THE PHANTOM REGIMENT.--THE UNCO' QUEST.
Although this strange old man baffled or parried every inquiry of
Ewen as to whence he had come, and how and why he wore that
antiquated uniform, on his making a lucrative offer to take the upper
room of the little toll-house for a year--exactly a year--when Ewen
thought of his poor pension of six-pence per diem, of their numerous
family, and Meinie now becoming old and requiring many little
comforts, all scruples were overcome by the pressure of necessity,
and the mysterious old soldier was duly installed in the attic, with
his corded chest, scratch-wig, and wooden-leg; moreover, he paid the
first six months' rent in advance, dashing the money--which was all
coin of the first and second Georges, on the table with a bang and an
oath, swearing that he disliked being indebted to any man.
The next morning was calm and serene; the green hills lifted their
heads into the blue and placid sky. There was no mist on the
mountains, nor rain in the valley. The flood in the Nairn had
subsided, though its waters were still muddy and perturbed; but save
this, and the broken branches that strewed the wayside--with an
uprooted tree, or a paling laid flat on the ground, there was no
trace of yesterday's hurricane, and Ewen heard Wooden-leg (he had no
other name for his new lodger) stumping about overhead, as the old
fellow left his bed betimes, and after trimming his queue and wig,
pipeclaying his yellow facings, and beating them well with the brush,
in a soldier-like way, he descended to breakfast, but, disdaining
porridge and milk, broiled salmon and bannocks of barley-meal, he
called for a can of stiff grog, mixed it with powder from his wide
waistcoat pocket, and drank it off at a draught. Then he imperiously
desired Ewen to take his bonnet and staff, and accompany him so far
as Culloden, "because," said he, "I have come a long, long way to see
the old place again."
Wooden-leg seemed to gather--what was quite unnecessary to him--new
life, vigour, and energy--as they traversed the road that led to the
battle-field, and felt the pure breeze of the spring morning blowing
on their old and wrinkled faces.
The atmosphere was charmingly clear and serene. In the distance lay
the spires of Inverness, and the shining waters of the Moray Firth,
studded with sails, and the ramparts of Fort George were seen jutting
out at the termination of a long and green peninsula. In the
foreground stood the castle of Dalcross, raising its square outline
above a wood, which terminates the eastern side of the landscape.
The pine-clad summit of Dun Daviot incloses the west, while on every
hand between, stretched the dreary moor of Drummossie--the Plain of
Culloden--whilome drenched in the blood of Scotland's bravest hearts.
Amid the purple heath lie two or three grass-covered mounds.
These are the graves of the dead--the graves of the loyal
Highlanders, who fell on that disastrous field, and of the wounded,
who were so mercilessly murdered next day by an order of Cumberland,
which he pencilled on the back of a card (the Nine of Diamonds); thus
they were dispatched by platoons, stabbed by bayonets, slashed by
swords and spontoons, or brained by the butt-end of musket and
carbine; officers and men were to be seen emulating each other in
this scene of cowardice and cold-blooded atrocity, which filled every
camp and barrack in Continental Europe with scorn at the name of an
English soldier.
Ewen was a Highlander, and his heart filled with such thoughts as
these, when he stood by the grassy tombs where the fallen brave are
buried with the hopes of the house they died for; he took off his
bonnet and stood bare-headed, full of sad and silent contemplation;
while his garrulous companion viewed the field with his single eye,
that glowed like a hot coal, and pirouetted on his wooden pin in a
very remarkable manner, as he surveyed on every side the scene of
that terrible encounter, where, after enduring a long cannonade of
round shot and grape, the Highland swordsmen, chief and gillie, the
noble and the nameless, flung themselves with reckless valour on the
ranks of those whom they had already routed in two pitched battles.
"It was an awful day," said Ewen, in a low voice, but with a gleam in
his grey Celtic eye; "yonder my father fell wounded; the bullet went
through his shield and pierced him here, just above the belt; he was
living next day, when my mother--a poor wailing woman with a babe at
her breast--found him; but an officer of Barrel's Regiment ran a
sword twice through his body and killed him; for the orders of the
German Duke were, 'that no quarter should be given.' This spring is
named MacGillivray's Well, because here they butchered the dying
chieftain who led the Macintoshes--aye bayonetted him, next day at
noon, in the arms of his bonnie young wife and his puir auld mother!
The inhuman monsters! I have been a soldier," continued Ewen, "and I
have fought for my country; but had I stood that day on this Moor of
Culloden, I would have shot the German Butcher, the coward who fled
from Flanders--I would, by the God who hears me, though that moment
had been my last!"
"Ha, ha, ha! Ho, ho, ho!" rejoined his queer companion. "It seems
like yesterday since I was here; I don't see many changes, except
that the dead are all buried, whereas we left them to the crows, and
a carriage-road has been cut across the field, just where we seized
some women, who were looking among the dead for their husbands, and
who----"
"Well?"
Wooden-leg whistled, and gave Ewen a diabolical leer with his snaky
eye, as he resumed,--
"I see the ridge where the clans formed line--every tribe with its
chief in front, and his colours in the centre, when we, hopeless of
victory, and thinking only of defeat, approached them; and I can yet
see standing the old stone wall which covered their right flank.
Fire and smoke! it was against that wall we placed the wounded, when
we fired at them by platoons next day. I finished some twenty rebels
there myself."
Ewen's hand almost caught the haft of his skene dhu, as he said,
hoarsely,--
"Old man, do not call them rebels in my hearing, and least of all by
the graves where they lie; they were good men and true; if they were
in error, they have long since answered to God for it, even as we one
day must answer; therefore let us treat their memory with respect, as
soldiers should ever treat their brothers in arms who fall in war."
But Wooden-leg laughed with his strange eldritch yell, and then they
returned together to the tollhouse in the glen; but Ewen felt
strongly dissatisfied with his lodger, whose conversation was so
calculated to shock alike his Jacobitical and his religious
prejudices. Every day this sentiment grew stronger, and he soon
learned to deplore in his inmost heart having ever accepted the rent,
and longed for the time when he should be rid of him; but, at the end
of the six months, Wooden-leg produced the rent for the remainder of
the year, still in old silver of the two first Georges, with a few
Spanish dollars, and swore he would set the house on fire, if Ewen
made any more apologies about their inability to make him
sufficiently comfortable and so forth; for his host and hostess had
resorted to every pretence and expedient to rid themselves of him
handsomely.
But Wooden-leg was inexorable.
He had bargained for his billet for a year; he had paid for it; and a
year he would stay, though the Lord Justice General of Scotland
himself should say nay!
Boisterous and authoritative, he awed every one by his terrible
gimlet eye and the volleys of oaths with which he overwhelmed them on
suffering the smallest contradiction; thus he became the terror of
all; and shepherds crossed the hills by the most unfrequented routes
rather than pass the toll-bar, where they vowed that his eye
bewitched their sheep and cattle. To every whispered and stealthy
inquiry as to where his lodger had come from, and how or why he had
thrust himself upon this lonely tollhouse, Ewen could only groan and
shrug his shoulders, or reply,--
"He came on the night of the hurricane, like a bird of evil omen; but
on the twenty-sixth of April we will be rid of him, please Heaven!
It is close at hand, and he shall march then, sure as my name is Ewen
Mac Ewen!"
He seemed to be troubled in his conscience, too, or to have strange
visitors; for often in stormy nights he was heard swearing or
threatening, and expostulating; and once or twice, when listening at
the foot of the stair, Ewen heard him shouting and conversing from
his window with persons on the road, although the bar was shut,
locked, and there was no one visible there.
On another windy night, Ewen and his wife were scared by hearing
Wooden-leg engaged in a furious altercation with some one overhead.
"Dog, I'll blow out your brains!" yelled a strange voice.
"Fire and smoke! blow out the candle first--ha, ha, ha! ho, ho, ho!"
cried Wooden-leg; then there ensued the explosion of a pistol, a
dreadful stamping of feet, with the sound of several men swearing and
fighting. To all this Ewen and his wife hearkened in fear and
perplexity; at last something fell heavily on the floor, and then all
became still, and not a sound was heard but the night wind sighing
down the glen.
Betimes in the morning Ewen, weary and unslept, left his bed and
ascended to the door of this terrible lodger and tapped gently.
"Come in; why the devil this fuss and ceremony, eh, comrade?" cried a
hoarse voice, and there was old Wooden-leg, not lying dead on the
floor as Ewen expected, or perhaps hoped; but stumping about in his
shirt sleeves, pipe-claying his facings, and whistling the "Point of
War."
On being questioned about the most unearthly "row" of last night, he
only bade Ewen mind his own affairs, or uttered a volley of oaths,
some of which were Spanish, and mixing a can of gunpowder grog
drained it at a draught.
He was very quarrelsome, dictatorial, and scandalously irreligious;
thus his military reminiscences were of so ferocious and
blood-thirsty a nature, that they were sufficient to scare any quiet
man out of his seven senses. But it was more particularly in
relating the butcheries, murders, and ravages of Cumberland in the
highlands, that he exulted, and there was always a terrible air of
probability in all he said. On Ewen once asking of him if he had
ever been punished for the many irregularities and cruelties he so
freely acknowledged having committed,--
"Punished? Fire and smoke, comrade, I should think so; I have been
flogged till the bones of my back stood through the quivering flesh;
I have been picquetted, tied neck and heels, or sent to ride the
wooden horse, and to endure other punishments which are now abolished
in the king's service. An officer once tied me neck and heels for
eight and forty hours--ay, damme, till I lost my senses; but he lost
his life soon after, a shot from the rear killed him; you understand
me, comrade; ha, ha, ha! ho, ho, ho! a shot from the rear."
"You murdered him?" said Ewen, in a tone of horror.
"I did not say so," cried Wooden-leg with an oath, as he dealt his
landlord a thwack across the shins with his stump; "but I'll tell you
how it happened. I was on the Carthagena expedition in '41, and
served amid all the horrors of that bombardment, which was rendered
unsuccessful by the quarrels of the general and admiral; then the
yellow fever broke out among the troops, who were crammed on board
the ships of war like figs in a cask, or like the cargo of a slaver,
so they died in scores--and in scores their putrid corpses lay round
the hawsers of the shipping, which raked them up every day as they
swung round with the tide; and from all the open gunports, where
their hammocks were hung, our sick men saw the ground sharks gorging
themselves on the dead, while they daily expected to follow. The air
was black with flies, and the scorching sun seemed to have leagued
with the infernal Spaniards against us. But, fire and smoke, mix me
some more grog, I am forgetting my story!
"Our Grenadiers, with those of other regiments, under Colonel James
Grant of Carron, were landed on the Island of Tierrabomba, which lies
at the entrance of the harbour of Carthagena, where we stormed two
small forts which our ships had cannonaded on the previous day.
"Grenadiers--open your pouches--handle grenades--blow your fuses!"
cried Grant, "forward."
"And then we bayonetted the dons, or with the clubbed musket smashed
their heads like ripe pumpkins, while our fleet, anchored with
broadsides to the shore, threw shot and shell, grape, cannister,
carcasses, and hand-grenades in showers among the batteries, booms,
cables, chains, ships of war, gunboats, and the devil only knows what
more.
"It was evening when we landed, and as the ramparts of San Luiz de
Bocca Chica were within musket shot of our left flank, the lieutenant
of our company was left with twelve grenadiers (of whom I was one) as
a species of out-picquet to watch the Spaniards there, and to
acquaint the officer in the captured forts if anything was essayed by
way of sortie.
"About midnight I was posted as an advanced sentinel, and ordered to
face La Bocca Chica with all my ears and eyes open. The night was
close and sultry; there was not a breath of wind stirring on the land
or waveless sea; and all was still save the cries of the wild animals
that preyed upon the unburied dead, or the sullen splash caused by
some half-shrouded corpse, as it was launched from a gun-port, for
our ships were moored within pistol-shot of the place where I stood.
"Towards the west the sky was a deep and lurid red, as if the
midnight sea was in flames at the horizon; and between me and this
fiery glow, I could see the black and opaque outline of the masts,
the yards, and the gigantic hulls of those floating charnel-houses
our line-of-battle ships, and the dark solid ramparts of San Luiz de
Bocca Chica.
"Suddenly I saw before me the head of a Spanish column!"
"I cocked my musket, they seemed to be halted in close order, for I
could see the white coats and black hats of a single company only.
So I fired at them point blank, and fell back on the picquet, which
stood to arms.
"The lieutenant of our grenadiers came hurrying towards me.
"Where are the dons?" said he.
"In our front, sir," said I, pointing to the white line which seemed
to waver before us in the gloom under the walls of San Luiz, and then
it disappeared.
"They are advancing," said I.
"They have vanished, fellow," said the lieutenant, angrily.
"Because they have marched down into a hollow."
"In a moment after they re-appeared, upon which the lieutenant
brought up the picquet, and after firing three volleys retired
towards the principal fort where Colonel Grant had all the troops
under arms; but not a Spaniard approached us, and what, think you,
deceived me and caused this alarm? Only a grove of trees, fire and
smoke! yes, it was a grove of manchineel trees, which the Spaniards
had cut down or burned to within five feet of the ground; and as
their bark is white it resembled the Spanish uniform, while the black
burned tops easily passed for their grenadier caps to the
overstrained eyes of a poor anxious lad, who found himself under the
heavy responsibility of an advanced sentinel for the first time in
his life."
"And was this the end of it?" asked Ewen.
"Hell and Tommy?" roared the Wooden-leg, "no--but you shall hear. I
was batooned by the lieutenant; then I was tried at the drumhead for
causing a false alarm, and sentenced to be tied neck and heels, and
lest you may not know the fashion of this punishment I shall tell you
of it. I was placed on the ground; my firelock was put under my
hams, and another was placed over my neck; then the two were drawn
close together by two cartouch-box straps; and in this situation,
doubled up as round as a ball, I remained with my chin wedged between
my knees until the blood spouted out of my mouth, nose, and ears, and
I became insensible. When I recovered my senses the troops were
forming in column, preparatory to assaulting Fort San Lazare; and
though almost blind, and both weak and trembling, I was forced to
take my place in the ranks; and I ground my teeth as I handled my
musket and saw the lieutenant of our company, in lace-ruffles and
powdered wig, prepare to join the forlorn hope, which was composed of
six hundred chosen grenadiers, under Colonel Grant, a brave Scottish
officer. I loaded my piece with a charmed bullet, cast in a mould
given to me by an Indian warrior, and marched on with my section.
The assault failed. Of the forlorn hope I alone escaped, for Grant
and his Grenadiers perished to a man in the breach. There, too, lay
our lieutenant. A shot had pierced his head behind, just at the
queue. Queer, was it not? when I was his covering file?"
As he said this, Wooden-leg gave Ewen another of those diabolical
leers, which always made his blood ran cold, and continued,--
"I passed him as he lay dead, with his sword in his hand, his fine
ruffled shirt and silk waistcoat drenched with blood--by the bye,
there was a pretty girl's miniature, with powdered hair peeping out
of it too. 'Ho, ho!' thought I, as I gave him a hearty kick; 'you
will never again have me tied neck-and-heels for not wearing
spectacles on sentry, or get me a hundred lashes, for not having my
queue dressed straight to the seam of my coat."
"Horrible!" said Ewen.
"I will wager my wooden leg against your two of flesh and bone, that
your officer would have been served in the same way, if he had given
you the same provocation."
"Heaven forbid!" said Ewen.
"Ha, ha, ha! Ho, ho, ho!" cried Wooden-leg.
"You spoke of an Indian warrior," said Ewen, uneasily, as the
atrocious anecdotes of this hideous old man excited his anger and
repugnance; "then you have served, like myself, in the New World?"
"Fire and smoke! I should think so, but long before your day."
"Then you fought against the Cherokees?"
"Yes."
"At Warwomans Creek?"
"Yes; I was killed there."
"You were--what?" stammered Ewen.
"Killed there."
"Killed?"
"Yes, scalped by the Cherokees; dam! don't I speak plain enough?"
"He is mad," thought Ewen.
"I am not mad," said Wooden-leg gruffly.
"I never said so," urged Ewen.
"Thunder and blazes! but you thought it, which is all the same."
Ewen was petrified by this remark, and then Wooden-leg, while fixing
his hyæna-like eye upon him, and mixing a fresh can of his peculiar
grog, continued thus,--
"Yes, I served in the Warwomans Creek expedition in '60. In the
preceding year I had been taken prisoner at Fort Ninety-six, and was
carried off by the Indians. They took me into the heart of their own
country, where an old Sachem protected me, and adopted me in place of
a son he had lost in battle. Now this old devil of a Sachem had a
daughter--a graceful, pretty and gentle Indian girl, whom her tribe
named the Queen of the Beaver dams. She was kind to me, and loved to
call me her pale-faced brother. Ha, ha, ha! Ho, ho, ho! Fire and
smoke! do I now look like a man that could once attract a pretty
girl's eye,--now, with my wooden-leg, patched face and riddled
carcase? Well, she loved me, and I pretended to be in love too,
though I did not care for her the value of an old snapper. She was
graceful and round in every limb, as a beautiful statue. Her
features were almost regular--her eyes black and soft; her hair hung
nearly to her knees, while her smooth glossy skin, was no darker than
a Spanish brunette's. Her words were like notes of music, for the
language of the Cherokees, like that of the Iroquois, is full of the
softest vowels. This Indian girl treated me with love and kindness,
and I promised to become a Cherokee warrior, a thundering turtle and
scalp-hunter for her sake--just as I would have promised anything to
any other woman, and had done so a score of times before. I studied
her gentle character in all its weak and delicate points, as a
general views a fortress he is about to besiege, and I soon knew
every avenue to the heart of the place. I made my approaches with
modesty, for the mind of the Indian virgin was timid, and as pure as
the new fallen snow. I drew my parallels and pushed on the trenches
whenever the old Sachem was absent, smoking his pipe and drinking
fire-water at the council of the tribe; I soon reached the base of
the glacis and stormed the breastworks--dam! I did, comrade.
"I promised her everything, if she would continue to love me, and
swore by the Great Spirit to lay at her feet the scalp-lock of the
white chief, General the Lord Amherst, K.C.B., and all that, with
every other protestation that occurred to me at the time; and so she
soon loved me--and me alone--as we wandered on the green slopes of
Tennessee, when the flowering forest-trees and the magnolias, the
crimson strawberries, and the flaming azalea made the scenery
beautiful; and where the shrill cry cf the hawk, and the carol of the
merry mocking-bird, filled the air with sounds of life and happiness.
"We were married in the fantastic fashion of the tribe, and the
Indian girl was the happiest squaw in the Beaver dams. I hoed cotton
and planted rice; I cut rushes that she might plait mats and baskets;
I helped her to weave wampum, and built her a wigwam, but I longed to
be gone, for in six months I was wearied of her and the Cherokees
too. In short, one night, I knocked the old Sachem on the head, and
without perceiving that he still breathed, pocketted his valuables,
such as they were, two necklaces of amber beads and two of Spanish
dollars, and without informing my squaw of what I had done, I
prevailed upon her to guide me far into the forest, on the skirts of
which lay a British outpost, near the lower end of the vale, through
which flows the Tennessee River. She was unable to accompany me more
than a few miles, for she was weak, weary, and soon to become a
mother; so I gave her the slip in the forest, and, leaving her to
shift for herself, reached head-quarters, just as the celebrated
expedition from South Carolina was preparing to march against the
Cherokees.
"Knowing well the localities, I offered myself as a guide, and was at
once accepted--
"Cruel and infamous!" exclaimed honest Ewen, whose chivalric Highland
spirit fired with indignation at these heartless avowals; "and the
poor girl you deceived----"
"Bah! I thought the wild beasts would soon dispose of her."
"But then the infamy of being a guide, even for your comrades,
against those who had fed and fostered, loved and protected you! By
my soul, this atrocity were worthy of King William and his Glencoe
assassins!"
"Ho, ho, ho! fire and smoke! you shall hear.
"Well, we marched from New York in the early part of 1760. There
were our regiment, with four hundred of the Scots Royals, and
Montgomery's Highlanders. We landed at Charleston, and marched up
the country to Fort Ninety-six on the frontier of the Cherokees. Our
route was long and arduous, for the ways were wild and rough, so it
was the first of June before we reached Twelve-mile River. I had
been so long unaccustomed to carry my knapsack, that its weight
rendered me savage and ferocious, and I cursed the service and my own
existence; for in addition to our muskets and accoutrements, our
sixty rounds of ball cartridge per man, we carried our own tents,
poles, pegs, and cooking utensils. Thunder and blazes! when we
halted, which we did in a pleasant valley, where the great shady
chestnuts and the flowering hickory made our camp alike cool and
beautiful, my back and shoulders were nearly skinned; for as you must
know well, comrade, the knapsack straps are passed so tightly under
the armpits, that they stop the circulation of the blood, and press
upon the lungs almost to suffocation. Scores of our men left the
ranks on the march, threw themselves down in despair, and were soon
tomahawked and scalped by the Indians.
"We marched forward next day, but without perceiving the smallest
vestige of an Indian trail; thus we began to surmise that the
Cherokees knew not that we were among them; but just as the sun was
sinking behind the blue hills, we came upon a cluster of wigwams,
which I knew well; they were the Beaver dams, situated on a river,
among wild woods that never before had echoed to the drum or bugle.
"Bad and wicked as I was, some strange emotions rose within me at
this moment. I thought of the Sachem's daughter--her beauty--her
love for me, and the child that was under her bosom when I abandoned
her in the vast forest through which we had just penetrated; but I
stifled all regret, and heard with pleasure the order to 'examine
flints and priming.'
"Then the Cherokee warwhoop pierced the echoing sky; a scattered fire
was poured upon us from behind the rocks and trees; the sharp steel
tomahawks came flashing and whirling through the air; bullets and
arrows whistled, and rifles rung, and in a moment we found ourselves
surrounded by a living sea of dark-skinned and yelling Cherokees,
with plumes on their scalp locks, their fierce visages streaked with
war paint, and all their moccasins rattling.
"Fire and fury, such a time it was!
"We all fought like devils, but our men fell fast on every side; the
Royals lost two lieutenants, and several soldiers whose scalps were
torn from their bleeding skulls in a moment. Our regiment, though
steady under fire as a battalion of stone statues, now fell into
disorder, and the brown warriors, like fiends in aspect and activity,
pressed on with musket and war-club brandished, and with such yells
as never rang in mortal ears elsewhere. The day was lost, until the
Highlanders came up, and then the savages were routed in an instant,
and cut to pieces. 'Shoot and slash' was the order; and there ensued
such a scene of carnage as I had not witnessed since Culloden, where
His Royal Highness, the fat Duke of Cumberland, galloped about the
field, overseeing the wholesale butchery of the wounded.
"We destroyed their magazines of powder and provisions; we laid the
wigwams in ashes, and shot or bayonetted every living thing, from the
babe on its mother's breast, to the hen that sat on the roost; for as
I had made our commander aware of all the avenues, there was no
escape for the poor devils of Cherokees. Had the pious, glorious,
and immortal King William been there, he would have thought we had
modelled the whole affair after his own exploit at Glencoe.
"All was nearly over, and among the ashes of the smoking wigwams and
the gashed corpses of king's soldiers and Indian warriors, I sat down
beneath a great chestnut to wipe my musket, for butt, barrel, and
bayonet were clotted with blood and human hair--ouf, man, why do you
shudder? it was only Cherokee wool;--all was nearly over, I have
said, when a low fierce cry, like the hoarse hiss of a serpent, rang
in my ear; a brown and bony hand clutched my throat as the fangs of a
wolf would have done, and hurled me to the earth! A tomahawk flashed
above me, and an aged Indian's face, whose expression, was like that
of a fiend, came close to mine, and I felt his breath upon my cheek.
It was the visage of the sachem, but hollow with suffering and almost
green with fury, and he laughed like a hyæna, as he poised the
uplifted axe.
"Another form intervened for a moment; it was that of the poor Indian
girl I had so heartlessly deceived; she sought to stay the avenging
hand of the frantic sachem; but he thrust her furiously aside, and in
the next moment the glittering tomahawk was quivering in my brain--a
knife swept round my head--my scalp was torn off, and I remember no
more."
"A fortunate thing for you," said Ewen, drily; "memory such as yours
were worse than a knapsack to carry; and so you were killed there?"
"Don't sneer, comrade," said Wooden-leg, with a diabolical gleam in
his eye: "prithee, don't sneet; I was killed there, and, moreover,
buried too, by the Scots Royals, when they interred the dead next
day."
"Then how came you to be here?" said Ewen, not very much at ease, to
find himself in company with one he deemed a lunatic.
"Here? that is my business--not yours," was the surly rejoinder.
Ewen was silent, but reckoned over that now there were but thirty
days to run until the 26th of April, when the stipulated year would
expire.
"Yes, comrade, just thirty days," said Wooden-leg, with an
affirmative nod, divining the thoughts of Ewen; "and then I shall be
off, bag and baggage, if my friends come."
"If not?"
"Then I shall remain where I am."
"The Lord forbid!" thought Ewen; "but I can apply to the sheriff."
"Death and fury! Thunder and blazes! I should like to see the
rascal of a sheriff who would dare to meddle with me!" growled the
old fellow, as his one eye shot fire, and, limping away, he ascended
the stairs grumbling and swearing, leaving poor Ewen terrified even
to think, on finding that his thoughts, although only half conceived,
were at once divined and responded to by this strange inmate of his
house.
"His friends," thought Ewen, "who may they be?"
Three heavy knocks rang on the floor overhead, as a reply.
It was the wooden leg of the Cherokee invader.