Transcriber's note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. A printer error has been changed, and it is indicated with a [mouse-hover] and listed at the [end of this book].

A Table of Contents has been created for this version.

[ILLUSTRATIONS]
[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]
[CHAPTER VII]
[CHAPTER VIII]
[CHAPTER IX]
[CHAPTER X]
[CHAPTER XI]
[CHAPTER XII]
[CHAPTER XIII]
[NOTES]

"The officers expressed their earnest remonstrances." (See page [198].)

The Story
of
Old Fort Loudon

By

Charles Egbert Craddock

Author of "In the Tennessee Mountains," "The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains," etc., etc.

With Illustrations by Ernest C. Peixotto

New York

The Macmillan Company

London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.

1899

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1898,
By The Macmillan Company.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

Illustrations

The Story of Old Fort Loudon

CHAPTER I

Along the buffalo paths, from one salt-lick to another, a group of pioneers took a vagrant way through the dense cane-brakes. Never a wheel had then entered the deep forests of this western wilderness; the frontiersman and the packhorse were comrades. Dark, gloomy, with long, level summit-lines, a grim outlier of the mountain range, since known as the Cumberland, stretched from northeast to southwest, seeming as they approached to interpose an insurmountable barrier to further progress, until suddenly, as in the miracle of a dream, the craggy wooded heights showed a gap, cloven to the heart of the steeps, opening out their path as through some splendid gateway, and promising deliverance, a new life, and a new and beautiful land. For beyond the darkling cliffs on either hand an illuminated vista stretched in every lengthening perspective, with softly nestling sheltered valleys, and parallel lines of distant azure mountains, and many a mile of level woodland high on an elevated plateau, all bedight in the lingering flare of the yellow, and deep red, and sere brown of late autumn, and all suffused with an opaline haze and the rich, sweet languors of sunset-tide on an Indian-summer day.

As that enchanted perspective opened to the view, a sudden joyous exclamation rang out on the still air. The next moment a woman, walking beside one of the packhorses, clapped both hands over her lips, and turning looked with apprehensive eyes at the two men who followed her. The one in advance cast at her a glance of keen reproach, and then the whole party paused and with tense attention bent every faculty to listen.

Silence could hardly have been more profound. The regular respiration of the two horses suggested sound. But the wind did not stir; the growths of the limitless cane-brakes in the valley showed no slight quiver in the delicately poised fibers of their brown feathery crests; the haze, all shot through with glimmers of gold in its gauzy gray folds, rested on the mute woods; the suave sky hung above the purple western heights without a breath. No suggestion of motion in all the landscape, save the sudden melting away of a flake of vermilion cloud in a faintly green expanse of the crystal heavens.

The elder man dropped his hand, that had been raised to impose silence, and lifted his eyes from the ground. "I cannot be rid of the idea that we are followed," he said. "But I hear nothing."

Although the eldest of the group, he was still young,—twenty-five, perhaps. He was tall, strong, alert, with a narrow, long face; dark, slow eyes, that had a serious, steadfast expression; dark brown hair, braided in the queue often discarded by the hunters of this day. A certain staid, cautious sobriety of manner hardly assorted with the rough-and-ready import of his garb and the adventurous place and time. Both he and the younger man, who was in fact a mere boy not yet seventeen, but tall, muscular, sinewy,—stringy, one might say,—of build, were dressed alike in loose hunting-shirts of buckskin, heavily fringed, less for the sake of ornament than the handiness of a selection of thongs always ready to be detached for use; for the same reason the deerskin leggings, reaching to the thighs over the knee-breeches and long stockings of that day, were also furnished with these substantial fringes; shot-pouch and powder-horn were suspended from a leather belt, and on the other side a knife-hilt gleamed close to the body. Both wore coonskin caps, but that of the younger preserved the tail to hang down like a plume among his glossy brown tangles of curls, which, but for a bit of restraining ribbon, resisted all semblance to the gentility of a queue. The boy was like his brother in the clear complexion and the color of the dark eyes and hair, but the expression of his eyes was wild, alert, and although fired with the earnest ardor of first youth, they had certain roguish intimations, subdued now since they were still and seriously expectant, but which gave token how acceptably he could play that cherished rôle, to a secluded and isolated fireside, of family buffoon, and make gay mirth for the applause of the chimney-corner. The brothers were both shod with deerskin buskins, but the other two of the party wore the shoe of civilization,—one a brodequin, that despite its rough and substantial materials could but reflect a grace from the dainty foot within it; the other showed the stubby shapes deemed meet for the early stages of the long tramp of life. The little girl's shoes were hardly more in evidence than the mother's, for the skirts of children were worn long, and only now and then was betrayed a facetious skip of some active toes in the blunt foot-gear. Their dresses were of the same material, a heavy gray serge, which fact gave the little one much satisfaction, for she considered that it made them resemble the cow and calf—both great personages in her mind. But she flattered herself; her aspect in the straight, short bodice that enclosed her stout little rotund figure, and the quaint white mob-cap that encircled her chubby, roseate face, all smiles, and indeterminate nose, and expanded, laughing, red mouth, and white, glittering, irregular teeth, had little in common with the mother whom she admired and imitated, and but for the remnant of the elder's stuff gown, of which her own was fashioned, the comparison with the cow and calf would have failed altogether. She was not even a good imitator of the maternal methods. Of course the days of her own infancy, recent though they were, had long been lost to her limited memory, and a token of the length of time that they had dwelt in the wilderness, and the impressions her juvenile faculties had received therefrom might have been given by the fact that her doll was reared after pappoose fashion; on her back was slung a basket in the manner of the peripatetic cradle of the Indian women, and from this protruded the head and the widely open eyes of a cat slightly past kittenhood, that was adapting its preferences to the conditions of the journey with a discretion which might argue an extension of the powers of instinct in pioneer animals,—a claim which has often been advanced.

The cat evidently realized the fact that it was a domesticated creature, that naught was possible for it in these strange woods but speedy destruction by savage beast or man, and that decorous submission became a cat promoted to the estate of a juvenile settler's baby. The cat was as silent and as motionless during the halt as the rest of the party, looking out watchfully over the shoulder of the little three-year-old, who, with perfect and mute trust, and great, serene eyes, gazed up at the face of her father, nothing doubting his infinite puissance and willingness to take care of her. When he spoke and the tension was over, she began to skip once more, the jostled cat putting out her claws to hold to the wicker-work of her basket; the two had ridden most of the day on one of the packhorses, their trifling weight adding but little to the burden of the scanty store of clothing and bedding, the cooking and farming utensils, the precious frying-pan and skillet, the invaluable axe, hand-saw, auger, and hoe,—the lares and penates of the pioneer. There were some surveying-instruments, too, and in the momentary relaxation of suspense the elder of the brothers consulted a compass, as he had done more than once that day.

"I thought I heard something," said the boy, shouldering his rifle and turning westward, "but I couldn't say what."

"Ah, quelle barbarie!" exclaimed the woman, with a sigh, half petulance, half relief.

She seemed less the kind of timber that was to build up the great structure of western civilization than did the others,—all unfitted for its hardships and privation and labor. Her gray serge gown was worn with a sort of subtle elegance hardly discounted by the plainness of the material and make. The long, pointed waist accented the slender grace of her figure; the skirt had folds clustered on the hips that gave a sort of fullness to the drapery and suggested the charm of elaborate costume. She wore a hood on her head,—a large calash, which had a curtain that hung about her shoulders. This was a dark red, of the tint called Indian red, and as she pushed it back and turned her face, realizing that the interval of watching was over, the fairness of her complexion, the beauty of her dark, liquid eyes, the suggestion of her well-ordered, rich brown hair above her high forehead, almost regal in its noble cast, the perfection of the details of her simple dress, all seemed infinitely incongruous with her estate as a poor settler's wife, and the fact that since dawn and for days past she had, with the little all she possessed, fled from the pursuit of savage Indians. She returned with a severe glance the laughing grimace of the boy, with which, despite his own fear but a moment ago, he had, in the mobility of the moods of youth, decorated his countenance.

"If it were not for you, Hamish," she said to him, "I should not be so terrified. I have seen Indians many a time,—yes,—and when they were on the war-path, too. But to add to their fury by an act of defiance on our part! It is fatal—they have only to overtake us."

"What was I to do, Odalie?" said Hamish MacLeod, suddenly grave, and excitedly justifying himself. "There was that red Injun, as still as a stump. I thought he was a stump—it was nearly dark. And I heard the wild turkey gobbling,—you heard it yourself, you sent me out to get it for supper,—you said that one more meal on buffalo meat would be the death of you,—and it was nearly dark,—and—gobble—gobble—gobble—so appetizing. I can hear it yet."

With an expression of terror she caught suddenly at his hand as he walked beside her, but he petulantly pulled away.

"I mean in my mind, Odalie,—I hear it now in my mind. And all of a sudden it came to me that it was that stump up on the slope that was gobbling so cheerful, and gobbling me along into gunshot.[1] And just then I was in rifle range, and I fired at the same minute that the stump fired, or the turkey, whichever you choose to call him—What is the reason, Sandy, that Injuns are so apt to load with too little powder?" he broke off, speaking to his brother. "The turkey shot straight—his ball dropped spent just at my feet."

"Quelle barbarie!" exclaimed Mrs. MacLeod, catching his hand again—this time to give it a little squeeze—impressed with the imminence of the boy's danger and their loss.

But Hamish was quite as independent of caresses and approval as of rebuke, and he carelessly twisted his hand away from his sister-in-law as he cocked his head to one side to hear the more experienced hunter's reply.

"Because their powder is so precious, and scant, and hard to come by, they economize it," said Alexander MacLeod, as he trudged along behind the packhorses, guarding the rear of his little party with his rifle on his shoulder.

"The turkey would better have economized his meat this time," said the boy, swinging round his belt to lift the lid of his powder-horn and peep gloatingly in at the reinforced stores. "He was economical with his powder, but extravagant with his life; for that turkey will gobble no more."

He gobbled a brisk and agitated imitation of the cry of the fowl, and then broke off to exclaim, "Quelle barbarie!—eh, Odalie?"

He looked at his sister-in-law with a roguish eye, as he travestied the tone and manner of her favorite ejaculation, which he was wont to call the "family oath." For indeed they had all come to make use of the phrase, in their varying accent, to express their disaffection with the ordering of events, or the conduct of one another, or the provoking mischance of inanimate objects,—as the gun's hanging fire, or the reluctance of a spark to kindle from flint to make their camp-fire, or the overturning of a pot of buffalo soup, or bear stew, when the famished fugitives were ready to partake in reality of the feast which their olfactory nerves and eyes had already begun. Even the little girl would exclaim, "Quelle barbarie!" when thorns caught her skirts and held her prisoner as she had skipped along so low down among the brambles and dense high cane, that one must needs wonder at the smallness of Empire, as expressed in her personality and funny cap, taking its westward way. "Quelle barbarie!" too, when the cat's culture in elegant manners required of maternal solicitude a smart box on the ear. And if the cat did not say "Quelle barbarie!" with an approved French accent, we all know that she thought it.

"So much better for the soul's health than swearing," Hamish was wont to say, when Odalie showed signs of considering the phrase a bit of ridicule of her and her Frenchy forbears.

Her grandfather had been a Huguenot refugee, driven out of his country by the religious persecution about the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, seventy odd years previously. Her father had prospered but indifferently in the more civilized section of the New World, and had died early. There his daughter had met her young Scotchman, who was piqued by her dainty disdain of his French accent, which MacLeod had recklessly placed on exhibition, and was always seeking to redeem the impression, finally feeling that he must needs improve it by having a perfect Mentor at hand. He had brought from the land of his birth, which he had quitted in early years, but few distinctive local expressions, yet a certain burr clung to his speech, and combined as incongruously as might be with his French accent. She evidently considered the latter incurable, intolerable, and always eyed him, when he spoke in that language, with ostentatious wonder that such verbal atrocities could be, and murmured gently in lieu of reply—"Quelle barbarie!" He found his revenge in repeating a similar slogan, one that had often been as a supplement to this more usual phrase,—"Partons pour la France aujourd'hui, pour l'amour de Dieu!" It had been urged by her grandmother in moments of depression, and Odalie, born and reared in the royal province of South Carolina, had always the logic and grace to wince at this ungrateful aspiration to return to France,—the dear France that had been so much too hot to hold them. For the family had rejoiced to escape thence with their lives, even at the forfeiture of all that they possessed.

This jesting warfare of words had become established in the MacLeod household, and often recurred, sometimes with a trifle of acrimony. Little they thought how significant it was to be and how it should serve them in their future lives.

The sun was going down. Far, far purple mountains, that they might never have seen but for that great clifty gateway, were bathed in the glory of the last red suffusion of the west; the evening star of an unparalleled whiteness pulsated in the amber-tinted lucidity of the sky. The fragrance of the autumn woods was more marked on the dank night air. One could smell the rich mould along a watercourse near at hand, the branch from a spring bubbling up in the solid rock hard by. Odalie had seated herself on the horizontal ledge at the base of one of the crags and had thrown back her hood, against which her head rested. Her large eyes were soft and lustrous, but pensive and weary.

"Rest, Odalie, while Hamish and I make the fire, and then you can fix the things for supper," her husband admonished her.

It was the first time that they had halted that day, and dinner had been but the fragments of breakfast eaten while on the march. There had been a sudden outbreak of the Cherokee Indians which had driven them from the more frequented way where they feared pursuit,—this, and the fate of the brave who had sought to lure Hamish to his death last night with the mimicry of the gobbler, and was killed in consequence himself. They could not judge whether he had been alone or one of a party; whether his body might be discovered and his death avenged by the death or capture of them all; whether he had been a scout, thrown out to discover the direction they took, and his natural blood-thirstiness had overmastered his instructions, and he must needs seek to kill the boy before his return with his news.

With this more recent fear that they were followed they had not to-day dared to build a fire lest its smoke betray to the crafty observation of the Indians, although at a great distance, their presence in this remote quarter of the wilderness, far even from the Indian war-path, that, striking down the valley between the Cumberland range and the eastern mountains, was then not only the road that the Indians followed to battle, but the highway of traffic and travel, the only recognized and known path leading from the Cherokee settlements south of the Tennessee River through this great uninhabited park or hunting-ground to the regions of other Indian tribes on the Scioto and to Western Virginia. Now, however, rest and refreshment were necessary; even more imperative was the need of a fire as a protection to the camp against the encroachments of wild beasts; for wolves were plentiful and roamed the night-bound earth, and the active panther, the great American cougar, was wont to look down from the branches of overhanging trees. The horses were not safe beyond the flare of the flames, to say nothing of wife and child. Therefore the risk of attracting observation from Indians must be run, especially since it was abated by the descending dusk. The little treacherous smoke escaping from the forest to curl against the blue sky need not be feared at night. The darkness would hide all from a distance; as to foes lurking nearer at hand, why, if any such there were, then their fate was already upon them. With the stout heart of the pioneer, Alexander MacLeod heaped the fagots upon the ground and struck the flint and steel together after giving the officious little Josephine a chance to try her luck with the tinder. Soon the dry dead wood was timidly ablaze, while Hamish led the horses to the water and picketed them out.

Odalie's eyes followed the boy with a sort of belated yet painful anxiety, thinking how near he had been to parting with that stanch young spirit, and what a bereavement would have been the loss of that blithe element from their daily lives.

"Quelle barbarie!" she exclaimed suddenly. "Quelle barbarie!"

Perhaps her husband realized her fatigue and depression and was willing to put his French accent on parade for her amusement; perhaps it was for the sake of the old flouting retort; he theatrically rejoined without looking up, "Partons pour la France aujourd'hui, pour l'amour de Dieu."

And Josephine, taking the cat out of its basket and kissing its whiskers and the top of its head, was condoling with it on its long restraint:—"Quelle barbarie, ma poupée, quelle barbarie, ma douce mignonne," she poutingly babbled.

Alexander MacLeod paused to listen to this affectionate motherly discourse; then glanced up at his wife with a smile, to call her attention to it.

She had not moved. She had turned to stone. It seemed as if she could never move again. A waving blotch of red sumach leaves in a niche in the dark wall of the crag hard by had caught her notice. A waving blotch of red leaves in the autumnal dusk,—what more natural?

What more wonderful? What more fearful?

There was no wind. How could the bough stir? There was no bough. The blotch of color was the red and black of a hideous painted face that in the dusk, the treacherous dusk, had approached very near and struck her dumb and turned her to stone. It had approached so near that she could see its expression change as the sound of the words spoken about the fireside arose on the air. Her mental faculties were rallying from the torpor which still paralyzed her physical being; she understood the reason for this facial change, and by a mighty effort of the will summoned all her powers to avail herself of it.

Alexander MacLeod, glancing up with a casual laugh on his face, was almost stunned to see a full-armed and painted Cherokee rise up suddenly from among the bushes about the foot of the cliff. Standing distinctly outlined against the softly tinted mountain landscape, which was opalescent in its illumined hues, faint and fading, and extending his hand with a motion of inquiry toward Odalie, the savage demanded in a lordly tone,—"Flinch? Flanzy?"

As in a dream MacLeod beheld her, nodding her head in silent acquiescence,—as easily as she might were she humming a tune and hardly cared to desist from melody for words. She could not speak!

The Cherokee, his face smeared with vermilion, with a great white circle around one eye and a great black circle around the other, looked not ill-pleased, yet baffled for a moment. "Me no talk him," he observed.

"What more wonderful? What more fearful?"

He had never heard of Babel, poor soul, but he was as subject to the inconvenience of the confusion of tongues as if he had had an active share in the sacrilegious industry of those ambitious architects who builded in the plains of Shinar.

"But I can speak English too," said Odalie.

"Him?" said the Cherokee, "and him?" pointing at Alexander and then at Hamish—at Hamish, with his recollection of that dead Indian, a Cherokee, lying, face downward, somewhere there to the northward under the dark trees, his blood crying aloud for the ferocious reprisal in which his tribe were wont to glut their vengeance.

"Both speak French," said Odalie.

The Indian gazed upon her doubtfully. He had evidently only a few disconnected sentences of English at command, although he understood far more than he could frame, but he could merely discern and distinguish the sound of the admired "Flanzy." Odalie realized with a shiver that it was only this trifle that had preserved the lives of the whole party. For even previous to the present outbreak and despite the stipulations of their treaties with the English, the Cherokees were known to have hesitated long in taking sides in the struggle between France and Great Britain, still in progress now in 1758, for supremacy in this western country, and many were suspected of yet inclining to the French, who had made great efforts to detach them from the British interest.

"Where go?" demanded the chief, suspiciously.

"To Choté, old town," she averred at haphazard, naming the famous "beloved town, [2]city of refuge," of the Cherokee nation.

He nodded gravely. "I go Choté,—travel with white man," he remarked, still watchful-eyed.

The shadows were deepening; the flames had revealed other dark figures, eight braves at the heels of the spokesman, all painted, all armed, all visibly mollified by the aspect that the dialogue had taken on,—that of an interpreting female for a French husband.

"What do—Choté—old town?" demanded the chief.

"Buy furs," said Odalie at a venture, pointing at her husband.

The Cherokee listened intently, his blanket drawn up close around his ears, as if thus shrouded he took counsel of his own identity. The garment was one of those so curiously woven of the lustrous feathers of wild-fowl that the texture had a rich tufted aspect. This lost manufacture of the Cherokee Indians has been described by a traveler in that region in 1730 as resembling a "fine flowered silk shag."

"Ugh!" muttered the chief. "Ugh!" he said again.

But the tone was one of satisfaction. The buying and shipping of peltry was at that date a most lucrative business, furs bearing a high price in all the markets of the world, and this region bade fair to be one of the large sources of supply. The Indians profited by selling them, and this, too, was the magnet that was beginning to draw the hardy Carolina hunters westward, despite the hazards. At no other industry elsewhere could commensurate sums of money be earned without outlay beyond a rifle and ammunition and a hunter's cheap lodgement and fare. The Indians early developed a dependence on the supplies of civilization,—guns, ammunition, knives, tools, paints, to say nothing of fire-water, quickly demonstrating their superiority to primitive inventions, and this traffic soon took on most prosperous proportions. Thus, although the Cherokees resented the presence of the white man upon their hunting-ground in the capacity of competitor, and still more of colonist, they were very tolerant of his entrance into their towns and peaceful residence there as buyer and shipper—one of the earliest expressions of middleman in the West—of the spoils of the chase, the trophies of the Indian's skill in woodcraft. Although the British government, through treaties with the Cherokees, sought a monopoly of this traffic as a means of controlling them by furnishing or withholding their necessities as their conduct toward the English colonists on the frontier might render judicious, many of the earlier of these traders were French—indeed one of the name of Charleville was engaged in such commerce on the present site of the city of Nashville as early as the year 1714, his base of supplies being in Louisiana, altogether independent of the English, as he was then one of the traders of Antoine Crozat, under the extensive charter of that enterprising speculator.

The French had exerted all their suavest arts of ingratiation with the Cherokees, and as the Indians were now on the point of breaking out into open enmity against the English, the idea of a French trader in furs, which Odalie had suggested, was so acceptable to the Cherokee scheme of things, that for the time all doubt and suspicion vanished from the savage's mind. Vanished so completely, in fact, that within the half-hour the chief was seated with the family-party beside their camp-fire and sharing their supper, and the great Willinawaugh, with every restraint of pride broken down, with characteristic reserve cast to the winds, speaking to the supposed Frenchman, Alexander MacLeod, as to a brother, was detailing with the utmost frankness and ferocity the story of the treatment of the Indians by the Virginians, their allies, in the late expedition against Fort Duquesne. The Cherokees had marched thither to join General Forbes's army, agreeably to their treaty with the English, by which, in consideration of the building of a fort within the domain of their nation to afford them protection against their Indian enemies and the French, now the enemies of their English allies, and to shelter their old men and women and children during such absences of the warriors of the tribe, they had agreed to take up arms under the British flag whenever they were so required. And this the Cherokees had done.

Then his painted, high-cheek-boned face grew rigid with excitement, and the eagle feathers bound to his scalp-lock quivered in the light of the fire as he told of the result. His braves hovered near to hear, now catching the broad flare of the flames on their stalwart, erect forms and flashing fire-locks, now obscured in the fluctuating shadow. The pale-faced group listened, too, scarcely moving a muscle, for by long familiarity with the sound, they understood something of the general drift of the Cherokee language, which, barring a few phrases, they could not speak.

There had been only a very bloody skirmish,—since known as "Grant's defeat,"—but no fight at Fort Duquesne, not even a formal defence of the works. The French had surely forgotten General Braddock! They had forgotten the fleeing red-coated Unaka[A] soldiers who, three years before, had been beaten near there with such terrible slaughter, and their chief warrior, the great Braddock, himself, had been tamed by death—the only foe that could tame him!—and lay now somewhere in those eastern woods. He pointed vaguely with his hand as he spoke, for Braddock's grave had been left unmarked, in the middle of the military road, in order that, passing over it without suspicion, it might not be rifled and desecrated by those savage Indians who had fought with such furious efficiency in the French interest.[3]

Willinawaugh paused, and all his braves muttered in applause "Ugh! Ugh!"

To the warlike Cherokee the event of a battle was not paramount. Victory or defeat they realized was often the result of fortuitous circumstance. Courage was their passion. "We cannot live without war," was their official reply to an effort on the part of the government to mediate between them and another tribe, the Tuscaroras, their hereditary enemies.

But upon this second attempt on Fort Duquesne the British had only to plant their flag, and repair the dismantled works, and change the name to Fort Pitt. For in the night the French had abandoned and fired the stronghold, and finally made their escape down the Ohio River. In all good faith, however, the Cherokees had marched thither to help the Virginians defend their frontier,—far away from home! So far, that the horses of a few of the warriors had given out, and finding some horses running wild as they came on their homeward way through the western region of Virginia, these braves appropriated the animals for the toilsome march of so many hundred miles, meaning no harm; whereupon a band of Virginians fell upon these Cherokees, their allies, and killed them! And his voice trembled with rage as he rehearsed it.

For all her address Odalie could not sustain her rôle. She uttered a low moan and put her hand before her eyes. For he had not entered upon the sequel,—a sequel that she knew well;—the sudden summary retaliation of the Cherokees upon the defenseless settlers in the region contiguous to the line of march of the returning warriors,—blood for blood is the invariable Cherokee rule!

Never, never could she forget the little cabin on the west side of New River where she and her adventurous husband had settled on the Virginia frontier not far from other adventurous and scattered pioneers. They had thought themselves safe enough; many people in these days of the western advance relied on the community strength of a small station, well stockaded, with the few settlers in the cabins surrounded by the palisades; others, and this family of the number, felt it sufficient protection to be within the sound of a signal gun from a neighboring house. But the infuriated homeward-bound Cherokees fell on the first of these cabins that lay in their way, massacred the inmates, and marched on in straggling blood-thirsty bands, burning and slaying as they went. So few were the settlers in that region that there was no hope in uniting for defense. They fled wildly in scattered groups, and this little household found itself in the untried, unfrequented region west of the great Indian trail, meditating here a temporary encampment, until the aggrieved Cherokees on their homeward march should all have passed down the "Warrior's Path" to their far-away settlements south of the Tennessee River. Then, the way being clear, the fugitives hoped to retrace their journey, cross New River and regain the more eastern section of Virginia. Meantime they were slipping like shadows through the dark night into the great unknown realms of this uninhabited southwestern wilderness, itself a land of shadow, of dreams, of the vague unreality of mere rumor. Some intimation of their flight must have been given, for following their trail had skulked the Indian whom Hamish had killed,—a spy doubtless, the forerunner of these Cherokees, who, but for thinking them French, would have let out their spirits into the truly unknown, by way of that great mountain pass opening on an unknown world. If the savages but dreamed of the fate that had befallen their scout!—she hardly dared look at Hamish when she thought of the dead Indian, lest her thought be read.

She wondered what had become of her neighbors; where had they gone, and how had they fared, and where was she herself going in this journey to Choté,—a name, a mere name, heard by chance, and repeated at haphazard, to which she had committed the future.

This fresh anxiety served to renew her attention. Willinawaugh, still rehearsing the griefs of his people, and the perfidy, as he construed it, of the government, was detailing the perverse distortion of the English compliance with their treaty to erect a great defensive work in the Cherokee nation—the heart of the nation—to aid them in their wars on Indian enemies, and to protect their country and the non-combatants when the warriors should be absent in the service of their allies, the English. Such a work had the government indeed erected, on the south bank of the Tennessee River, mounted with twelve great cannon, not five miles from Choté, old town, and there, one hundred and fifty miles in advance of Anglo-American civilization, lay within it now the garrison of two hundred English soldiers!

Odalie's heart gave a great bound! She felt already safe. To be under the protection of British cannon once more! To listen to an English voice! Her brain was a-whirl. She could hear the drums beat. She could hear the sentry's challenge. She even knew the countersign—"God save the king!"—they were saying that to-night at Fort Loudon as the guard turned out;—she did not know it; she never knew it; she was only sure of it!

Willinawaugh had never heard of the agriculturist who sowed dragon's teeth and whose crop matured into full-armed soldiers. But he acutely realized this plight as he detailed how the Cherokees had protested, and had sent a "talk" (letter) to the Earl of Loudon, who had been at the time commander-in-chief of the British forces in America, setting forth the fact that the Cherokees did not like the presence of so many white people among them as the two hundred soldiers and the settlers that had gathered about the place. The military occupation made the fort a coercion and menace to the Cherokee people, and they requested him to take away the soldiers and relinquish the fort with its twelve great guns and other munitions of war to the Cherokee nation,—to which suggestion the Earl of Loudon had seemed to turn a deaf ear.

Alexander MacLeod, deliberating gravely, realized that under such circumstances the fort would ultimately be used against the English interest that it was designed to foster, by reason of the ever-ready machinations of the French influence among the Cherokees. The fort was evidently intended to afford protection to the Cherokees, but only so long as they were the allies of the English.

Much of the night passed in this discourse, but at length Willinawaugh slept, his feet toward the fire, around which the other Indians, all rolled in their blankets, like the spokes of a wheel about a hub, were already disposed. Alexander MacLeod had been nearly the last man to drop out of the conversation. He glanced up to note that Odalie sat still wide awake with her back against the trunk of a great chestnut-oak, her eyes on the fire, the child in her arms. They exchanged a glance which said as plain as speech that he and Hamish and she would divide the watch. Each would rest for two or three hours and watch while the others slept. It behooved them to be cautious and guard against surprise. The recollection of that dead Indian, lying on his face in the woods miles to the north of them, and the doubt whether or not he belonged to this party, and the sense of vengeance suspended like a sword by a hair,—all impinged very heavily on Hamish's consciousness, and in his own phrase he had to harry himself to sleep. Alexander, realizing that, as the ablest of the family, he was their chief means of defense, betook himself to much-needed repose, and Odalie was the only waking human being in many and many a mile. Now and again she heard far away the hooting of an owl, or the scream of a panther, and once, close at hand, the leaves stirred with a stealthy tread and the horses snorted aloud. She rose and threw more lightwood on the flaring fire, and as the flames leaped up anew two bright green eyes in the dusk on the shadowy side of the circle vanished; she saw the snarl of fierce fangs and no more, for the fire burned brilliantly that night as she fed the flames, and far down the aisles of the primeval forest the protective light was dispensed. Above were the dense boughs of the trees, all red and yellow, but through that great gate, the gap in the mountain wall, she could look out on the stars that she had always known, keeping their steadfast watch above this strange, new land. So accustomed was she to nature that she was not awed by the presence of the somber, wooded, benighted mountain range, rising in infinite gloom, and austere silence, and indefinable extent against the pallid, instarred sky.

She began to think, woman-like, of that home she had left; in her mind it was like a deserted living thing. And the poor sticks of furniture all standing aghast and alone, the door open and flapping in the wind! And when she remembered a blue pitcher,—a squat little blue jug that had come from France,—left on a shelf by the window with some red leaves in it to do duty as a bouquet,—so relieved was she now of her fears for the lives of them all that she must needs shed tears of regret for the little blue pitcher,—the squat little blue jug that came from France. And how had she selected so ill among her belongings as to what she should bring and what leave? Fifine had a better frock than that serge thing; it would not wear so well, but her murrey-colored pelisse trimmed with the sarcenet ribbon would have added warmth enough. If it were not such a waste of goods she would make over her paduasoy coat for Fifine, for she loved to see a small child very fine of attire. But precious little time she would have for remodeling the paduasoy coat,—a primrose-tinted ground with dark red roses, that had been her "grand'maman's" when new. "I wonder if I expected to live always in a hollow tree, that I should have left that pair of sheets, new ten hundred linen, the ones that I have just woven," she arraigned herself indignantly, as she mentally went over the stock in the pack. "And did I think I should be so idle that I must bring instead so much spun-truck so as to weave others. To think of those new linen sheets! And then too that lovely, quaint little jug—the little squat blue jug that came from France!"

Oh, no; Odalie was not at all lonely during the long watch through the night, and did not lack subjects of meditation. The time did not hang heavily on her hands!

It hardly seemed that an hour had passed when Hamish, in obedience to some inward monition, turned himself suddenly, looked up, stretched himself to a surprising length, then sat up by the fire, motioning to her to close her eyes.

His face was compassionate; perhaps he saw traces of tears about her eyes. He could not know why she had been weeping, or he might have accounted his sympathy wasted. For Hamish looked upon crockery as inanimate and a mere manufacture, yet endowed with a perverse ingenuity in finding occasions to come into disastrous contact with a boy's unsuspecting elbow, and get itself broken and the boy into disgrace. He had his gentle interpretation of her sorrow, and motioned to her, once more, to close her eyes, and pointed up at the skies, where Orion was unsheathing his glittering blade above the eastern mountains—a warning that the night was well-nigh spent and a chill day of early December on the way. And it seemed only an inappreciable interval of time before Odalie opened her eyes again, upon a crimson dawn, with the rime white on the sparse red and brown leaves and bare boughs; to see breakfast cooking under Hamish's ministrations; to see Fifine washing the cat's face with fresh water from the spring—very cold it was, as Fifine herself found it, when it came her turn to try it herself and cry "Quelle barbarie!"—to see the Indians getting a party to horse to go back and search for one of their number, who had become separated in some way; to see poor Hamish's face pale with fear and consciousness, and then harden with resolution to meet the worst like a man.

At length they set forth in the frosty dawn of a new day, changing their route and making their progress further southward along untried ways she had never thought to travel. The sun came grandly up; the mountain range, wooded to the summit, flaunted in splendid array, red, and yellow, and even purple, with the heavy growths of the sweet-gum trees, and their wealth of lingering foliage. Here and there, along the heights, grim crags showed their beetling precipices, and where the leaves had fallen, covering great slopes with russet hues, the bare boles and branches of the forest rose frosted with fine lace-like effects. Sometimes, with a wild woodland call and a flash of white foam, a cataract dashed down the valley. The feeding deer lifted their heads to gaze after the party with evanescent curiosity and then fell to quietly grazing again: they had not known enough of man to acquire a fear of him. Sometimes arose the bellowing of distant herds of buffalo, filling the Cumberland spurs and coves with a wonted sound, to which they have now long been strangers.

Wild turkey, quail, wild duck, wild geese, the latter already beginning their southward migration, were as abundant, one might say, as leaves on the trees or on the ground. There were trout of the finest flavor in these mountain streams, and one might call for what one would for dinner. If one cared for sweets there was honey in the honeycomb in almost any hollow tree, where the wild bees worked and the bear profited; and for fruit and nuts there were the delicious amber persimmons, and the sprightly frost grapes, and walnuts and hickory-nuts and chestnuts galore.

The march was far swifter now than the rate that the settlers had maintained before the Indians had joined the party, and the little girl was added to the burden of one of the packhorses, but Odalie, light, active, with her native energy tense in every nerve, and with every pulse fired by the thought that each moment carried her nearer to the cannon of Fort Loudon and safety, kept step valiantly with the pedestrians. Willinawaugh sat at his ease on his horse, which was somewhat jaded by long and continuous marches, or perhaps his patience would not have sufficed to restrain him to the pace of the pioneers and his own unmounted followers. A grave spirit of amity still pervaded the party, but there was little talk. Odalie relegated herself to the subservient manner and subordinate silence befitting a squaw; MacLeod, restricted to the French language and his bit of Cherokee, feared that his interest might lead him beyond the bounds of the simulation their safety required; Hamish was silent, too, partly tamed by the halt which they now and then made on rising ground, when the chief would turn his keen, high-nosed profile, distinct upon the faint tints of the blue mountains beyond, his eagle feathers on his scalp-lock blowing back against the sky, and cast a sharp-eyed glance over the landscape to discern if perchance the search party, from which they had separated, was now coming to rejoin them. These frequent halts were discontinued after two days, when the Indian saw fit to change his proposed line of march, and the rest of his party, if following, could hardly be expected to also deviate from the agreed plan and overtake them.

They had hitherto proceeded down a valley, between clifty mountain walls on the one hand, and a high, steep, frowning ridge on the other, running with the same trend in unbroken parallelism. Now it suited Willinawaugh to turn his horse's head straight up these seemingly inaccessible slopes; and without exchanging a glance or venturing a comment his fellow-travelers obediently followed his lead, conscious of the sly and furtive observation of his tribesmen and even of Willinawaugh himself, for the suspicion of the Indian never seems quite allayed but only dormant for a time. He noted naught that could excite it afresh, although it was only by the toil of hours that they could surmount the obstacles of great rocks, could find a deer-path through the dense jungle of the laurel, otherwise impenetrable, could cross foaming mountain torrents so swift and so deep that more than once it seemed that the packhorses, with Odalie also mounted now for the ford, must succumb to the strength of the current.

At length the party stood upon the summit, with a dozen wild outliers of the Cumberland and the intervenient coves below their feet; then came a vast spread of undulating country to the eastward, broken here and there by parallel ridges; and beyond rose mountains brown, and mountains purple, and still further, mountains blue; and still beyond and above, a-glimmering among the clouds, so high and so vague, apparently so like the gossamer texture of the vapor that one could hardly judge whether these congeners of the very heavens were earth or sky, mythical peaks or cloud mountains—the Great Smoky Range. In the wide, wide world below, noble rivers flowed, while aloft, like the gods on Olympus, it seemed the travelers could overlook the universe, so vast as to discount all theories of measurement, and mark its varying mood. So clear and limpid was the air that trivial incidents of that great scene were asserted despite the distance, and easily of note,—a herd of buffalo was distinguishable in an open, trodden space about a salt-lick; a fleet of canoes, like a bevy of swallows, winged along the broad surface of the largest of these splendid streams, called the Tsullakee (Cherokee) as Willinawaugh informed them, for these Indians never used the sound represented by our letter R. In the phonetically spelled words in which it seems to occur the sound is more accurately indicated by the letter L. A notable philological authority states that the English rendering of the word "Cherokee" and others of the language in which the letter R appears is derived from the mistaken pronunciation of neighboring tribes and of the French, who called the Tsullakee[B]—La rivière des Chéraquis.

Odalie could not refrain from asking in what direction was Choté, "beloved town, city of refuge." She had the art to affect to interpret for her husband, but she could not keep the light from her eyes, the scarlet flush of joyful expectation from her cheek, when the savage, with a sweeping wave of his pipe-stem, indicated a region toward the southeast on the banks of a tributary (the Little Tennessee) of that broad and splendid river, which was now running crimson and gold and with a steely glitter, reflecting the sunset, in the midst of the dusky, dull-blue landscape, with the languor of evening slipping down upon it.

There it lay in primeval beauty,—the land of hope. Oh, for the spirit of a soothsayer; for one prophetic moment! What did that land hold,—what days should dawn upon it; what hearthstones should be alight; who should be the victor in the conquests of the future, and what of the victim?

But they loved this country—the Cherokees; their own, they said, for the Great Spirit gave it them. They even sought to associate with those splendid eastern mountains the origin of the Cherokee people by the oft-reiterated claim that the first of their race sprung from the soil of those noble summits or dropped from the clouds that hover about the lofty domes. And now Willinawaugh broke from the silence that the lack of a common tongue had fostered, and despite that embargo on the exchange of ideas he grew fluent and his enthusiasm seemed to whet the understanding of his listeners, who could realize in some sort the language that they could not speak. They caught the names of the great landmarks. The vast range, on an outlier of which they pitched their camp, as insignificant in proportion as an atom to the universe, he called the Wasioto Mountain, and one of the rivers was the Hoho-hebee, and others were the Coot-cla, the Agiqua, the Canot, the Nonachuckeh. Hamish remembered these names long after they were forgotten by others, and the re-christened Clinch and Holston and French Broad flowed as fairly with their uncouth modern nomenclature as when they were identified by as liquid musical syllables as the lapsing of their own currents; for never did he lose the impression of this night;—never faded the mental picture of the Cherokee chief, the war-paint, vermilion and black and white, on his face as he sat before the fire, the waving of the eagle-feathers on his tufted scalp-lock blotting out half the dull-blue landscape below, which had the first hour of the night upon it, and the moon, blooming like a lily, with a fair white chalice reflected in the dark deeps of the Tsullakee River. And in this hour while Odalie reached out with all tender, tremulous hope to the future the savage told of the past.

Of the past,—mysterious, mythical. Of the strange lack of tradition of this new world that was yet so old. For here, in the midst of the Cherokee hunting-ground,—the whole country was but a great uninhabited park heavily stocked with game, the Cherokee settlements being merely a fringe upon its verges,—were vestiges of a previous population; remains of works of defense like forts; fragments of pottery and other manufactures; unfading allegorical paintings high on the face of inaccessible cliffs; curious tiny stone sarcophagi containing pygmy bones, the mysterious evidence of the actual existence of the prehistoric "little people";[4] great burial mounds, with moldering skeletons, and caves entombing mummies of splendid stature and long yellow hair, evidently placed there ages ago, still wearing ornaments of beads and metals, with remnants of strange fabrics of fibers and feathers, and with weapons befitting a high rank and a warlike race. And who were they? And whence did they come? They were always here, said Willinawaugh. So said all the Cherokees. They were always here.

And whither did this unknown people go? The Indian shook his head, the flicker of the fire on his painted face. They were gone, he said, when the Tsullakee came. Long gone—long gone!

And alas, what was their fate? Odalie looked about at the violet night, at the white moon and the dun shadows, with an upbraiding question, and the night was silent with a keen chill fall of a frost. This was no new world into which they were adventuring. It had witnessed tragedies. It held death. It sealed its lips and embodied oblivion. Oh, for the hopes of the future,—and oh, for the hopes of the dead and gone past!

FOOTNOTES:

[A] White.

[B] It is known now as the Tennessee River.

CHAPTER II

The next day when Odalie turned her face once more toward her Mecca of home and peace she felt that she trod on air, although her shoes, ill calculated for hard usage, had given way at last, and suffered the thorns to pierce through the long rifts between sole and upper leather and the stones to still further rend the gaping tatters. MacLeod would not allow himself to comment on it even by a look, lest some uncontrollable sympathy should force him to call a halt, now when he felt that their lives depended on pressing forward and taking advantage of the pacific mood of the Indian and the assumed character of French traders to reach the English fort. Hamish, however, with a dark-eyed, reproachful glance upbraided this apparently callous disregard, and then addressed himself to the task of making light of the matter to Odalie in lieu of other solace.

"Tu ne ought pas l'avoir fait," he gravely admonished her in his queer French. "Tu ought known better, Odalie!"

"Known what better?" demanded Odalie, resenting reprimand in a very un-squawlike fashion.

"Marcher in shoes! Mong Dew! Ces souliers couldn't have been made pour marcher in!" he retorted, with a funny grimace.

The facial contortion seemed suddenly to anger Willinawaugh, who had chanced to observe them; to suggest recollections that he resented, and the reminder shared in his disfavor. He abruptly wreathed his fierce countenance into a simulacrum of Hamish's facetious mug; he shrugged his shoulders with a genuine French twist; and anything more incongruously and grotesquely frightful and less amusing could hardly be imagined.

"Fonny! vely fonny! Flanzy!" he exclaimed harshly. "Balon Des Johnnes!"[5]

His unwilling companions gazed at him with as genuine a terror as if the devil himself had entered into him and thus expressed his presence among them. Willinawaugh abruptly discontinued his "fonny" grimace, that had a very ferocity of rebuke, and leaning from his horse with an expression of repudiation, spat upon the ground. Then he began to talk about Baron Des Johnnes and his sudden disappearance from the Cherokee Nation.

At Choté, it seemed, was this gay and facetious Frenchman, this all-accomplished Baron Des Johnnes, who could speak seven different Indian languages with equal facility, to say nothing of a trifle or two such as English, Spanish, German, and French, of course!—at Choté, City of Refuge, where, if he had shed the blood of the native Cherokee on his own threshold, his life would have been sacred even from the vengeance of the Indian's brother! And suddenly came the Carolina Colonel Sumter, returning with an Indian delegation that had been to Charlestown, and found the Frenchman here. And with Colonel Sumter was Oconostota, king of the Cherokees, and other head-men, who had just signed a treaty at Charlestown, promising to kill or arrest any Frenchman discovered within the Cherokee Nation. And who so appalled as Oconostota, to see his friend, the gay Baron Des Johnnes, lying on a buffalo skin before the fire, smoking his pipe in the chief's own wigwam. And when Colonel Sumter demanded his arrest Oconostota refused and pleaded the sanctity of the place—the City of Refuge. And Baron Des Johnnes arose very smiling and bland, and bowed very low, and reminded Colonel Sumter that he was in Choté—Old Town!

And what said Colonel Sumter? He spoke in the English, like a wolf might talk—"Old Town—or New Town—I'll take you to Charles Town!"

And what did the Baron Des Johnnes? Not a Cherokee; not bound by the ever-sacred laws of the City of Refuge! Although surrounded by his friends he struck not one blow for his freedom, as man to man. He suffered himself to be arrested, single-handed, by this wolf of a Colonel—Colonel Sumter—saying in gentle protest, "Mais, M'sieur!"

"Mais, M'sieur!" grimaced Willinawaugh, in mimicry. Then "Mais M'sieur!" he threw up both hands. "Mais, M'sieur!" he shrieked in harsh derision to the unresponsive skies.

Alexander knew that the Baron Des Johnnes had been taken to Charlestown and examined, and although nothing could be proved against him, it had been deemed expedient to ship him off to England. Perhaps the authorities were of opinion that a man with such conversational facilities as eight or ten languages had best be kept where "least said, soonest mended."

But for the repeated harsh treatment that the Cherokees sustained from the English settlers, the ingratiating arts of the French might have failed to find so ready a response. Sedate of manner and of a grave cast of mind themselves, the Indians could ill tolerate the levity, the gaieté de cœur, of the French, whom they pronounced "light as a feather, fickle as the wind, and deceitful as serpents."

With this intimation of Willinawaugh's reserves of irritability the pioneers journeyed on, a trifle more ill at ease in mind, which was an added hardship, since their physical sufferings were intensifying with every long mile of continued effort. They began to wonder how they, supposed to be French, would fare when they should meet other Cherokees, perhaps more disposed than Willinawaugh to adhere to the terms of their treaty to kill or make prisoner every Frenchman who should venture into the Cherokee Nation, yet on the other hand perhaps more competent by virtue of a familiarity with the language to detect and resent the fact that they were not of the French nationality. Already Willinawaugh had counseled that they should go further than Choté, to ply their trade in furs, for Choté was dangerously near the English fort for a Frenchman; one of the Tuckaleechee towns on the Canot River was a preferable location, and he promised to contrive to slip them past Fort Loudon without the commandant's knowledge.

They restrained all expression of objection or discomfort and bore their growing distresses with a fortitude that might rival the stoicism of a savage. Only when an aside was possible, MacLeod besought his wife to loose the burden of one of the packhorses and mount the animal herself. She shook her head resolutely. She had already suffered grief enough for the household stores she had left behind. To these precious remaining possessions she clung desperately. "When I can no longer walk," she said, with a flash in her eye which admonished him to desist.

They offered no comment on their route, although it seemed that they had climbed the mountain two days ago for the express purpose of descending it again, but on the eastern side. MacLeod, however, at length realized that the Indian was following some faint trace, well distinguishable to his skilled eye, and the difficulties of the steep descent were rendered more tolerable by his faith in the competence of his guide. The packhorses found it hard work filing down the sharp declivities and sustaining the equilibrium of their burden. The chief, with his lordly impatience and superiority to domestic concerns, evidently fumed because of the delay they occasioned, and had he not supposed that the contents of the bales of goods were merchandise and trinkets to be bartered with the Indians for peltry, instead of Odalie's slim resources of housekeeping wares,—sheets, and table-linen and garments, and frugal supplies of flax and seeds,—he would not have suffered the slow progress.

Through the new country below, that they had watched from the heights, they went now, the mountains standing sentinel all around the horizon—east and west, and north and south, sometimes nearer, sometimes more distant; always mountains in sight, like some everlastingly uplifting thought, luring a life to a higher plane of being. Now and again the way wended along the bank of a river, with the steeps showing in the waters below as well as against the sky above, and one day when they had but recently broken their camp on its shores there shot out from beneath an overhanging boscage of papaw trees a swift, arrowy thing akin to a fish, akin to a bird—an Indian canoe, in which were three braves.

The poor pioneers were exhausted with their long and swift journey; their hearts, which had been stanch within them, could but fail with the failure of physical strength. Their courage only sufficed to hold them to a mute endurance of a dreadful expectation, and a suspense that set every nerve a-quiver. The boatmen had cried out with a wild, fierce note of surprise on perceiving the party, and the canoe was coming straight across to the bank as fast as the winglike paddles could propel it. Willinawaugh rode slowly down to meet them, and in contrast to the usual impassive manners of the Indians he replied to the agitated hail in a tone of tense and eager excitement. There ensued evidently an exchange of news, of a nature which boded little good to the settlers. Dark anger gathered on the brow of the chieftain as he listened when the braves had bounded upon the bank, and more than once he cried out inarticulately like a wild beast in pain and rage. Perhaps it is rare that a man has such a moment in his life as Alexander experienced when one of the savages, a ferocious brute, turned with a wild, untamed, indigenous fury kindling in his eyes, and drawing his tomahawk from his belt smiled fiercely upon the silent, motionless little band, his deadly racial hatred reinforced by a thousand bitter grudges and wrongs.

Hamish's fingers trembled on his gun, but ostensibly no one moved. Willinawaugh hastily interposed, speaking but the magic words—"Flanzy—Flinch!" Then still in English, as if to reassure the pioneers—"Go Choté—Old Town—buy fur!"

The hatred died out of the fierce Indian faces. The French in the South, as has been said, had always used every art to detach the Cherokees from the British interest, and even now the men who had abandoned Fort Duquesne, escaping down the Ohio River, were sending emissaries up the Tsullakee, to the Lower Towns, there finding fruitful soil in which to sow the seeds of dissension against the English. The assertion that these travelers were French, and the fact that by receiving persons of this nation the Cherokees could requite with even a trivial and diplomatic injury some faint degree of the wrong which they considered they had sustained from the Virginians, was more than adequate to nullify for the time the rage they felt against these pioneers as of the white race.

With the instinct of hospitality, which is a very marked element of the Cherokee nature, one of them signed with a free and open gesture to the boat.

"Beaucoup marchez!" he said, smiling with an innocent suavity like a child, "Svim!"

He did not mean literally "swim," and to offer them the facilities of the Tennessee River for that purpose, although this might have been inferred. But the pioneers understood the proffer of the canoe for the remainder of their journey, and a deadly terror seized the heart of Odalie as she marked the demonstrations of the others in pulling Willinawaugh forcibly from his horse in spite of his feigned objections, for the canoe could hold but three persons. Little choice had she, however. Willinawaugh, maintaining the affable demeanor of a guest of conscious distinction, was already seated in the boat, and pointed out Alexander as his preferred companion. For once the Scotchman disregarded the wishes of his guide, philosopher, and friend, and taking his wife by the hand motioned to her to step over the side of the little craft. Odalie could only look reproachfully at him; she could not contend with her lord and master in the presence of savages—such are the privileges of civilization! The Indians, somewhat accustomed by the talk, and on occasion the example, of the French traders, and perhaps by traditions from the white settlements, to the idea of the extreme value that the paleface was wont to place on wife or daughter, scornfully marked the instance, but beyond an expressive "Ugh!" naught was said. The child was lifted to Odalie's arms—the cat strapped pappoose-wise to Josephine's back and accommodating itself quiescently to the situation.

Alexander had never intended to embark Odalie and Josephine alone with the Indians, although his will was but a slight thing, so entirely were they now in the power of the savages; he motioned to Hamish to take the paddle, and with the slight mixture of French and Cherokee at his command, intimated to the apparent owner of the boat that he would rather walk by his side and profit by his converse than to be able to sail at will on the water like the swan there—a large and handsome bird, who was giving the finest exhibition of that method of progression to be easily found anywhere, with her white neck arched, her gliding motion, and snowy breast reflected in the clear water.

And so Odalie had parted from her husband, without so much as a glance of farewell! Perhaps he dared not look at her. So far they had come together, and now in these wild fastnesses, among these blood-loving fiends in the likeness of humanity, they were separated to meet when?—where? Perchance no more. She could not—would not—leave him thus. She would turn back at the last moment! She would go back!

She rose to her feet so precipitately that with the shifting of her weight the canoe careened suddenly and was momentarily in danger of capsizing with all on board. Willinawaugh glanced up with a kindling eye and a ferocious growl. Hamish, throwing himself skillfully on the opposite side, adroitly trimmed the boat. His look of warning, upbraiding and yet sympathizing, steadied Odalie's nerves as she sank back into her place. She tactfully made it appear that she had accidentally come near to dropping the little girl from her grasp and rising to recover her had shaken the poise of the frail craft. Willinawaugh's mutter of dissatisfaction showed that he esteemed the possibility no very great mischance, and set no high store on Josephine. Now and again he eyed the cat, too, malevolently, as if he could ill brook her mannerisms and pampered mien. Hamish had an uncomfortable idea that the Cherokee was not familiar with animals of this kind, and that he harbored a wonder if Kitty would not serve her best and noblest possibilities in a savory stew. But for himself Hamish avoided the Indian's eyes with their curious painted circles of black and white, as much as he might, for whenever their glances met, Willinawaugh's facial contortion to deride the "fonny" disposition he deemed a part of Hamish's supposed French nature so daunted the boy that he bent his head as well as his muscles to the work.

That day was like a dream to Odalie, and, indeed, from the incongruity of her mental images she hardly knew whether she was sleeping or waking. One moment it seemed to her that she was in Carolina, in the new frame mansion that she had always thought so fine, sitting on the arm of her grandmother's chair, with her dark hair against the white locks and the snowy cap, while she babbled, in the sweet household patois of French children that has no lexicon, and no rules, and is handed down from one generation to another, her girlish hopes, and plans, and anxieties, to find the grandmother's fine, old, deft hand smooth all the difficulties away and make life easy, and hope possible, and trouble a mere shadow.

Alas! that brightening perspective of the colonial garden, where the jasmine, gold and white, clung to the tall trellises, and the clove gillyflower, and the lilies and roses grew in the borders in the broad suffusions of the sunshine, was metamorphosed to the wide spread of the Tennessee River, with the noon-day blaze on its burnished expanse of ripples; and grand'maman had long since ceased her ministry of soothing and consolation, and found her own comfort in the peace and quiet of the grave. And ere Odalie could suffer more than a pang to realize that she was so far from that grave, her head drooped once more—she was asleep.

No; she was awake, awake and splendid in a white dress, her beautiful bridal dress in which she had looked a very queen, with her grand'maman's pearl necklace, itself an heirloom, about her white throat. And so, standing at the altar of the little church with Alexander, and much light about her, and a white dress, oh, very white—and suddenly! all the church is stricken to darkness. No; there is light again!

It was a flash from a thunder cloud, reflected in sinister, forked lines in the Tennessee River, so that they seemed in the very midst of the lightning, until it vanished into the darkness of a lowering black sky, that overhung the water and made all the woods appear bleak and leafless, though here and there still a red tree blazed. The world was drearier for these grim portents of storm, for all the way hitherto fair weather had smiled upon their progress. Still she could not heed—she did not care even when the rain came down and pitilessly beat upon her white face; she did not know when Fifine crept under the shawl which Hamish threw around her, and that the frightened little girl held to her tight with both arms around her waist, while the pioneer cat very discreetly nestled down in the basket on Josephine's back. She was not roused even by loud voices when later a pettiaugre, a much larger boat than theirs, pulled alongside with eight or ten warriors and remained in close and unremitting conversation with Willinawaugh for several miles. Poor Hamish could hardly sustain himself. He felt practically alone. Odalie was, he thought, on the verge of death from exhaustion and realized naught of her surroundings. His brother had been left in these wild woods with a party of savages, who were as likely to murder him for a whim or for the treasures of the bales which the packhorses carried, as to respect the safe conduct of Willinawaugh and the supposed character of French traders. This, Hamish was aware, hardly sufficed now, so unrestrained was the ferocity of the glances cast upon them by the Indians in the pettiaugre alongside—so like the glare of a savage catamount, ready to leap upon its prey and yet with a joyance in its ferocity, as if this rage were not the pain of anger but the pleasure of it.

What subtle influence roused Odalie at last she could hardly have said; perhaps the irresistible torpor of exhaustion had in some sort recruited her faculties. The storm was gone, unseasonable and transient, and only a broken remnant of its clouds hung about the western mountains. Toward the east the sky was clear and a dull fluctuation of sunset, alternating with shadow, was on the landscape. As a sudden suffusion of this broad, low, dusky glare lay upon the scene for a moment, she saw against the dark blue Chilhowee Mountain in the middle distance something glimmering and waving, and as she strained her eyes it suddenly floated broadly forth to the breeze,—the blended cross of St. George and St. Andrew blazoned on the British flag.

In one moment she was strong again; alert, watchful, brave, despite that boat close alongside and the alternate questions and remonstrances of the fierce and cruel Indians. One of them, the light of a close and fine discernment in his savage features, was contending that Willinawaugh was deceived; that these were no French people; that the cast of the face of the "young dog" was English; he looked like the Virginia settlers and hunters; even like the men at the fort.

Willinawaugh had the air of deigning much to consider the plea that the other Indians preferred. He only argued astutely that they all spoke French among themselves,—man, boy, squaw, and pappoose. They showed gratitude when he had promised them that they should not be obliged to pass the English fort and risk the chance of detection. He intended to slip them up the Tellico River where it flows into the Tennessee a mile on the hither side of the fort and thence make their way to a remoter Indian town than Choté.

The skeptical Cherokee, Savanukah, immediately asserted boastfully that he spoke "Flinch" himself and would test the nationality of the boy.

Hamish had never had great scholastic advantages and had sturdily resisted those that Odalie would have given him. He remembered with despair the long lines of French verbs in the little dog's-eared green book that all her prettiest sisterly arts could never induce him to learn to conjugate. Why should he ever need more talking appliance than he already possessed, he used to argue. He could tell all he knew, and more besides, in the somewhat limited English vocabulary at his command. "Parlez vous? Parlez, fou!" he was wont to exclaim, feeling very clever. How should he have dreamed that Odalie's little Vocabulaire Français would be more efficacious to save his life than his rifle and his deadly aim?

"The canoe rocked in the swirls."

He looked toward her once more in his despair. The boats were now among a series of obstructions formed by floating débris of a recent storm,—many branches of trees, here and there a bole itself, uprooted and flung into the river by the violence of the tempest,—which necessitated careful steering and paddling and watching the current to take them through safely. It threw the two boats apart for a space, prolonging Hamish's suspense, yet serving as a reprieve to the ordeal of his examination as to his proficiency in the French language by the erudite Cherokee. The canoe rocked in the swirls, and although Willinawaugh sat still in stately impassiveness, Odalie and Fifine clung to the gunwale. Hamish's eyes met Odalie's, which were clear, liquidly bright, as if fired with some delightful anticipation, and yet weary and feverishly eager. Oh, this was delirium! She did not realize her surroundings; her intelligence was gone! His poor young heart swelled nearly to bursting as he turned back with aching arms and dazzled eyes and throbbing, feverish pulses to the careful balancing of the paddle, for Willinawaugh was an exacting coxswain. Hamish could not know what vision had been vouchsafed to Odalie in the midst of the gloomy woods while the other Indians and Willinawaugh had wrangled and he had hung absorbed upon their words as on the decrees of fate. Even she at first had deemed it but hallucination, the figment of some fever of the brain—this had been a day of dreams! Yet there it had stood on the river bank with the primeval woods around it, with the red sunset amongst the clouds above it, with the sunset below it, reflected in the current of the river, full of sheen and full of shadow,—a figure, a hunter, looking out at the boats; a white man,—a man she had never before seen.

How he stared! She dared make no signal of distress. She only turned her head that she might look back covertly with a face full of meaning. The next moment she saw him mount his horse in the buffalo path in the cane-brake and gallop off at a breakneck speed.

But was she sure—had she seen aught, she asked herself, tremulously. For it had been a day of dreams—it had been a day of dreams! And the confluence of the Tellico River with the Tennessee might be so hopelessly near!

The progress of both boats was very slow now, upstream against the current and the débris of the storm; even the crew of Indian braves needed to pull with vigor to make the clear water again. When this was reached they rested motionless, the duplication of the pettiaugre and the feather headdress of the Cherokees as clearly pictured in the bright, still reaches of the river as above in the medium of the air between sunset and dusk.

They were all looking back, all commenting on Hamish's slow progress. He had the current and his exhaustion both against him, and the most earnest and well-equipped postulant of culture would hardly be eager to go to an examination in the French language when his life was to be the forfeit of failure. The sound of the river was loud on the evening air; a wind was astir on either bank,—a pillaging force, rifling the forest of the few leaves it might still treasure; now and then a scurrying cloud of them fled before the blast against the sky; the evening had grown chill; the boy felt its dank depression in every nerve despite the drops of perspiration that stood upon his brow as he too paddled into the clear water. He held the boat stationary by a great effort.

He had come to the end. He could strive no more. He saw Savanukah rise up in the pettiaugre, looking toward him. The next moment the savage turned his head. There was an alien sound upon the air, so close at hand that despite the fret and turmoil of the water, the blare of the wild wind, the tumultuous clashing together of the bare boughs in the black forest, it arrested the attention. Once more it asserted itself against the tumult, and then Hamish, his head spinning around until he thought that the canoe had broken loose from his mechanical plying of the paddle, recognized the regular rhythmical dash of oars.

CHAPTER III

In the next instant from beyond a curve in the river a boat shot into the current,—a large row-boat, manned by twelve red-coated soldiers, bending to the oars, whose steady strokes sent the craft down the stream with the speed, it seemed, of a meteor.

They were alongside and a non-commissioned officer was in diplomatic converse with Willinawaugh before Hamish had regained possession of his faculties. Very diplomatic was the conference, for the corporal had his pacific orders and Willinawaugh was burdened with the grave anxiety to make the facts conform at once to the probabilities, yet sustain the impeccability of his own conduct. A little network of wrinkles, almost like a visible mesh, gathered at the corners of his eyes and gave token of his grave cogitation.

The corporal, a dark-haired, blue-eyed, florid young Irishman, looking very stanch and direct and steady, but not without a twinkle of humor which betokened some histrionic capacity to support the situation, speaking partly in English and partly, glibly enough, in very tolerable Cherokee, although incongruously embellished with an Irish brogue, detailed that Captain Stuart had been apprised that there was a band of Indians on the river who had some white people with them, and he wished to know if these white people were French, in which case, according to the treaty made with the Cherokees, they must be arrested and delivered up to the commandant of the fort, or if English, he wished to be assured that they were at liberty to go where they pleased, and were under no restraint.

As the officer concluded, having bowed to Odalie with much politeness, considering he was not yet informed as to whether she were of a party of French emissaries, forever sowing dissension amongst the Cherokee allies of the English, he drew himself up very erect, with a complacent mien. He was conscious of being a fine-looking fellow, and he had not seen so handsome a young woman of her evident position in life for a month of Sundays. Nevertheless he kept one eye on Willinawaugh, who was also eminently worthy of his respectful attention.

"Ingliss—all Ingliss," said the chief, unexpectedly.

The Indians in the pettiaugre, listening attentively, gave no sign of surprise upon this statement, so at variance with the warrior's previous representations. His ruse to shield the travelers now by declaring them English shielded himself as well, for being a chief and head-man he could hardly find a plausible subterfuge to cloak his playing the rôle of guide, philosopher, and friend to people of a nation so obnoxious to his English allies, and establishing them in the very heart of the Cherokee nation, contrary to its many solemn obligations and treaties.

After a moment's further reflection, Willinawaugh said again with emphasis, "Ingliss, Ingliss." Perhaps he did not desire to avail himself of the added fluency of explanation which the Cherokee language would have afforded him, and which Corporal O'Flynn evidently understood. "Go Choté—Old Town. Buy fur—man—packhorse," he added, pointing across the woods in the direction in which Alexander MacLeod was presumably still wearily tramping.

The corporal for the moment forgot how good-looking he was. He concentrated his whole attention on Willinawaugh's disingenuous countenance, and then turned and cast a long, searching look upon Odalie. The eyes that met his own were swimming in tears, and with an expression of pleading insistence that fairly wrung his heart, although he hardly understood it. If she were English, why then she was free as the air. If French—well, bedad, thin, Corporal O'Flynn wished himself at the bottom of the Tennessee River, for a French lady in grief and under arrest had no right to be so good-looking at all, at all. Here was something wrong, he could but perceive, and yet because of Willinawaugh's diplomacy he could not fix upon it.

"What's your name, my lad?" he said abruptly to Hamish.

Hamish had his eyes on the water. His fortitude, too, had given way in the sudden relaxation of the strain of suspense. He could not, would not, lift his face and let that boat's crew of stalwart soldiers resting on their oars, the two ranks gazing at him, see the tears in his eyes.

"Hamish MacLeod," he made shift to say, and could say no more.

"A good English name, bedad, for a Scotch one, and an English accent," Corporal O'Flynn mentally commented, as he looked curiously at the boy, standing with downcast face, mechanically handling the paddle.

"Now by the powers," said the young soldier to himself with sudden resolution, "Captain Stuart may undertake the unraveling o' this tangle himself."

"English!" he exclaimed aloud. Then with much courtesy of manner, "Captain Stuart desires his compliments, and begs the English party to do him the honor to lie at Fort Loudon to-night and pursue their journey at their convanience." He glanced up at the sky. "It grows late and there are catamounts out, an' other bletherin' bastes, an' their howlin' might frighten the leddy."

Odalie, remembering the real dangers that had beset her and catching his serious, unconscious glance as he animadverted on the possibly terrifying vocalizations, burst into momentary laughter, and then into a torrent of tears.

At which the corporal, the boat's crew, and the Indian braves gazed at her in blank astonishment. Hysterics were a new importation on the frontier. She controlled with an effort her tendency to laugh, but still wept with the profusion of exhaustion and nervous tension.

Willinawaugh's eyes were fixed on her with deep displeasure. "Ugh!" he grunted from time to time. "Ugh!"

"Oh, there's bloody murder here, if one could but chance upon the carpse," said the corporal to himself, looking bewildered from her to the boy.

And now was demonstrated the fact that although the corporal had but the slightest bit of a brogue in the world, there was a twist in his tongue which showed that he had at some time in his career made a practice of kissing the "Blarney Stone" and was as Irish as County Clare.

"Of course Captain Stuart couldn't have known that his valued friend, the great chief, Willinawaugh, was to be passing with the English party, but, sure, he would take it mighty ill if the chief did not stop over, too, and lie at the fort to-night,—an' he so seldom up from Toquoe! Captain Demeré, too, will expect the great chief. My word on't, he will."

Now Willinawaugh, an epitome of craft, had no idea of adventuring with his supposed French friends, whom he had endeavored to pass off as English, into the British stronghold, for he doubted their capacity to sustain their character of compatriots; he had no means of judging of their knowledge of the English language and how soon their ignorance might betray them. Since the ruse he had adopted had evidently not sufficed to evade the enforced stoppage at Fort Loudon, he had relinquished the intention to take them on past Choté to some other of the Overhill towns, and let them establish themselves as French traders. He feared that were they once inside the walls of Fort Loudon this design against the agreement with his allies would become transparent. To be sure, it must be soon elucidated, but Willinawaugh was determined to be far away by that time, and, moreover, he could send a "talk" (letter) to Captain Stuart, whose good opinion he greatly coveted, to say that the French trader had deceived him and made him believe that the party was English. At the same time he was too wary to venture into his valued friend's power with this fresh grievance and with stormy times for the two peoples evidently in prospect.

But he was flattered, infinitely flattered, as indeed who would not have been, by Corporal O'Flynn's tone and expression of ingenuous eyes and respectful word of mouth. Willinawaugh was glad to have these Choté Cherokees see how highly he was esteemed—he was indeed a great warrior and a "Big Injun" of exclusive privilege. The invitation in no wise was to be extended to the others to pass the night at Fort Loudon—not even to Savanukah, a chief himself, who spoke French!

Corporal O'Flynn was now going over in his mind how Willinawaugh might best be insulated, so to speak, that he might not have means to fire the barracks, should that enterprise suggest itself to his fertile brain, or find a way to open the gates, or otherwise afford ingress to confederates without; how to lock him in, and yet not seem to treat him as a prisoner; to leave him at liberty, and yet free to do nothing but that which his hosts should please. All such complicated and contradictory details did Corporal O'Flynn deem himself capable of reconciling—but one such subject was enough. Unfortunately for the triumphant elucidation of these puzzling problems, Willinawaugh, with dignity and a certain gruffness; yet now and again a flicker of covert smile as if to himself, declined to partake of Captain Stuart's hospitality. He had a mission to the head-men of Choté which would not brook delay. Yet he had a message to leave for the English officer. He desired to tell Captain Stuart that he often thought of him! Whenever he heard tales of famous warriors, of British generals, he thought of him! He considered these fighting men brave and noble, when he learned of their splendid deeds in battle; and then again, they were as naught in his mind,—for he had once more thought of the great Captain Stuart!

The corporal, listening attentively to pick out the meaning of Cherokee and English, made a low bow in behalf of Captain Stuart, with a flourishing wave of his hat.

"I'll bear yer message, sir, and a proud man Captain Stuart ought to be the day! An those jontlemen,"—he glanced at the pettiaugre full of Indians,—"be so good as to ask them to lead the way."

Then he added in an undertone to his own men, "I am glad on't. I don't want the responsibility of takin' care of the baste. I might be accused of kidnapin' the craythure if anythin' was to happen to 'm,—though as to kids, he's more like the old original Billy-goat o' the whole worruld!"

Corporal O'Flynn cast the eye of a disciplinarian about him. It was one of the rules of the tyranny he practiced, thus remote from civilization, that however jocose he might be not a trace of responsive merriment must decorate the faces of the men. They were all now, as was meet, grave and wooden. At the orders in his clear, ringing voice—"Let fall!" and the oars struck the water with emphasis, "Give way!"—Odalie's tears must needs flow anew. She gazed at the dozen fresh, florid young faces, as the boat swung round and they came once more near the canoe, as if they were a vision of saints vouchsafed to some poor groping, distraught spirit,—when they were far indeed from being saints, though good enough in their way, too! They all looked with unconscious sympathy at her as she sat and wept and looked at them, and Corporal O'Flynn, moved by the tears, exclaimed below his breath, "But, be jabbers, afther all, what's the good of 'em now—better have been cryin' yesterday, or mebbe the day before. Back oars! Now—now! Give way!"

He was the last in the little fleet, and Hamish paddled briskly now to keep ahead, as he was evidently expected to do, for Corporal O'Flynn intended that his own boat should bring up the rear. As they fared thus along, Odalie noted the inflowing of that tributary, the Tellico River—how solitary, how remote, how possible its loneliness had rendered the scheme of Willinawaugh. Some distance beyond appeared a settler's cabin in an oasis of cultivated land in the midst of the dense cane-brake; then others, now dull and dusky in the blue twilight, with the afterglow of the sunset redly aflare above in the amber sky and below in the gray and glimmering water; now with a lucent yellow flicker from the wide-open door gemming the night with the scintillations of the hearthstone, set like a jewel in the center of the wilderness; now sending forth a babbling of childish voices where the roof-tree had been planted close by the river-side and the passing of the boats had drawn all the household to the brink. How many they seemed—these cabins of the adventurous pioneers! How many happy homes—alas, that there should ever be cause to cry it were better for them had they never been!

Odalie began to realize that she owed her liberty and perhaps her life to the first of these settlers who had espied the craft upon the river; as she marked the many windings and tortuous curves of the stream she understood that he must have galloped along some straight, direct route to the fort to acquaint the officers with the suspicious aspect of the Indian party and their white captives. As to the tremendous speed the commandant's boat had made to their rescue,—she blessed anew those reckless young saints who had plied the oars with such fervent effort, which, however, could hardly have effected such speed had it not been too for the swift current running in their favor.

Suddenly the fort came into view—stanch, grim, massive, with the great red-clay exterior slopes and the sharp points of the high palisades on the rampart distinct in the blue twilight. It was very different from the stockaded stations of the early settlers with which she had been familiar. This fort had been erected by the British government, and was a work of very considerable strength and admirably calculated for defensive purposes, not only against the subtle designs of the Indians but against possible artillery attacks of the French. There were heavy bastions at the angles and within each a substantial block-house, the upper story built with projections beyond the lower, that would not only aid the advantage which the bastions gave of a flanking fire upon an assailant, but enable a watch to be maintained at all times and from all quarters upon the base of the wooden stockade on the rampart lest an enemy passing the glacis should seek to fire the palisades. But this was in itself well-nigh impracticable. Strong fraises, defending both scarp and counterscarp, prevented approach. The whole was guarded by twelve cannon, grimly pointed from embrasures, and very reassuring their black muzzles looked to one who hoped to ply the arts of peace beneath the protection of their threat of war. Even the great gates were defended, being so thickly studded with iron spikes that not an inch of the wood was left uncovered. They were broadly aflare now, and a trifle in advance of the sentry at the entrance two officers were standing, brilliant with their red coats and cocked hats. They were gazing with a certain curiosity at the boats on the river, for Corporal O'Flynn, having pressed forward and landed first, had left his men resting on their oars and taken his way into the presence of his superior officers to make his report. He had paused for half a dozen words with Hamish MacLeod as the boat passed the canoe, and when Odalie and the boy, with a couple of soldiers at either side maintaining the aspect of a guard, came up the gentle ascent at a slower pace, Captain Stuart was already fully apprised of their long and perilous flight from Virginia. He stood awaiting their approach,—a tall man of about twenty-eight years of age, bluff and smiling, with dense light-brown hair braided in a broad, heavy queue and tied with a black ribbon. He had a fair complexion, considerably sun-burned, strong white teeth with a wide arch of the jaw, and he regarded her with keen steel-blue eyes, steady and unfathomable, yet withal pleasant. He took off his hat and cordially held out his hand. Odalie could do naught but clasp it in both her cold hands and shed tears over it, mute and trembling.

With that ready tact which always distinguished him, Captain Stuart broke the tension of the situation.

"Do you wish to enlist, Mrs. MacLeod?" he said, his smile showing a glimpse of his white teeth. "His majesty, the king, has need of stout-hearted soldiers. And I will take my oath I never saw a braver one!"

And Odalie broke into laughter to blend with her tears, because she divined that it was with the intention of passing on a difficulty that he not ungracefully transferred her hands to the officer standing near with the words, "I have the pleasure of presenting Captain Demeré." However capable Captain Stuart might be of dealing with savages, he evidently shrank from the ordeal of being wept over and thanked by a woman.

He has been described by a contemporary historian as "an officer of great address and sagacity," and although he may have demonstrated these qualities on more conspicuous occasions, they were never more definite than in thus securing his escape from feminine tearfulness.

Captain Demeré was of a graver aspect. He heard without impatience her wild insistence that the whole available force of the fort should turn out and scour the wilderness for her husband—he even argued the matter. It would be impossible to find Mr. MacLeod at night and the effort might cost him his life. "So marked a demonstration of a military nature would alarm the Indians and precipitate an outbreak which we have some reason to expect. If he does not appear by daylight, the hunters of the fort who always go out shall take that direction and scout the woods. Rest assured everything shall be done which is possible."

She felt that she must needs be content with this, and as it had been through the intervention of the officers that she and Hamish and Fifine were set free, it did not lie in her mouth to doubt their wisdom in such matters, or their capacity to save her husband. Looking back to the river, as upon a phase of her life already terminated, she saw the canoe in which she had spent this troublous day already beginning to push out upon the broad current. Willinawaugh, with an Indian from the other crew to paddle the craft, had eluded Captain Stuart, who had reached the water's edge too late for a word with him, and who stood upon the bank, an effective martial figure, and blandly waved his hand in farewell, with a jovial outcry, "Canawlla! Canawlla!"[C]

The features of the chief were slightly corrugated with those fine lines of diplomatic thought, and even at this distance he muttered the last word he had spoken to the corporal as he swiftly got away from him—"Ingliss!" he said again. "All Ingliss!"

As Odalie turned, the interior of the fort was before her; the broad parade, the lines of barracks, the heavy, looming block-houses, the great red-clay wall encircling all, and the high, strong palisades that even surmounted the rampart. It gave her momentarily the sensation, as she stood in its shadow, of being down in a populous and very secure well. There was a pervasive sentiment of good cheer; here and there the flicker of firelight fluctuated from an open door. Supper was either in progress or just over, and savory odors gushed out into the air. The champing of horses and now and then a glad whinny betokened that the corn-bin was open in the stables somewhere in the dusk. She felt as if the wilderness was a dream, for surely all this cordial scene of warmth, and light, and cheer, and activity, could not have existed while she wandered yonder, so forlorn, and desolate, and endangered; in pity of it,—surely it was a dream! Now and again groups of fresh-faced soldiers passed, most of them in full uniform, for there had been a great dress parade during the afternoon, perhaps to impress the Indians with the resources and military strength of the fort; perhaps to attach them by affording that spectacular display, so new to all their experience, so imposing and splendid. Some of the savage visitors lingered, wistful, loath to depart, and were being hustled carefully out of the place by a very vigilant guard, who had kept them under surveillance as a special charge all the afternoon. A few soldiers of the post coming in laden with game wore the buckskin leggings, shirt, and coonskin cap usual among the settlers, for it had been bitterly demonstrated that the thorns of the trackless wilderness had no sort of reverence for the texture of the king's red coat.

Even the cat realized the transition to the demesne of civilization and in some sort the wonted domestic atmosphere. She suddenly gave an able-bodied wriggle in the basket on Josephine's back where she had journeyed, pappoose-wise, sprang alertly out, and scampered, tail up and waving aloft, across the parade. Josephine's shriek of despair rang shrilly on the air, and Captain Demeré himself made a lunge at the animal, as she sped swiftly past, with a seductive cry of "Puss! puss!" A young soldier hard by faced about alertly and gave nimble chase; the cry of "Puss! puss!" going up on all sides brought out half a dozen supple young runners from every direction, but Kitty, having lost none of the elasticity of her muscles during her late inaction, darted hither and thither amongst her military pursuers, eluded them all, and scampering up the rampart, thence scaled the stockade and there began to walk coolly along the pointed eminence of this lofty structure as if it were a backyard fence, while the soldier boys cheered her from below. In this jovial demonstration poor Josephine's wailing whimper of despair and desertion was overborne, and with that juvenile disposition to force the recognition and a share of her woe on her elders she forthwith lost the use of her feet, and was half dragged, rather than led, by poor Odalie, who surely was not calculated to support any added burden. She herself, with halting step, followed Captain Demeré across the parade to a salient angle of the enclosure, wherein stood one of the block-houses, very secure of aspect, the formidable, beetling upper story jutting out above the open door, from which flowed into the dusky parade a great gush of golden light. Josephine's whimper was suddenly strangled in her throat and the tears stood still on her cheeks, for as Captain Demeré stepped aside at the door with a recollection of polite society, yielding precedence to the ladies, which formality Odalie marveled to find surviving in these rude times so far on the frontier, Josephine seemed resolved into a stare of dumb amazement, for she had never seen a room half so fine. Be it remembered she was born in the backwoods and had no faint recollection of such refinement and elegances as the colonial civilization had attained on the Carolina coast, and which her father and mother had relinquished to follow their fortunes to the West. And in truth the officers' mess-hall presented a brave barbaric effect that had a sort of splendor all its own. It was a large room, entered through the gorge of the bastion, and its deep chimney-place, in the recesses of which a great fire burned with a searchingly illuminating flare, was ample enough to afford a substantial settee on either hand without impinging on the roomy hearth of flagstones that joined the puncheons of the floor. Around the log walls the suffusion of light revealed a projecting line of deer antlers and the horns of buffalo and elk, partly intended as decoration and trophies of the chase, and partly for utilitarian purposes. Here and there a firelock lay from one to another, or a powder-horn or brace of pistols swung. A glittering knife and now and again a tomahawk caught the reflection of the fire and bespoke trophies of less peaceful pursuit. Over the mantel-shelf a spreading pair of gigantic antlers held suspended a memento evidently more highly cherished,—a sword in its sheath, but showing a richly chased hilt, which Odalie divined was a presentation in recognition of special service. Other and humbler gifts were suggested in the long Indian pipes, with bowls of deftly wrought stone; and tobacco-bags and shot-pouches beaded with intricate patterns; and belts of wampum and gorgeous moccasons; and bows and arrows with finely chiseled flint-heads winged with gayly colored feathers—all hanging from antlers on either side, which, though smaller than the central pair, were still large enough to have stretched with surprise more sophisticated eyes than Fifine's. The variegated tints of the stained quills and shells with which a splendid curious scarlet quiver was embroidered, caught Odalie's attention, and reminded her of what she had heard in Carolina of the great influence which this Captain Stuart had acquired among the Indians, and the extraordinary admiration that they entertained for him. These tokens of Aboriginal art were all, she doubted not, little offerings of the chieftains to attest good-will, for if they had been merely bought with money they would not have been so proudly displayed.

There was a continual fluttering movement in the draught from the loop-holes and open door, and lifting her eyes she noted the swaying folds of several banners against the wall, carrying the flare of color to the ceiling, which was formed only by the rude floor of the room above.

But in all the medley her feminine eye did not fail to perceive high up and withdrawn from ordinary notice, a lady's silk riding-mask such as was used in sophisticated regions at the period to protect the complexion on a journey,—dainty, fresh, of a garnet hue with a black lace frill, evidently treasured, yet expressively null. And this was doubtless all that was left of some spent romance, a mere memory in the rude military life on the far frontier, barely suggesting a fair and distant face and eyes that looked forth on scenes more suave.

With a sentiment of deep respect Odalie observed the six or eight arm-chairs of a rude and untoward manufacture, which were ranged about the hearth, draped, however, to real luxury by wolfskins, for the early settlers chiefly affected rough stools or billets of wood as seats, or benches made of puncheons with a couple of auger-holes at each end, through which four stout sticks were adjusted for legs, which were indeed often of unequal length and gave the unquiet juvenile pioneer of that day a peculiarly acceptable opportunity for cheerily jouncing to and fro. There were several of these benches, too, but placed back against the walls, for the purpose she supposed of affording seats when the festive board was spread at length. An absolute board, this figurative expression implied, for the stern fact set forth a half dozen puncheons secured together with cleats and laid across trestles when in use, but at other times placed against the wall beside the ladder which gave access to the room above. The table was now in the center of the floor, spread with some hasty refreshments, of which Captain Demeré invited the forlorn travelers to partake. At the other end lay a draughtsman's board, a Gunter's scale, a pair of dividers and other materials, where he had been trying to reduce to paper and topographical decorum for transference to an official report a map of the region which Rayetaeh, a chief from Toquoe, who had visited the fort that afternoon, had drawn on the sand of the parade ground with a flint-headed arrow. The officer had found this no slight task, for Rayetaeh was prone to measure distance by the time required to traverse it—"two warriors, a canoe, and one moon" very definitely meaning a month's journey by watercourse, but requiring some actively minute calculation to bring the space in question to the proportional scale. Rayetaeh might be considered the earliest cartographer of this region, and some of his maps, copied from the sand, are extant to this day. Captain Demeré laid the papers of this unfinished task carefully aside, and by way of giving his hospitality more grace took the head of the table himself.

But Odalie could not eat, and wept steadily on as if for the purpose of salting her food with tears, and Fifine's hunger seemed appeased by the feast of her eyes. Now and again her head in its little white mob-cap turned actively about, and she seemed as if she might have entered upon a series of questions save for the multiplicity of objects that enthralled her attention at once. Captain Demeré desisted from insistence after one or two well-meant efforts, and the man who had served the table waited in doubt and indecision.

"It's a hard life for women on the frontier," the officer observed as if in polite excuse for Odalie's ill-mannered tears that she could not control.

"And for men," she sobbed, thinking of Alexander and marveling if the Indians would carry him on without resistance to Choté,—for he could not know she had found lodgement in the fort,—or further still and enslave him—many captives had lived for years in Indian tribes—she had heard of this even in Carolina; or would they murder him in some trifling quarrel or on the discovery of his nationality or to make easier the robbery of the packhorses. Ah, why had she brought so much; why had she hampered their flight and risked their lives for these paltry belongings, treasures to the Indians, worth the shedding of much blood? How could she have sacrificed to these bits of household gear even her own comfort! She remembered, with an infinite yet futile wish to recall the moment, how eagerly Sandy had urged the abandonment of these poor possessions, that she might herself mount the horse and ease her bleeding and torn feet. Is every woman an idolater at heart, Odalie wondered. Do they all bow down, in the verity of their inner worship, to a few fibers of woven stuff and some poor fashioning of potter's clay, and make these feeble, trivial things their gods? It seemed so to her. She had bled for the things she had brought through the wilderness. She had wept for others that she had left. And if for such gear Sandy had come to grief—"I wonder—I wonder if I could find a pretext to care for them still!"

But she only said aloud, with a strong effort to control her attention, "And for men, too."

"Men must needs follow when duty leads the way," said Captain Demeré, a trifle priggishly.

Odalie, trying to seem interested, demanded, lifting her eyes, "And what do women follow?"

If Captain Demeré had said what he truly thought, he would have answered:—

"Folly! their own and that of their husbands!"

He had had close observation of the fact that the pioneers gave heavy hostages to fate in their wives and children, and a terrible advantage to a savage foe, and the very bravery of so many of these noble helpmeets only proved the value of all they risked. He could not elaborate, however, any scheme by which a new country should be entered first by the settlers aided by a strong occupancy of soldiery, and only when the lands should be cleared and the savages expelled the women and children venture forth. So he said:—

"They follow their destiny."

He had a smile in his eyes as if appealing to her clemency not to tax him with ascribing a humbler motive to the women than to the men, as he was only making talk and spoke from a natural deprecation of dangers to non-combatants who of right should be exempt from peril. His eyes, which were large, were of a color between gray and brown—darker than the one and lighter than the other. His hair was brown and smooth; he was slender and tall; his aquiline nose and finely cut lips gave a certain cast of distinction to his face, although the temples were slightly sunken and the thinness of his cheek revealed the outline of the jaw and chin which showed determination and force, despite his mild expression at present. Josephine fixed an amazed stare upon his polished shoes as he crossed his legs, never having seen any men's foot-gear save a buskin of deer hide.

"The men have a natural interest in warfare," suggested Odalie, forlornly, seeking to be responsive to his conversational efforts.

"Warfare!" exclaimed Captain Demeré, with sudden animation. "Contention with savages is not warfare! It cannot be conducted on a single recognized military principle." He went on to say that all military tactics counted for naught; the merely mechanical methods of moving bodies of troops were unavailable. Discipline, the dexterities of strategy, an enlightened courage, and the tremendous force of esprit de corps were alike nullified.

The problem of Indian fighting in America was then far greater than it has been since the scene has shifted to the plains, the densely wooded character of the tangled wilderness affording peculiar advantage to the skulking individual methods of the savage and embarrassing inconceivably the more cumbrous evolutions of organized bodies. But long before Captain Demeré's time, and often since, the futility of opposing regular scientific tactics to the alert wiles of the savage native in his own difficult country has been commented upon by observers of military methods, and doubtless recognized in the hard knocks of experience by those whose fate it has been to try again the experiment.[6]

"As to military ethics," he added, "to induce the Indian to accept and abide by the principles governing civilized warfare seems an impossibility. He cannot be constrained for a pledge of honor to forego an advantage. He will not respect his parole. He continually violates and sets at naught the provisions of his solemn treaty."

Odalie would not ask if the white man never broke faith with the red—if the Indian had not been taught by example near at hand of what brittle stuff a treaty was made. It was not worth while to reason logically with a mere man, she said to herself, with a little secret sentiment of derision, which served to lighten a trifle the gloom of her mental atmosphere, and since she could not eat and little backwoods Fifine's eyes had absorbed her appetite, it was just as well that Hamish, who had been greatly interested in being shown over the fort by the jolly Corporal O'Flynn, appeared at the door with the intelligence that their quarters were assigned them. The courteous Captain Demeré handed her to the door, and she stepped out from the bizarre decorated mess-hall into the dark night, with the stars showing a chill scintillation as of the approach of winter in their white glitter high in the sky, and the looming bastion close at hand. The barracks were silent; "tattoo" had just sounded; the great gates were closed, and the high walls shut off the world from the deserted parade.

Naught was audible in all the night save the measured tread of a sentry walking his beat, and further away, seeming an echo, the step of another sentinel, while out in the wilderness the scream of a wildcat came shrilly on the wind from the darkness where Alexander roamed with savage beasts and still more savage men far from the sweet security so trebly protected here.

Not even the flare of another big homelike fire in the cabin assigned to her could efface the impression of the bleak and dark loneliness outside the walls of the fort, and when the three were together, untrammeled by the presence of others, they were free to indulge their grief and their awful terror for husband and brother and father. They could not speak of it, but they sat down on a buffalo rug spread before the fire, and all three wept for the unuttered thought. The suspense, the separation of the little party, seemed unbearable. They felt that they might better have endured anything had they been together. Perhaps it was well for the elder two that their attention was diverted now and again by the effort to console Fifine in a minor distress, for with the ill-adjusted sense of proportion peculiar to childhood she had begun to clamor loudly too for her cat—her mignonne, her douce fillette that she had brought so far in her arms or on her back.

Alas, poor Fifine! to learn thus early how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child! For indeed Kitty might have seemed to lie under the imputation of having merely "played baby" in order to secure free transportation. At all events, she was a cat now, the only one in the fort, and for all she knew in the settlement. The douce mignonne was in high elation, now walking the palisades, now peeping in at a loop-hole in the upper story of one of the block-houses where a sentinel was regularly on guard, being able to scan from the jutting outlook not only the exterior of the fort on two sides, but a vast extent of darkling country. In his measured tramp to and fro in the shadowy apartment lighted only by the glimmer of the night without, he suddenly saw a flicker at the loop-hole he was approaching, caught a transient glimpse of a face, the gleam of a fiery eye, and he nearly dropped his loaded firelock in amazement.

"By George!" he exclaimed, "I thought that was a blarsted cat!"

He had not seen one since he left Charlestown a year before.

He walked to the loop-hole and looked far down from the projecting wall and along the parapet of the curtain and the scarp to the opposite bastion with its tower-like block-house.

Nothing—all quiet as the grave or the desert. He could hear the river sing; he could see in the light of the stars, and a mere flinder of a moon, the clods of earth on the ground below,—naught else. For the douce mignonne, with her back all handsomely humped, had suddenly sprung aside and fled down the interior slope of the rampart into the parade and over to the cook's quarters neighboring the kitchen. She nosed gleefully about among pots and kettles, feeling very much at home and civilized to the verge of luxury; she pried stealthily, every inch a cat, into the arrangements for to-morrow's breakfast, with a noiseless step and a breathless purr, until suddenly a tin pan containing beans was tumultuously overturned, being within the line of an active spring. For the douce fillette had caught a mouse, which few sweet little girls are capable of doing;—a regular domestic fireside mouse, a thing which the douce fillette had not seen in many weeks.

The stir in the neighboring cabin did not affright Kitty, and when the officers' cook, a veritable African negro, suddenly appeared with an ebony face and the rolling whites of astonished eyes, she exhibited her capture and was rewarded by a word of commendation which she quite understood, although it was as outlandish as the gutturals of Willinawaugh.

When the night was nearly spent, a great star, splendidly blazing in the sorceries of a roseate haze, seemed to conjure into the blackness a cold glimmer of gray light above the high, bleak, serrated summit line of the mountains of the eastern horizon, showing here and there white blank intervals, that presently were revealed as stark snowy domes rising into the wintry silence of a new day. The resonant bugle suddenly sounded the reveillé along the far winding curves of the river, rousing greetings of morning from many a mountain crag, and before the responsive echoes of the forest were once more mute the parade was full of the commotion elicited by the beating of the drums; shadowy military figures were falling in line, and the brisk authoritative ringing voice of the first sergeant was calling the roll in each company.

And on the doorstep of Odalie's cabin, when Josephine opened the door, sat the douce mignonne with her most babified expression on her face, now and again mewing noiselessly, going through the motions of grief, and cuddling down in infantile style when with wild babbling cries of endearment the little girl swooped up maternally the renegade cat.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] Friendship! Friendship!

CHAPTER IV

With the earliest flush of dawn Hamish MacLeod was seeking one of the officers in order to solicit a guide to enable him to go in search of his brother with some chance of success.

Captain Stuart, whom he finally found at the block-house in the northwestern bastion, was standing on the broad hearth of the great hall, where the fire was so brightly aflare that although it was day the place had all the illuminated effect of its aspect of last night. The officer's fresh face was florid and tingling from a recent plunge in the cold waters of the Tennessee River. He looked at Hamish with an unchanged expression of his steady blue eye, and drawing the watch from his fob consulted it minutely.

"The hunters of the post," he said, still regarding it, "have been gone for more than half an hour. There is no use in trying to overtake them. They have their orders as to what kind of game they are to bring in."

He smiled slightly, with the air of a man who in indulgent condescension would humor natural anxiety and overlook the effort of intermeddling, and as he returned the watch to his pocket, Hamish felt dismissed from the presence. The sun was well over the great range of purple bronze mountains in the east, their snowy domes a-glister in the brilliance between the dark slopes below and the blue sky above, and the fort, as he came forth, was a scene of brisk activity. The parade ground had already been swept like a floor, and groups of soldiers were gathered about the barracks busily burnishing and cleaning their arms, pipe-claying belts and rotten-stoning buckles and buttons, and at the further end near the stables horses were in process of being groomed and fed; one of them, young and wild, broke away, and in a mad scamper, with tossing mane and tail, and head erect and hoofs scattering the gravel, plunged around and around the enclosure, baffling his groom. A drill-sergeant was busy with an awkward squad; another squad without arms, in charge of a corporal, was marching and marching, making no progress, but vigorously marking time, whether for exercise or discipline Hamish could hardly determine, for he began to have a very awesome perception of the rigor of authority maintained in this frontier post. He had noticed—and the gorge of a freeman had risen at the sight—a soldier mounted high upon a trestle, facetiously called a horse, and he was well aware that this was by no means a new and a merry game. Hamish wavered a little in his mental revolt against the powers that be, as he noticed the reckless devil-may-care look of the man. He was a ruddy young fellow; he had a broad visage, with a wide, facetious red-lipped mouth, a quick, blithe, brown eye, and a broad, blunt nose. Hamish knew intuitively that this was the typical inhabitant, the native, so to speak, of the guard-house; his sort had ridden the wooden-horse, for many a weary hour in every country under the sun, and when an Indian's tomahawk or a Frenchman's bullet should clear the ranks of him, the gap would be filled by a successor so like him in spirit that he might seem a lineal descendant instead of a mere successor in the line. He had long ago been dubbed the "Devil's Dragoon," and he looked down with a good-humored glance at a bevy of his comrades, who from the door of the nearest log-cabin covertly cast gibes at him, calling out sotto voce, "Right about wheel—Trot!—March!"

In another quarter of the parade the regular exercise was in progress, and Hamish listened with interest to the voice of the officer as it rang out crisp and clear on the frosty air.

"Poise—Firelock!"

A short interval while the sun glanced down the gleaming barrels of the muskets.

"Cock—Firelock!"

A sharp metallic click as of many sounds blent into one.

"Take—Aim!"

A moment of suspense.

"Fire!"

A resonant detonation of blank cartridges—and all the live echoes leaped in the woods, while the smoke drifted about the parade and glimmered prismatic in the sun, and then cleared away, escaping over the ramparts and blending with the timorous dissolving mists of the morning.

Several Indians had come in through the open gate, some arrayed in feather or fur match-coats and others in buckskin shirt and leggings, with their blankets purchased from the traders drawn up about their ears; they were standing near the walls of one of the block-houses to see the drill. A certain expectancy hung upon this group as they watched the movements of the men now loading anew.

"Half-cock—Firelock!" came the order in the peremptory voice of the officer.

Once more that sharp, metallic, unnerving click.

"Handle—Cartridge!"

A sudden swift facial expression went along the line with a formidable effect. With the simultaneous show of strong teeth it was as if each soldier had fiercely snarled like a wild beast. But each had only bitten the end of the cartridge.

"Prime!"

The eyes of the Indians followed with an unwinking, fascinated stare the swift, simultaneous movement of the rank as of one man, every muscle animated by the same impulse.

"Shut—Pan!"

Once more the single sound as of many sounds.

"Charge with—Cartridge!"

The watchful eyes of the Indians narrowed.

"Draw—Rammer!"

Once more the loud, sharp, clash of metal rising to a menace of emphasis with the succeeding,—

"Ram down—Cartridge!"

"Return—Rammer!"

And as hard upon the clatter of the ramrods, slipping back into their grooves, came the orders—

"Shoulder—Firelock!"

"Advance—Arms!" the Cherokees drew a long breath as of the relief from the tension of suspense. They were evidently seeking to discern the utility of these strange military gyrations. This the Indians, although always alert to perceive and adopt any advantage in arms or military method, despite their characteristic tenacity to their ancient customs in other matters, could not descry. They had, even at this early day, almost discarded the bow and arrow for the firelock, wherever or however it could be procured, but the elaborate details of the drill baffled them, and they regarded it as in some sort a mystery. Their own discipline had always sufficed, and their military manœuvres, their march in single file or widely extended lines, their skulking approach, stalking under cover from tree to tree, were better suited, as even some of their enemies thought, for military movements, than tactical precision, to the broken character of the country and the dense forest of the trackless wilderness.

They noticed with kindling eyes a brisk reprimand administered to Corporal O'Flynn, when Lieutenant Gilmore called attention to the fact that one of the men had used three motions instead of the prescribed two motions in charging with cartridge, and two motions, instead of one, in ramming down cartridge. Corporal O'Flynn's mortification was painted in a lively red on his fresh Irish cheek, for this soldier was of a squad whose tuition in the manual exercise had been superintended by no less a tactician than himself.

"Faith, sir," he said to his superior officer, "I don't know what ails that man. He has motion without intelligence. Like thim windmills, ye'll remember, sir, we seen so much on the Continent. He minds me o' thim in the way he whur-r-ls his ar-rms."

The lieutenant—they had served together in foreign countries—laughed a trifle, his wrath diverted by the farcical suggestion, and the instant the command to break ranks had been given, Corporal O'Flynn, with the delinquent under close guard, convoyed him to the scene of the exploits of the awkward squad, where he might best learn to discard the free gestures of the windmills of the Continent of Europe.

"To disgrace me afore the officers," said Corporal O'Flynn, "and I fairly responsible for ye! I larned ye all ye know—and for ye to show the leftenant how little 'tis! Ye've got to quit that way of loading with ca'tridge with as many motions as an old jontleman feeling for his snuff-box! I'm fairly responsible for yez. I'm yer sponsor in this business. I feel like yer godfathers, an' yer godmothers, an' yer maiden aunt. I never seen a man so supple! Ye have as much use of yer hands as if ye was a centipede!"

The matter and manner of this discourse tried the gravity of the awkward squad, but no one dared to laugh, and Corporal O'Flynn himself was as grave as if it were a question of the weightiest importance involved, as he stood by and watched for a time the drill of the men.

The Indians turned their attentive eyes to Captain Stuart and Captain Demeré, who were both upon the terre-pleine at the shoulder-point of a bastion where one of the twelve cannon, mounted en barbette, looked grimly forth over the parapet. The gunners were receiving some instructions which Stuart was giving in reference to serving the piece; now and again it was pointed anew; he handled the heavy sponge-staff as if in illustration; then stepped swiftly back, and lifted the match, as if about to fire the gun. The Indians loitering in the shade watched the martial figure, the sun striking full on the red coat and cocked hat, and long, heavy queue of fair hair hanging on his shoulders, and as he stood erect, with the sponge-staff held horizontally in both hands, they turned and looked with a common impulse at one another and suddenly spat upon the ground. The sentry in a sort of cabin above the gate—a gate-house, so to speak—maintained a guard within as well as without, for an outer sentinel was posted on the crest of the counterscarp beyond the bridge; he kept his eye on the Cherokees, but he did not note their look. He was not skilled in deciphering facial expression, nor did he conceive himself deputed to construe the grimaces of savages. Gazing without for a moment, he turned back and cast a glance of kindly concern on Hamish MacLeod, who was disconsolately strolling about, not daring to go back and encounter the reproaches of Odalie, who doubtless thought him even now in the wilderness with a searching party, too urgent to admit of the time to acquaint her with so hasty a departure—and yet striving against his eagerness to go on this very errand, relying on the superior wisdom of the officers even while rebelling against it. All that he observed tended to confirm this reliance. How safe it was here! How trebly guarded! Even to his callow experience it was most obvious that whatever fate held in store for this garrison, whose lives were intrusted to the wisdom and precaution of the commandant, surprise was not among the possibilities. He remembered anew poor Sandy, far from these stanch walls, the very citadel of security, within which he felt so recreant; and as he thought again of the perils to which his brother was exposed, and a possibly impending hideous fate, he felt a constriction about his throat like the clutch of a hand. The tears rose to his eyes—and through them as he looked toward the gate he saw Sandy coming into the fort! In the extremity of the revulsion of feeling Hamish gave a sudden shrill yell that rang through the woods like a war-whoop. Even the Indians, still loitering in the diminishing shadow of the block-house, started at the sound and gazed at him amazed, as he dashed across the parade and flung his arms around his brother. Sandy, who had had his own terrors to endure concerning the fate of his family, was not altogether appreciative of their terrors for his sake. He felt amply capable of taking care of himself, and if he were not—why, his scalp was not worth saving! He extricated himself with unflattered surprise from Hamish's frantic embrace that was like the frenzied hug of a young bear and made his ribs crack.

"That's enough, Hamish; that's enough!" he said. "Of course I'm safe, all right. That's enough."

He advanced with what grace he could command after such an exhibition to shake hands with the two officers near the sally-port and thank them for the shelter the fort had afforded his family.

And here was Odalie,—for a good-natured soldier, one of the boat's crew of the previous evening, had instantly run to her cabin with the news of the arrival—restored to her normal poise in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, by the shattering of her dismal forebodings in the glad reality of MacLeod's safety. So composed was her manner, so calmly happy, that Captain Stuart could not forbear to unmask the sham, and let the poor man know how he had been bewept yesterday at even.

"We were very glad to take in the wanderers, although I cannot say it was a cheerful scene. I never realized until Mrs. MacLeod reached the gate here the meaning of the phrase 'dissolved in tears.'"

Alexander looked anxiously at his wife—had she found the journey, then, so vexatious?

"I was tired and dusty," she said demurely, as if in explanation. "My shoes—one of them was in tatters; and, Sandy, I was so ashamed."

Captain Stuart stared at her for a moment and broke into a laugh. "That's putting the shoe on the other foot, at all events," he said.

He and Captain Demeré, accompanied by the newcomer, turned into the block-house, in order to question Sandy as to any information he might have been able to acquire concerning French emissaries, the disposition of the Cherokees, the devastation of the Virginia settlements, and any further news of General Forbes and the fall of Fort Duquesne now called Fort Pitt. However, Sandy had naught to report, save the angry threat with the tomahawk which gave way upon the assurance that the party was French. In the solitary journey with those who had resigned their boat to Willinawaugh, he had experienced no worse treatment than the destruction of his pocket compass. With this at first they had been highly delighted, but some ten miles from the fort they had been joined by an Indian who declared he had seen such things in Carolina, doubtless among land-surveyors, and who stigmatized it as a "land-stealer," forthwith crushing it with his tomahawk. MacLeod had expected this revelation to bring about ill-feeling, but the party shortly met the hunters of the post, who had insisted on conducting him to the fort on suspicion of being a Frenchman.

These pioneers never forgot that day, a rich, languid day of the lingering St. Martin's summer-tide. What though in the early morn the frost had lain in rime as white as snow on the bare branches of the great trees where now the yellow sunshine dripped in liquid light! A tender haze like that of spring suffused the depths of the forest, the gleaming, glancing reaches of the river, the level summit-lines of the great massive purple mountains of the west, and half concealed, and shifting half revealed, always elusively, the fine azure snow-capped domes against the pearl-tinted eastern sky. What though the flowers were dead, the leaves had fled, the woods were bare and rifled,—when the necromancy of the powers of the air filled all the winter day with sweet, subtle odors that excelled the fragrance of summer, as a memory might outvie the value of the reality, seeming to exhale now from the forest, and again from the river, and anon from some quality of the beneficent sunshine, or to exist in ethereal suspension in the charmed atmosphere. Nature was in such blessed harmony, full of graceful analogy; a bird would wing his way aloft, his shadow careering through the sun-painted woods below; a canoe with its swift duplication in the water would fly with its paddles like unfeathered wings down the currents of the river; those exquisite traceries of the wintry woods, the shadows of the leafless trees, would lie on a sandy stretch like some keen etching, as if to illustrate the perfection of the lovely dendroidal design and proportion of the growth it imaged; now and again the voice of herds of buffalo rose thunderously, muffled by distance; a deer splashed into the river a little above the fort, and gallantly breasting the current, swam to the other side, while a group of soldiers standing on the bank watched his progress and commented on his prowess. No shot followed him; the larders were filled, and orders had been given to waste no powder and ball.

The newcomers were made most heartily welcome in the settlement near the fort, as newcomers were apt to be in every pioneer hamlet, whatever their quality; for the frontiersmen, in their exposed situation, earnestly appreciated the strength in numbers. But this gratulation was of course infinitely increased when the arrivals were, like these, people of character, evidently so valuable an addition to the community. Finally several of the settlers persisted in carrying off Sandy to look at a fertile nook where the river swung round in a bend, earnestly recommending the rich bottom lands for the growth of corn, and the crest of the hill with a clear free-stone spring for that home he sought to plant in the far west. Hamish went too,—he could not bear Sandy to be out of his sight and was "tagging" after him as resolutely and as unshake-off-ably as when he was four and Sandy was twelve years of age.

In their absence Odalie and Josephine and the douce mignonne sat on the doorstep of their latest entertainer, and watched the shadows and sunshine shift in the woods, and listened to the talk of their hostess. And here was where the trail of the serpent began to be manifest; for this old woman was a professed gossip, and Odalie speedily learned the points of view from which the settlement about Fort Loudon ceased to present the aspect of the earlier Paradisaic era.

Mrs. Halsing had a hard, set visage, and was very shrewd,—none the worse gossip for that,—and went straight to the weak point, and unraveled the tangle of mystery in any subject that presented itself for discussion. She was thin and angular and uncultivated, and had evidently come of people who had been used to small advantages in education and breeding. Equally humble of origin was another of Odalie's future neighbors, with a sort of homespun dress made after the fashion called a "short gown," a red petticoat, and a pair of moccasons in lieu of shoes. Her face was as broad as the moon, and as bland. Much smiling had worn dimples around her mouth instead of wrinkles in her forehead. She, too, had a keen gleam of discernment in her eyes, but tempered with a perception of the sweetly ludicrous in life, which converted folly into the semblance of fun. She seemed to love her comfort, to judge by her leisurely motions and the way her arms fell into easy foldings, but the wife of a pioneer could never have lived at ease in those days. She sat opposite Mrs. Halsing, by the cabin door, on a bench which the hostess had vacated in her favor, adopting instead an inverted tub, and although admitting as true much that was said, Mrs. Beedie advanced palliating theories which, paradoxically enough, while they did not contradict the main statement, had all the effect of denial.

For her part, said Mrs. Halsing, she did not see what anybody who was safe in Virginia or Carolina, or anywhere else, would come to this country for. She wouldn't, except that her husband was possessed! The sight of a road put him into a "trembly fit." He was moving west to get rid of civilization, and he was as uncivilized as a "bar himself, or an Injun."

Odalie learned that a number of the men were wild, roving, roaring fellows, who came here because they hated law and order; then, without contradiction, Mrs. Beedie's exposition tended to show that it was a new country with splendid prospects and they desired to take advantage of its opening opportunities; some of them being already poor, sought here cheaper homes, with more chance for development.

And, pursuing the interpretation of her side of the shield, Mrs. Halsing detailed the fact that some people love change and adventure, because no matter what the Lord gave 'em they wouldn't fold their hands and be thankful. Were the Rush people poor and oppressed in Carolina? Mighty well off, they seemed to her—had cows, if the wolves hadn't got 'em, and had owned property and held their heads mighty high where they came from, and claimed kin with well-to-do people in England. People said Captain Stuart said he knew who they were—but the Lord only knew what Captain Stuart knew! Then Mrs. Halsing further unfolded the fact that Mrs Rush's husband had been the son of a bishop, but had got among the dissenters, and had been cast out like a prodigal, because he took to preaching.

"Preachin' being in the blood, I reckon," Mrs. Beedie palliated.

Thereupon he emigrated to America and was seized with a mission to the Indians, that fastened upon him like a plague; and he lost his scalp and his life—not even a red Indian would tolerate the doctrine he set up as the Word! And Mrs. Halsing pursed her lips with a truly orthodox fixity. And now we have no religion at the fort and the settlement.

But here Mrs. Beedie took up her testimony with unction and emphasis. We had Captain Stuart!

Mrs. Halsing gave a sudden cry of derision like the abrupt squawk of a jay-bird. Captain Stuart was not a humble man. That back of his was never bent! She wondered if his heart had ever felt the need of aught.

"Yes," Mrs. Beedie affirmed. "When one of the soldiers died of the pleurisy last winter in the fort and Captain Demeré was ill himself, Captain Stuart read the service all solemn and proper, and had men to march with arms reversed and fire a volley over the grave."

Mrs. Halsing rose to the occasion by demanding what good such evidences of religion might do in such a lot as there was at the fort. Forgetting her scorn of the bishop's son, who had taken to Methodism and Indians, she set forth the fact that the whole settlement was given to dances—that the settlers with their wives and daughters, not content with dances at home, must needs go to the fort on state and special occasions, such as Christmas, and there participate in the ball, as they called it, given in the officers mess-hall. They went in daylight, and did not return till daylight, and the fiddle it sang the whole night through! And cards—the soldiers played cards, and the settlers too; and the officers, they played "loo," as they called it, as if that made it any better. Even Captain Demeré! This latter phrase occurred so frequently in Mrs. Halsing's prelection that it created a sort of mitigating effect, and made the enormity it qualified gain a trifle of respectability from the fact that Captain Demeré countenanced it. Odalie knew already that he was the commandant, and it was plain to be seen that Captain Demeré stood first in Mrs. Halsing's estimation. And the officers all, she declared, the captains, the frisky lieutenants, and the ensigns, all drank tafia.

"When they can git it," interpolated Mrs. Beedie, with twinkling eyes.

"They are deprived, I will say, by the slowness and seldomness of the express from over the mountains. But if they are a sober set, it is against their will, and that I do maintain," Mrs. Halsing added, turning an unflinching front toward Mrs. Beedie. Then resuming her dissertation to Odalie:—

"But there's one thing that rests on my mind. I can't decide which one it belongs to, Captain Stuart or Captain Demeré. Did ye see—I know ye did—a lady's little riding-mask on the shelf of the great hall. Ye must have seen it,"—lowering her voice,—"a love token?"