How the mother-heart would have rejoiced could Lillian have divined that
her child was well and happy, though affectionate in new ties while she
languished in his absence! Archie had begun to adore the old Indian
fortune-teller who cuddled and coddled him in loving delight. She lived
for a time in grievous fear of his departure, but when no news came of
the men who had placed him there, and the date fixed for their return
passed without event, she began to gloat on the possibility of desertion.
She tried all her ancient savage spells and methods of forecast--many
strange jugglings with terrapin shells and white beads and pointed sticks
and the aspect of the decoction of magic herbs. With fervor, she gave
herself also to her pagan invocations to those spirits of Zootheism and
personified elements of Nature, so real even to the modern Cherokee,
esteemed so potent in the ordering of human affairs. Suddenly her hope
glowed into triumph! She had a fantastic conviction that the child was
bound fast. The signs intimated that the great mystic Red Spider,
_Kananiski gigage_, had woven his unseen web about the boy, and he
could not escape from those constraining meshes. As to the men--she
concluded that they were blown away somewhere. The wind had attended to
that little matter. "_Agaluga Hegwa! Atigale yata tsutu negliga_," she
exclaimed in grateful rapture. ("Oh, great Whirlwind! By you they must
have been scattered.")
Happiness had long held aloof. She was of the poorest of the tribe;
childless, for many years; a widow; she suffered much from rheumatism;
she was slowly going blind; she was deemed unlucky and avoided. For more
than once of late years she had in important crises predicted disaster,
and this prophecy, by fortuitous circumstances, had been fulfilled; thus
those to whom a deceitful hope is preferable to a warning of trouble
sought by fleeing the oracle to elude the misfortune. Being esteemed a
witch, and associated with dark dealings and prone to catastrophe, she
lived in peculiar solitude, and the two spent the long months of the
winter within the cabin together, while the mountain snows lay heavy on
the eaves and the mountain winds beat and gibed at the door. Great
icicles hung from the dark fissures of the crags; frosty scintillations
tipped the fibres of the pines; wolves were a-prowl--sometimes their
blood-curdling howls from afar penetrated to the hut where the
ill-assorted companions sat together in the red glow of the fire, and
roasted their sweet potatoes and apples on the hearth, and cracked nuts
to pound into the rich paste affected by the Cherokees, and drank the
bland "hominy-water," and gazed happily into each other's eyes, despite
their distance apart at the two termini of life, the beginning and the
end.
As she could speak no English, yet they must needs find a medium of
exchange for their valuable views, she tried to teach him to speak
Cherokee. He was a bird, her little bird, she told him by signs, and his
name was _Tsiskwa_. This she repeated again and again in the velvet-soft
fluting of her voice. But no! he revolted. His name was Archie Royston,
he declaimed proudly. He soon became the monarch of this poor hearth, and
he deported himself in royal fashion.
"Oo tan't talk," he said patronizingly to her one day, after listening in
futile seriousness to her unintelligible jargon. Forthwith he essayed to
teach her to speak English, and, humoring his every freak, she sought to
profit. She would fix intent eyes upon him and turn her head askew to
listen heedfully while she lisped after his lisping exposition of "Archie
Royston." He grew heady with his sense of erudition. He would fairly roll
on the puncheon floor in the vainglory of his delight when she identified
chair and fire and bed and door by their accurate English names.
Sometimes, in a surge of emotion, hardly gratitude or a sense of comfort,
neither trust nor hope, but the sheer joy of love, the child would come
at her in a tumultuous rush, cast himself in her arms, and cover her face
with kisses--the face that had at first so terrified him, that was so
typical of cruelty and craft and repellent pride. Then as they nestled
together they would repeat in concert--poor woman! perhaps she thought it
a mystic invocation charged with some potent power of prayer or
magic--"Ding-dong-bell!" and the comparative biographies of little Johnny
Green and little Johnny Stout, and the vicissitudes of the poor pussycat
submitted to their diverse ministrations. He was wont to sing for her
also, albeit tunelessly, and as he sat blond and roseate and gay,
warbling after his fashion on the hearth, her clouded old eyes were
relumed with a radiance that came from within and was independent of the
prosaic light of day. His favorite ditty was an old nursery rhyme in
which the name "Pretty Polly Hopkins" occurs with flattering iteration,
and he began to apply it to her, for he had come to think her very
beautiful--such is the gracious power of love! And while the snow was
flying, and the sleet and hail tinkled on the batten shutter, and the
draughts bleated and whined in the crevices, he made the rafters ring:
"'Pretty, pretty Polly Hopkins,
How de do?--how de do?'
"'None the better, Tommy Tompkins,
For seeing you, for seeing you!'
"'Polly, I've been to France
And there spent all my cash.'
"'More the fool for you, Mister Tompkins,
Fool for you, fool for you!'"
It was a valuable course in linguistics for the inmates of the cabin,
and Archie Royston was far more intelligible and skilled in expressing
himself when that door, that had been closed on the keen blast, was
opened to let in the suave spring sunshine and the soft freshness of the
mountain air.