VII
HOW he fared on his return to Ioco Town, Laroche never knew. The interval of his transit was a blank in his recollection. He was only aware of the crisis when he plunged out of the encompassing woods, still urging the horse to a wild gallop, lashing him at every bound with his cap, in default of a whip, which he had lost, when or where he could not say.
The town lay before him, idealized in a suffusion of roseate purpling light as the sun was going down beyond those dark, heavily wooded ranges in the west into which the mountain plateau, even then called the Cumberland, splits at its southern extremity. The eastern loftier heights, the Great Smoky, bore an almost visible sentiment of peace on their slopes, which were of an etherealized azure with a reflection of the red west in the suave sky above their domes. The Cherokee dwellings were all solidly dark against the fine, delicate intimations of color in the opalescent atmosphere. Where a fire was glimpsed in the “beloved square,” the red and white and yellow of the blaze were like a crude overlay of coarse pigment on some exquisite mosaic. The figures of the Indians themselves in groups of varied aspect,—sundry of them arrayed in aboriginal splendor, feathered and mantled; others almost nude; still again others clad in the coarse and unpicturesque buckskin shirt and leggings,—all stood as if petrified at the first disordered sound of the wildly galloping hoofs of the horse. They watched in blank surprise the equestrian apparition speeding across the open spaces until, hardly pausing in front of the trading-house, Laroche flung himself from the saddle. He took no heed to secure the creature. With the reins loose on his neck the horse, amazed at this unwonted liberty and lack of care, reared aimlessly once or twice. Then motionless, with a gaze of obvious surprise, he turned to look after his eccentric rider, who had burst into the trading-house with his warning of the danger upon his lips, that all who cared might hear and tremble. No more would he trust to the foolhardiness of the sturdy trader, who had weathered many a gale of disaffection, signs of Indian displeasure, rumors of massacres impending, and threats of reprisal; nor to the young Highland soldier’s unquestioning reliance on the superior judgment of Jock Lesly. The under-trader and the young packmen responded as alertly with fears and precautions as Laroche could wish. With his martial habitudes reasserted in the emergency, Laroche gave the necessary orders with such dispatch, such decision, such obvious discrimination, that the men, discerning their value and aware that none other of the group could have originated the plan, as instantly obeyed as if he had been a military superior entitled to the authority he wielded. Jock Lesly, coming in at haphazard, found himself a mere supernumerary in his own trading-house, where his word had been law. He stared for a moment with stunned surprise, and then at last and after so long a time, hearing the interpretation of the dream he had derided, he began to admit to himself that perhaps more mischief was brewing in the air than he wot of.
“It’s the French—thae kittle cattle!” he exclaimed; “I wad na vex mysel’ if it were na for the lassie.”
He heard with deliberative calmness the preparations which Laroche had projected for the defense of the little colony, which he instantly began to detail, so eagerly, so urgently, that amidst the tumultuous words there came to Jock Lesly’s absorbed sense a fact which he remembered long afterward rather than noted in that moment of crucial stress—a vaguely foreign accent. Now he only marked the features of the plan, and his strong heart was buoyed up by its hopefulness.
“Eh, callant,” he cried; “it’s gey gleg ye are at this wark! Ye’ll no hae seen foreign service for naething!”
The phrase went the rounds of the lads who stood with their lives in their hands, and, though loath enough to yield them in this petty strife that had not even a fair quarrel for its justification, were still more loath to yield first their strong bodies, endowed with stanchest nerves, to furnish sport to the Cherokees in the delights of the torture. Foreign service! The words were like magic. It was a trained mind, with a practiced eye and an experienced judgment, that disposed their pitiful resources to the best advantage for defense. And with this reassurance these resources hardly seemed so pitiful.
In two minutes the trading-house, a temple of peace and built without the customary loopholes for musketry, had half a dozen sawn through each of the stanch walls, save on the side nearest the dwelling, where a dozen slits were fashioned. The emporium of commerce, being a long and large building in comparison, commanded it on three sides. Around the home in the early days of its occupation a ditch had been once dug, intended to drain the slope. This was still deep but now dry, and in it emergency mines were hastily constructed here and there after a fashion which Laroche had seen in practice in his military experience in Europe. There were still many kegs of powder in the store, a quantity of tow, numerous rude bags and boxes and barrels, half emptied or altogether thrown aside. Of these boxes and barrels he hastily contrived fougasses, lining them with tar before placing in each a heavy charge of powder. The energetic plying of a dozen spades soon covered them over in the ditch, and several were sunken in deeper pits with gravel and boulders to fill the space to the surface. He himself worked diligently with great deftness upon sundry long, thin bags which he called “saucissons,” fashioned from a bolt of Jock Lesly’s best linen, filled with powder, tarred externally, to serve as fuses to convey fire to the fougasses. He was a man of infinite expertness and a genius in the way of resource, and barricades for doors and windows were soon contrived of whatever material was at hand. He selected the guard, the greater number of the packmen, who were to hold out the trading-house, which, with its outlook and its loopholes, commanded the dwelling. They were instructed to prevent any possible approach by picking off the assailants by rifle fire, or, in case of a rush, by exploding one of the fougasses, the saucissons of several of which connected with the store, the others with the dwelling itself. The under-trader, as vigorous, devil-may-care, hard-headed, hard-handed, hard-hearted a backwoodsman as could have been found in those rude days, was to take command of the detachment in the trading-house, Jock Lesly himself, Laroche, Callum, and two of the packmen undertaking to defend the dwelling. The two buildings were thus enabled to afford mutual protection, and divide the numbers and break the force of the assault by the Indians, each offering the garrison of the other, in case of extremity, the chance of a refuge in flight.
So swift, so definite, yet so simple were these arrangements that when Moy Toy was summoned from the perplexities of his consultations with the headmen of Ioco in the great council-house, by the wild alarum from the Indians without that warlike preparations were going forward among the trader folk, he found these precautions already in a state of completion. Laroche, a pickaxe in his hand; advanced to meet the chief as he came toward the dwelling that now peered at him, as it were, suspiciously from loopholes. The sounds of excitement from the square, of wild cries and eager words, the disorder of swift, flitting figures hither and thither, the clash of weapons and the hasty tramp of feet, all implied an unusual activity among the tribesmen. They too were getting under arms, but were distinctly dismayed to find themselves surprised—the onset they had planned anticipated, crippled, perhaps even to be repelled by forethought, adequate preparation, and a valiant defense. In fact, without those tumultuous concomitants of the sudden onslaught, the stealthy ambush, the surprise of treachery in conference, the Indian hardly cared to fight. And although they were so vastly superior in numbers that calculation of odds was impracticable, they were aware that they must needs suffer severely from the fire of the little garrison, whose bulletproof walls would hold a far stronger force indefinitely at bay. Laroche fixed the period of the enterprise when he warned Moy Toy and the chief of Ioco Town, advancing with him, to come no further.
“The ground is mined with powder,” he explained. “No Indian shall come one pace nearer.”
Moy Toy cast an upbraiding glance upon his companion. And Laroche knew in an instant that his discovery of the inimical midnight mummeries and the suspicions they had aroused had been the subject of the debate in the town-house; but for the habitual forbearance of the Indians toward one another, it might have caused an open rupture that this had been so conducted as to betray their plans. He had not valued the pledge of the Indian’s word, but he had thought that Moy Toy realized his interest was involved in keeping his promise of immunity to the “trader folk.”
Now he would not trust to this.
“I have read my dream, Moy Toy!” he cried triumphantly. “Am I not a soothsayer—even like unto an ‘old beloved man’ myself—simple as I stand here?”
The very tones of his sarcastic voice, ringing so jauntily on the air, daunted the Indians, so assured, so inimical, so subtly menacing his laughter was.
From the loopholes of the barricaded trading-house interested faces peered out to witness the dumb show of this colloquy, the speakers being so distant that only the sound of their voices was distinguishable; the men at their several posts commented loudly to each other. “Eh, sirs, hear till him, now!” “Wow, he had best haud a care!” “Moy Toy looks gin he wad bite, the fearsome auld carle!”
Laroche turned as the two Indians, cautious, mute, doubtful, playing the waiting game, gazed at him. He lifted the pickaxe and struck it upon the ground.
“Here,” he cried, drawing the implement along the earth as if tracing the way, “walked the mock mourners—thrice—thrice around the house of the living, as if they were already the dead. Following came the bearers of cords and chains, with charms and spells to hinder resistance. And so—the lantern bearer, with light to prove the path. And him with the knife, to cut the bonds of plighted faith and friendship. And then the leaping Death—quick—quick—to seize his prey!”
Between each mystic sequence of this ghastly figurative array Laroche lifted the pickaxe and drew a stroke along the ground.
The two chiefs gazed now and again at each other as this recital proceeded, first with obvious agitation, giving way to sheer wonder, increasing to awe, and, as the idea became more accustomed, to a fierce anger that flashed in Moy Toy’s dark eyes like lightnings from out a storm cloud.
“Do I not read the dream aright?” Laroche cried at last, leaning on the pickaxe and surveying them with a smile of glad triumph, infinitely taunting.
“The white man reads no Cherokee dream,” said Moy Toy. “You have been told this.”
“The great chief knows all things,” flouted Laroche; “I have been told it.”
The two Indians looked at him with a keen expectancy that meant woe indeed to the traitor.
“The river whispered it in my ear. I read it in the clouds. The winds are singing it in the pines—I can turn nowhere that it does not cry out to me from all the voices of the earth. For all day I have been in the woods—even as far as Great Tellico; your good horse may show my speed, Moy Toy. All your Cherokee country tells it—the fair land that was to have been rescued from the British, and with the aid of the French made the head and front of an independent Indian confederacy of a dozen tribes!”
The large scope of this harmonious scheme that, could it have been realized,—the combination of the tribes, ever warring against each other, into a union of massed strength against the colonies,—would doubtless have worked mighty changes in the history of this continent, appealed to the breathless hope of the Cherokee statesmen. The chief of Ioco Town hastened to say that Laroche was the cherished friend of the tribe; the town of Ioco loved to hold, to shelter his honored head; he was indeed deceived if he imagined from his distorted reading of dreams of Indians—for dream Indians were mischievous and would not appear right to white men, and thus loved to delude them—that the Cherokees, least of all the town of Ioco, sought to do him mischief; they valued too greatly his promise of instruction, the assurances he had brought from his government, and the prospects he had unfolded of that large freedom and independence he would teach the nation to secure.
“Those prospects are as nothing—as a mere breath—as that mist before the moon—even the moon’s light will scatter it.” Laroche glanced up at the great disk slowly rising over the serrated summit line of the gloomy Smoky Mountains, albeit the western sky was yet red and day lingered, dusky and doubtful, among the wigwams, and in the opalescent tints of the river, broken here and there with the tumultuous flashing of the white foam against the rocks.
“Nothing will I promise—not even that I will remain amongst you.”
He detected a significant hardening in the faces of the Indian chiefs—a sudden tyrannous gleam in the eyes of Moy Toy.
“You would say I have no choice, Moy Toy.” He took from his belt a pistol—a fine new weapon, secured from Jock Lesly’s own armament at the trading-house—primed and loaded. “I hold in my hand the opportunities of life and death. Unless all at the trading-station go in peace, go free, and I myself accompany them as far as the Keowee River, I will not remain with you.” Once more that dangerous gleam in Moy Toy’s eye. “I will place this at my temple,” he held the muzzle amidst the loosely curling rings of his light brown hair and deftly touched the trigger, “and in one moment your league with the great French king is a thing of the past. His trusted officer, holding his commission and acting by his authority, will have died in your country, in your custody, as definitely, in his estimation, slain by your hand as if your hand had sped the bullet.”
The two Cherokees, obviously at a loss, gazed at each other and hesitated.
“Never will the pettiaugres ascend your demon-infested, rocky rivers—never will the barrier towns rise above and below those defiant, malign obstructions and secure the passage of merchandise. Your vassalage to the British will be an accomplished fact, your independence a dream; for I who am sent to organize your armies and perfect your plans and equip your warriors for defense and legitimate aggression in war—I will do nothing! My mission is at an end, unless you comply with my conditions. I am a soldier and no murderer. I cannot and will not be placed in a position to answer to the British colonial authorities for the innocent blood, for murder, for massacre. I said to you once as I say to you now—Let the traders go! They shall not return! Then, with the aid of the French government, I will put into the field an army of Indian braves, officered by French experts in each arm of the service, and the very name of it shall strike more terror to the hearts of the perfidious English than a myriad of border massacres.”
Laroche had already known something of the swiftness with which the crafty savage could shift ground, but he was not prepared for the sudden volte-face, without a glance at each other or a sign, with which both Moy Toy and the chief of Ioco began to protest, albeit in decorous fugue, notwithstanding their haste,—it being a standing joke among the Indians, a matter of perennial ridicule, that the white people would talk at the same time or interrupt one another so that none could be distinctly heard. The two chiefs instantly declared that they would respect his words and abide by his promises, which they cherished like the blood of their own hearts. They admitted that they ought earlier to have told him the truth—which for shame they wished to conceal,—that only the mad young men of the town had conceived the ignoble scheme of revenge for some trivial insults which they fancied had been offered them by the young packmen—themselves hardly less insane than the bereft young braves. They had been reproved for their midnight mummeries and their threats thus expressed, and when opportunity should offer, after the departure of the trader and his pack-train, the offenders should be dry-scratched.
The Frenchman duly appraised the insincerity of all this. He well understood that the plea of the misdoings of their “mad young men,” so frequently urged, was now, as often before, merely their scapegoat, designed to bear the burden of the mischievous device of the headmen, which some change of policy or mischance in execution caused them to abandon. He hardly cared, however, to challenge their motive, since it tended to promote the result he desired to foster,—the peaceful withdrawal of the trader’s household. He stood decorously listening, with a face of suave acquiescence, until, in the midst of their antiphonal series of excuses and explanations, the chiefs stated, among their reasons for concealing the alleged comparatively innocuous source of the demonstration, that they had refrained from telling him this lest he might esteem his own life insecure among such an uproarious, ill-conditioned troop as their mad young men, and thus desire to leave them.
Laroche, at the imputation, could but laugh aloud in his martial consciousness of courage. The tact of the Indians instantly perceived the false step.
They knew, they protested, the great bravery of the French officer, for no fear had he! His heart was so strong as even to make him contemplate taking his own life, merely should his plans be crossed. This they besought that he would consider no more, for they only desired to know his mind, that they might comply with his every thought. Still he might well deem that their wild young men could hardly be brought under reasonable authority, that they could be made the instruments of winning and wielding such an independence as he had planned for the splendid future. If he would but observe, he should see how plastic to command they could become, how rightful authority should reduce their turbulence and their clamors.
And indeed as they swarmed over the dusky “beloved square” and through the spaces among the shadowy cabins and wigwams and along the bank of the river, still red under the vague dream light of the faintly tinted sky, the wild excitement that had pervaded the tumultuous groups subsided upon the instant on the reappearance of the chiefs among them; whether a word, a look, a sign wrought the miracle one could hardly say. Laroche, standing gazing after his late interlocutors, could but admire the address with which they had selected the occasion of their withdrawal,—not that they had been faced down by argument, nor that their virulent threats were overborne by counter-threats, nor that their scheme was again proved foolish, futile, fatal to their own future prospects, but only to demonstrate how amenable, how subject to lawful authority were these very “mad young men” when adequate necessity caused it to be exerted. It seemed incredible how promptly all the aspects of peace were renewed. The long, lustrous, slanting rays of the moon, soon falling athwart the town, penetrating the dusky aisles among the Indian dwellings under the drooping boughs of the gigantic trees, flashing upon the foam of the river, or resting in full, unbroken placidity on the “beloved square,” scarcely showed the shadow of a quiver, or a firelock, or the flicker of a feathered head. Now and again the quiet echoed to the measured footfall of a sedate passer-by. An open door here and there might reveal a group about a fire where fish were frying for supper, and gossip was still stirring about the events of the day. Dogs clustered around the door and begged with all the insidious canine wiles of their kindred of civilization. The council-house, dome-like in its elevation on its mound above the town, was lighted by a party of young people setting forward some of their usual evening games or pantomimes for the general diversion. The two chiefs, respectively of Tellico and Ioco, had parted as if nothing more of importance were to be discussed, and Moy Toy, in the public office, as it were, the cabin of the aged councilors, deserted but for two or three of its frequenters, was talking over old times of hunting and fishing and was telling a tale of piscatorial captures which could hardly be matched even in these days of expanded imaginations,—his civil hosts now and again constrained to laugh with guttural remonstrance, or to interject an incredulous comment, “Ugh! Ugh!”
At the trading-house, lights flickered within, but the barricaded doors continued closed. The little garrison were to sleep upon their arms in view of possible treachery in some lapse of vigilance. Even thence, however, came loud, jesting voices, and now and again hilarious snatches of song; all were very mirthful and with a renewed sense of security under the double safeguard of adequate precaution against surprise and the apparent satisfaction and pacification of the Cherokees.
In the next few days preparations for an early and orderly departure were seriously inaugurated. It was not so much in advance of the usual time for the semiannual journey to Charlestown for the demonstration to augur undue fear of the Indians or to seem prompted by the recent suspicious events. With an apparent hardihood, that was yet the craft of caution, Jock Lesly more than once postponed the date for the flitting, openly alleging the reason for the delay: now it was the legitimate one of awaiting a consignment of deerskins which he had been notified was to be sent from Toquoe; now it seemed that a purely arbitrary wish of his own induced him to dispatch a messenger on a long wild-goose chase for a conference with an Indian friend of auld lang syne, for whom he had undertaken a personal commission to make sundry purchases in Charlestown,—which gear, when described from the aboriginal point of view, was found to have no counterpart in the material world; indeed the demand for it was prompted in the full faith that whatever wish the heart of man could fashion the great mart could furnish forth. The remonstrances sent on a second trip by the runner were productive only of very guarded modifications in the requisites, and all Ioco Town, in its excess of sophistication, was laughing both at the simplicity of the old Indian of remote Kanootare Town—who had never been as far as the Congarees, and who looked upon Jock Lesly as a master magician in the mechanical arts—and at the kindly worry and fret of the trader himself.
“Heard ever onybody the like o’ that—the daft auld carle! And where am I to find sic gear? And am na I a fule to try? A hammer, that suld hae a gun, like a pistol, in the eend, wi’ a sharp knife for skelpin’ that clasps under—sae he’ll be aye ready for wark or war. Ding it a’, I’ll no fash mysel’!”
As he strode about the place and discussed the absurdity with the various braves, all seeking to recognize some modern and simpler invention in the mists of his elaborate instructions, and the Indians came and went from the trading-house and loitered about its recesses with the young packmen, all in complete and obvious amity, there was not the vaguest suggestion of the antagonism that had threatened the destruction of the little party. The idea seemed a flout to credulity. Jock Lesly again doubted its reality at times. “Hegh, lad,” he said to Laroche, “ye hae gie us an unco stirrin’. I wad na tak a gliff at a potato-bogle. It’s ower easy to be frighted.”
For Laroche, albeit aware how thin was this crust of peace that overlay the seething, fiery crater of conspiracy and murder, was forced to run the gauntlet in some sort,—to be the butt of the ridicule which the harbinger of danger that does not materialize always is called upon to suffer. Now and again he encountered this among the young packmen poking fun in a sly way. The high value which they had set upon his views because of his experience in actual encounters in the continental wars, in which he stated he had served, seemed suddenly inverted, and for this very reason his measures were derided. It was a point of almost religious exaction in those days, as indeed sometimes in these, to decry the regular soldier in aggrandizing the militia or the volunteer, on the somewhat absurd hypothesis that the entire devotion of a man’s time to a pursuit renders him necessarily inexpert at it, or that the more one learns of military science the less one knows. Whether this comes about from the instinctive arrogation of the civilian that he is as fit in a fight as any man, and knows by intuition all that the soldier learns by hard knocks, it is one of the dearest delusions of the popular mind and is not to be lightly trifled with. Laroche must needs have been more the diplomat and less the soldier than he was to have perceived this spirit without the usual snorting indignation and sentiment of baffled wonder at the presumption of the comparison. But it is of that grade of intimate persuasion in which argument or any certainty of demonstration is futile, and like other military men earlier and since he permitted it to pass unchallenged, with a secret scorn and a mocking acquiescence. It was only in the presence of Lilias that he winced under this derision, knowing that but for him the whole trading-station would be in ashes, its embers quenched with the blood of its inmates. Yet in the same instant he was saying to himself that her presence should be naught to him, and that this guying was a trifle.
How could her presence be naught, when across the supper table the tiny flame of the candle showed her blue eyes kindling like sapphires?
“Ou, ay, ay,”—her father was answering Callum’s inquiry,—“Tam is gaun wi’ us—Tam’s gaun to haud a care o’ us,—gin he no taks to dreamin’ agen!” He stopped his chuckle with half a scone.
Lilias had risen and turned away, for Callum MacIlvesty wanted more parritch and Laroche had matter other than Jock Lesly’s clumsy jest to canvass in secret agitation. That blue, jeweled light in her starry eyes—was it set aglow because the day of parting seemed yet distant?—how could he care for the trader’s flout!
The next day he had in some sort a revenge for his installation as laughing stock. He had repeatedly cautioned the young packmen against the lurking dangers of the fougasses which he had connected with the trading-house for its defense. There had supervened so general a scorn of the warning, the menace—even the sight of the Indian town under arms had been apparently only the reflex of their own acts of hostility—that the emergency mines seemed but a part of the whole invalid hoax until a stout, red-haired young packman, striking his flint hard by, communicated a spark to a saucisson, and upon the consequent explosion of the fougasse he was tossed like a feather into the air and had three fingers blown off. The ground for several yards was ripped open as if the ditch had never been filled, and the crags and chasms of the mountains rang and rang with the successive reverberations of the detonation.
Great as was the commotion among the trading folk, the incident was as a revelation to the Indians. Almost palsied by terror, as in some stupendous convulsion of nature, they no sooner comprehended the agency of the disaster than their anxiety was increased twofold. At this period, although the use of firearms was general among them and the ancient bow and arrow were superseded, save in cases of necessity, gunpowder was as yet an unaccustomed force except as confined to musketry. They still entertained great terror of artillery, and the effects of powder in mining and in so large a quantity seemed little short of miraculous. Seeing the trader’s band presently clustered about the scene of the disaster, several of the savages ventured to approach, suspiciously sniffing the sulphur laden air and eyeing the deep chasm in the ground with a grave, tentative aspect and a sort of serious disaffection, which was in itself a most portentous threat. It seemed to argue that scarcely any advantage was to be neglected against people who could bring to their aid so potent an auxiliary of destruction as this. Evidently the town itself might be thus destroyed. The Indians began to walk about the pit, gazing down at it with the sort of averse appropriation which one feels toward aught of menace designed with a personal application. They measured the inimical capacities of the fougasse, dwelling upon the intention of its device, and obviously felt that anger experienced when one heartily takes the ill will for the deed. Their state of mind was all at once so rancorous that albeit the explosion of the fougasse was only another indication of the strength of the defenses and the value of the resources of the white man, and thus would seem to reinforce the dangers of attack, the fact that it was planned to carry death and destruction to them, who had as yet given no overt cause of offense and failed in naught of open friendship, was as a challenge to strategy, invited reprisal, and made vain all protestations of good will.
“Eh, we maun be gangin’ the morn’s morn,” said Jock Lesly, wiping his brow with his great red handkerchief, and gazing down from the window of the spence at the curious crowds that came and looked silently upon the snare—riven and exploded and harmless now—that yet had been laid for them.
“An’ what for no?” cried Lilias impatiently. “Ye’re aye sayin’ ‘we maun be gangin’ an’ we maun be gangin’,’ an’ we aye bide here!”
“Whist, whist, my bairn.” Then perceiving some inconsistency, “The deil’s in the wimmen folk!” Jock Lesly cried indignantly. “’Twas only yesterday sennight that ye sat greetin’ on your creepie an’ said your heart was sair to leave thae grand mountains,—an’ go ye wad na!”
The girl laughed slyly. So dull he was! So well, too, for a father to be dull, when he had “sic a fule” for a daughter. She suddenly grew grave and blushed with a deep, serious, conscious glow. She had caught MacIlvesty’s eyes, bright, alert, with a world of speculation in them as they were fixed upon her face. Could it be that he connected her sudden change of will with the fact that on that tearful yesterday sennight she had not known that mad Tam Wilson was to join their march? For he had since announced that, designing to return to Virginia, he would accompany the trader’s cavalcade as far as the Keowee River,—a great detour and much out of his way.