes of Altsasti
and turn her heart toward Tus-ka-sah. For among the Indians the lives of
the weather-prophets were not safe from the aggrieved agriculturists,
and there are authentic cases in which the cheera-taghe suffered death
by tribal law as false conjurers. Cheesto fixed an anxious gaze upon his
interlocutor as Tus-ka-sah rehearsed, by way of illustrating how
worthless were the charms wrought, the unsubstantial fiction that had so
beguiled the fancy of Altsasti, and posed Amoyah in the splendid guise
of the representative of the great Eeon-a in the shadow-march of the
bears.
The fate of the over-wise is ever the sorrowful dispensation. The fool
may be merry and irresponsible. Cheesto was at his wit's end. With that
unlucky drought in June to confront him, and dealing with the sharp
business man of Ioco, who exacted his due in the exchange of the Fates
as rigorously as if in a merely mundane market, the jeopardy of the
magician was great and his discredit almost assured.
Old Cheesto set his jaw firmly. Somehow, somewhere, something must be
wrought that would place Amoyah at a disadvantage and bring ridicule
upon him. No great matter, it might be said, to compass the change of a
fickle woman's mind, to disconcert a giddy young man. But how? Cheesto
was aweary of his own incantations and his ineffectual spells. He would
fain lend Fate a muscular hand.
This thought was uppermost in his mind for several days, even when he
went with the other cheera-taghe of Ioco to share in the conjurations
and incantations of the preliminary ceremonials of the Ball-Play,
without which success would never be anticipated, for a great match
between the towns of Ioco and Niowee was impending.
This game was usually played in the mid-summer or fall, but it would
seem that the unseasonable cold weather was well suited for such violent
exercise and the severe physical training which preceded it, and
although Amoyah noticed ice in the river as he dashed in for the
ceremonial plunge which accompanies the incantations, he remembered the
fact for a different reason than discomfort.
The eighty ball-players of Ioco stood in a row near the bank, submerged
to the knees. They had gone in with a tumultuous rush, and with their
faces painted, their heads crested with feathers, clad fantastically and
gorgeously but scantily, they were holding their ball-sticks high in the
air with an eager grasp,--all except Amoyah. Although still in his place
in the line, he was looking over his shoulder with an amazed and
startled gaze.
For there upon the bank, as if struck from his hand in the confusion and
turmoil of first entering the water, lay his ball-sticks. He seemed
about to return for them, as the implement of the game must be dipped
also in the water at the appropriate moment of the incantation. But old
Cheesto, the Rabbit, motioned him to forbear lest by this unprecedented
quitting of the line during the ceremonial the efficacy of the spell be
annulled; he himself stooped down and picked up the ball-sticks. Then,
notwithstanding his age and his fierce rheumatism, notwithstanding his
long and cumbrous robe of buffalo skin, the skirt of which he seemed to
clutch with difficulty, he plunged into the icy water, waded out to the
young man, handed him the ball-sticks, and regained the bank just as the
other cheera-taghe standing at the margin of the river began the
incantations supposed to influence the success of the competition.
This Indian game, which has left its name on one of the watercourses of
Tennessee, Ball-Play Creek, required a level space of some five or six
hundred yards in length but no other preparation of the ground. At one
end, in the direction of Niowee, two tall poles were fixed firmly in the
earth about three yards apart, and slanting outward. At the end toward
Ioco a similar goal was prepared. Every time the ball should be thrown
over either goal the play would count one for the proximate town, and
the game was of twelve or twenty points according to compact, the
catcher of the twentieth ball being entitled to especial honor. It was
of course the object of each side to throw the ball over the goal toward
their own town, and to prevent it from going in the direction of the
town of the opposing faction.