IX
PERHAPS no man ever lived a tragedy of thought and feeling, unrelated to the conditions and professions of his merely material life, more consciously than did Laroche. Flung back perforce on his military character, every pulse ached with the straining against those professional chains, the fragments of which, had they broken in the stress, he would with loyal perversity have hugged. Yet since they held fast, he pined for Jock Lesly, for the simple household, for the humble domestic habitudes and the hearthside atmosphere, for the chaste yet alluring presence of Lilias. Many a day after he had seen the trader’s cavalcade fare downward through the bosky ravine, becoming dim and diminishing as it went, flickering among the shadows seeming as immaterial as they, finally vanishing indistinguishably in their midst, he could behold it anew in freshest tints and near at hand whenever the wish—or alack, the unruly fancy—brought it to mind again. Long after the echoes had ceased to repeat the hearty halloo of farewell, the last of many regretful tokens of parting, he was wont to hear these voices in song or breezy talk or affectionate greeting as of yore.
Yet he had scant time for this as he rode back to Ioco Town, for it is needless to say the projected detour to Virginia was never really in contemplation. Moy Toy was obviously jealous of his self-absorption and silence, and had become captious under the enforced relinquishment of the trader’s party as his lawful prey. He was more impatient still of the necessary delays that must ensue before the Cherokees could be in case to strike a blow in revenge for all their disasters, plainly registered in the charred tenantless towns here and there on the face of the ravaged landscape. Laroche sought to divert his mind, to placate him anew, to excite his interest. In devising subjects of talk the Frenchman often attempted to sound the depths of the Cherokee character and definitely gauge the capacities of the tribe to receive and assimilate the values of civilization, that thereby he might deduce something of the force that their national traits would exert in the destinies of this great continent. For instance, he would argue with Moy Toy upon the Indian aversion to the stability and permanence of architecture.
“The white man like the Indian can live but a day—why should his house outlast him?” the chief would protest stolidly.
“For those who come after,—since houses congregate into cities, and cities erect nations, and nations continue throughout ages, and ages are aggregations of strength. What is done in a day lasts but a day,” retorted the soldier.
Thus speculatively disposed he would seek to measure the extent and divine the catastrophe of that ancient prehistoric civilization of which his keen instinct read much in the scattered fragments along the shores of Time: in the aboriginal traditions, unique and indefinitely antique; in the ceremonials, of which the significance was lost in degeneracy, retaining but the manner without the matter, the shapeless shadow of an unimagined symmetry; in the language, absolutely individual, he thought, with copious verbal forms and facile locutions, with orderly construction, with subtle shades of minutely diverse meanings, with large and sonorous adaptation to high themes; in the religion, with its elaborate theory of symbolism without the vital spark. He wondered how far this definite cult, seeming almost inherent, would deter the Cherokees from a conversion to Christianity. He doubted this result because of their earnest observance of the ritual of their ancient religion and implicit faith in its sanctities. Yet Moy Toy was himself the suavest of postulants, the most promising of catechumens. So eagerly he listened to the French officer who explained the grounds of his own belief and its revolutionizing effects upon the nations of all the world—not failing to turn and scan the number of tribesmen in the band from time to time, to make sure that none had followed with treacherous intentions the trader’s train—that many another man as discerning as Laroche yet less crafty might have been deceived.
Over the camp-fires at night especially Moy Toy seemed to delight in repeating some of the more simple and discursive details of the day’s talk, often startling Laroche by his powers of memory, the accuracy of his comprehension, and his gift of mimicry. Laroche wondered if a preference which he noted for biographical details might be ascribed to that fraternizing instinct to realize the conditions of the life of man in whatever age or country, despite the lapse of time and the barriers of distance, that attests the universal brotherhood, and if it was this which had served to invest the narrations with such reality and had so strengthened the grasp of his mind upon them. The officer found, however, a curious flavor of speculation in the fact that try as he might he could not enlist this vivid interest in the incidents of the New Testament. The sanguinary histories of the Old Testament, dealing oft with force and fraud, met with no skeptical reservations or evasions from Moy Toy. The motives they adduced were eminently comprehensible to him, the result credible, and his attitude of mind applausive. But with the gospel of love and meekness, the forgiveness of injuries and succor of enemies, the dictates of self-sacrifice and self-denial, the savage had no pulse in unison. Moy Toy listened as his obvious policy required. Sometimes he commented.
“Christianity is to make the red men good? Then tell me, why has it not made the white men good?—they have had it so long—seventeen hundred years, you say, and more!”
And the French officer, fairly routed, could only answer that the race had not lived up to its best opportunity.
The chief’s interest in the ethical phase of the subject often flagged, however, beyond the power of simulation. It was only held to a pretense of attention by the inexorable etiquette of the Cherokee, however prolix his interlocutor, and an occult intention to master certain knowledge by the ruse of surprise, as it were. But inborn subtlety is no match for the ratiocination of cultivation, and Moy Toy’s instinct was fatally at fault when with a child-like blandness and irrelevance he casually demanded, “How was it, did you say last night, that the good San Quawl made his powder when he journeyed down to the city of Damascus?” or “I have forgotten how many pounds of powder you said the brave chief Samson put under the gates of Gaza when he blew them up to carry them off.”
The trail of the earnest dominant desire to discover that seigneurial secret of civilization that made it the lord of the world, the conqueror of force, the despot of right, the annihilator of numbers,—the simple formula for the manufacture of gunpowder, the materials for which Laroche had already assured him abounded in the Cherokee country,—lay through all the devious windings of their talk, and divulged the springs of self-interest in Moy Toy’s affectations of the dawnings of faith.
On each occasion the revulsion of the officer’s feeling was so great that the betrayal of the Indian’s motive in searching the Scriptures, and his conviction that the ultimate value of the white man’s religion lay in his superior knowledge of destructive explosives, failed to excite any cynical amusement in Laroche, and roused in him a very genuine indignation. For the demonstration always came as a surprise in its devious methods, half incredulous though he was as to the eventual conversion of the Indian.
“Let it be accounted to me for righteousness that I do not instantly give you over!” Laroche would cry angrily.
It was essentially the pulse of the church militant which animated the soldier. His patience was scant, his summons imperative. “Become a Christian, or I’ll be the death of you!” might be a just translation of his urgency.
And in good sooth his easily excited anger was so obviously genuine on each recurrent presentation of the lure to entrap him into the disclosure of the secret which he had promised in his own good time to communicate, that Moy Toy experienced a very definite alarm lest by his precipitancy the precious knowledge that gave the white man his supremacy might be snatched from the Indian forever. With his naturally keen faculties thus whetted, Moy Toy evolved with countercraft a diversion that appealed irresistibly to the speculative phase of Laroche’s intellect and for a time led him captive, although he appreciated fully the trickery of the intention and the treachery of the heart of his interlocutor.
This was the recital of the Cherokee traditions of the more ancient Scriptural events,—the creation, the flood, the exodus,—knowledge of which the earliest travelers in this region found already implanted among that singular people, and, with certain analogous customs, serving to add so much plausibility to the theory of its Hebraic origin—even yet to be accounted for by vague hypotheses such as the teachings of Cabeza de Vaca among the more southern tribes, thence transmitted northward. If this be the source of these traditions, it is singular, to say the least, that there should be among them none of the essential truths of the new dispensation nor Roman Catholic legends of the saints. Laroche could but lend heedful attention to the variant details of the Cherokee version of the Patriarchal and Mosaic dispensations, and now and again pointed out to Moy Toy their divergencies from the true and only word, and much he meditated upon this strange disclosure as he rode along the woodland ways, listening in his turn.
Sometimes he sought to modify or adjust the sacred writings of the old dispensation to the interpretative temper of the new, always held in check by the Cherokee version which Moy Toy would repeat with controversial relish, keeping pace haud possibles æquis. For the savage, obdurate to the wile of civilization, was yet more steeled against the advance of the Christian religion; and indeed modern instances are not wanting, sufficiently dispiriting to the student of human progress, in which after a lifetime of the profession of Christianity the Cherokee in his dying hours openly discards the religion of his adoption and departs to the happy hunting-grounds in the faith of his fathers, going out of the world the pagan that he entered it.
Serious as was the subject that absorbed Laroche’s thoughts, the deep significance of his speculations, comprising the origin of this race, its perverted destiny, the intentions of the Deity, this strange glimpse into the mystic past, the darker mystery of the veiled future,—these mighty interests could not suffice to sustain that human heart of his when they passed once more the trading-house, silent and deserted at Ioco Town, and the cottage hard by, where he had lived out the sweets of the little romance snatched from untoward conditions. He smiled sadly and tenderly at the thoughts conjured up by the evening glow so red on the gable against the blue sky. Never again would the fire flash forth from that deserted hearthstone to lure the wanderer home. Never again would the gleam of the candle rejoice the hospitable board that welcomed the stranger. The ingleside was cold and bleak, and would soon be a wreck, for the Indians were now giving the roof to the torch, and he watched the blaze with many a sentimental pang, but did not offer remonstrance. Better thus! Far better thus! It was well that Jock Lesly should not be tempted back by the knowledge that his old nest still awaited him here, for the stout heart of the Scotch trader would credit no less definite a portent of continued danger than charred timbers and sacked dwelling. And Laroche honestly believed that the day of the great British trade on the Tennessee and its neighboring streams was over-past now and forever.
He did not hesitate when once more at Tellico Great to inaugurate the scheme, the progress of which had been delayed months ago by the defection of Mingo Push-koosh. For it was here on the banks of the Tennessee that he at last recovered his old identity, lost in that sweet and soft thrall of a hopeless love. He felt again a free man, albeit the glamours of the evening star in the saffron west moved him strangely. He threw himself ardently into all those plans so long in abeyance of equipping an army of the confederated tribes,—the Choctaw, the Muscogee, the Cherokee, and many minor bands,—and the problems of securing munitions of war, of the transmission of supplies, and of the apportionment of forces absorbed his every faculty. Continually his messengers were going to and fro in the Indian country, and his pettiaugres dared the currents of those swift difficult rivers, now and again running the gauntlet of the musketry of the inimical Chickasaws from some high bluff. Secretly, silently, the preparations went on like the gathering mute menace of a sullen storm whose ferocity must burst with an added fury from its long repression. All unsuspected it might have been, although the expectation was so widely extended, save for the arrogant boastfulness of some far-away Indian, drunk perhaps, in a British trading-house or the bloody culmination of an individual feud between a warrior and a white settler, the savage unable to restrain his vengeful anticipation and abide the accepted time.
Fantastic and impotent as this tenuous scheme may seem now, long ago shredded by the mere wind of the flight of time, a forgotten fantasy, not to be more considered than the snares of any humble spider of to-day throwing its fragile enmeshments from crag to crag on the banks of the Tennessee, it struck cold terror to the hearts of the royal governors of the adjacent British provinces. The Spaniard, insolent and powerful, openly menaced them on the south, and with the combination of the French and Indians they were surrounded and without recourse. They had little to hope from one another, save perhaps an unacknowledged aspiration on the part of each that the other might first tempt the attack of the designing projector of the new Indian alliance and serve as a sop to Cerberus. Each was in terror of a plea of assistance from the other, for the colonies themselves lacked that strength which comes from union and which Laroche sought to instill into the policy of the tribes. Each province being incapable of self-defense with its weak, untrained militia, its inadequate supplies of munitions of war, its vast wildernesses and stretches of unfortified frontier, was averse to dividing its slight resources. Roused, however, to the terror lest immediate massacre of outlying stationers ensue, a consultation was held and a remonstrance, adroit, sugared, promising yet threatening withal, addressed by the Governor of South Carolina to Cunigacatgoah[8] of Choté, now the nominal head of the Cherokee government, was framed and sent by the hand of one of the Kooasahte Indians, who chanced to be in Charlestown, with whose tribe the Cherokees were now at peace.
He returned after a swift journey with a most pacific answer, protesting and reproachful, Cunigacatgoah demanding to be informed of a single infraction of the terms of the treaty, bating, of course, wild, irresponsible rumors. If the governor could cite one such for which the nation could be fairly considered responsible, he would himself come down to Charlestown to answer for it in person.
Governor Boone, surprised yet reassured by the unexpected character of this reply, sought to further assuage his anxiety by catechising his messenger as to the state of matters in the Cherokee country. He found the mind of the Kooasahte, never forceful at best, in that flighty, agitated state to be described as all agog. Obviously the man had been immensely impressed by what he had seen and been able to learn. By no means willing to disclose all, still his eyes were opened to new possibilities of savage ascendancy. Under adroit cross-examination he divulged extraordinary suggestions of the suddenly developed magnificence of Moy Toy of Tellico and of the wonderful powers of a strange magician who was Moy Toy’s friend, yet whom he affirmed was a white man, and whose nationality he accidentally disclosed as French.
Whereupon Governor Boone grew more mystified than before. Finally he bethought himself to send for Jock Lesly as one who, having been intimately acquainted with the personnel and conditions of the Cherokee country for years past, might perchance explain the inconsistency of all these antagonistic details.
The doughty Scotch trader had accounted the burning of his buildings and the plunder of his goods, of which he had been informed indirectly by rumor, as but an accident or a bit of unwarranted and wanton mischief, and by no means as the definite threat that Laroche had supposed he would perceive therein. His daughter, however, had insisted that the demonstration was inimical and in no wise to be braved. Jock Lesly enjoyed much domestic oratory in these days which his “Whist, whist, my bairn!” was powerless to silence, and feminine logic won the battle when she persisted that if he returned, to Ioco Town she would accompany him, for if it were safe for him it was safe for her! Thereupon he hauled down his flag; and now as he needs must rebuild wherever he should go, he was idly awaiting in Charlestown a propitious opportunity of reëstablishment elsewhere under more permanent conditions.
Jock Lesly, cocking his sharp blue eyes at the cringing Kooasahte, a degenerate specimen of a warlike tribe, obviously regarded the whole history of his visit as a fable.
“Gin your excellency wad forgie the freedom, the man is a beautiful liar!”
“Was there no white man there when you left?”
“Nane, sir—that is—forbye a bit chiel o’ a Firginian on his way hame—he had cam doun wi’ a wheen o’ neighbors to herd up some stray horses that had been sold to the Williamsburg region and had gane back to their auld grass in the Cherokee country. He fell ailin’, an’ his friends went on wi’ the horses an’ lef him amang the Injuns,—an’ he foregathered wi’ us. He cam part o’ the way hame wi’ us, but struck aff a considerable way aboon Fort Prince George to go aff to Firginia.”
“He could not be this man, you think? Does he speak French?”
“He? Tam Wilson speak French?” exclaimed Jock Lesly, with a hearty rollicking laugh in his enjoyment of his superior discernment. “Your excellency disna ken thae carles out on the frontier! Tam Wilson ha’ enow to do to speer his wull in English,—puir fallow!”
This seemed definitive; Jock Lesly therefore was presently dismissed, and the gratuity which the Kooasahte received was of limited value and quality, which he had not expected nor had the governor intended, because he had told the truth, which chanced to be unwelcome and discredited. He went away, his heart hot within him, sending forth fumes of rum, which the present sufficed to procure, and sedition, which the present was not adequate to annul.
Meanwhile life on the banks of the Tennessee at Tellico Great flowed on as gently as the river. Laroche had received orders to seek adoption into the Cherokee tribe, according to the wont of the intriguing French, that he might thereby recruit his influence and improve his control. Thus he could better restrain their bellicose demonstrations till the time was ripe for revolt, lest precipitancy annul its values. Hence he became officially a Cherokee.
That singular atmosphere of fraternity peculiar to the Indian method of adoption encompassed Laroche like a native element. It seemed no longer inspired by self-interest. He was as one of the nation,—theirs in success or defeat, theirs in weal or woe! He had polled his head and painted his face and donned their garb. He had been initiated into their mysteries and had accepted their religion; for the Cherokees were no idolaters, and without mockery he could bow in worship to a Great Spirit, albeit with many a mental reservation and evasion in the ceremonies in which he participated. His suspicions were never allayed,—but they were in his mind, not in theirs,—and he was not the more content. Now and again as he danced with the braves in three circles on the sandy spaces of the “beloved square” to the shrilling of a flute, fashioned of the tibia of a deer, and to the thunderous drone of the earthen drums, while strange figures such as might grace pandemonium whirled about him,—hardly human figures; some with grotesquely frightful masks of gourds hiding faces scarcely less hideous; some almost nude; some smeared over with unguents as a groundcoat to make adhere a medley of feathers and foster the semblance of gigantic birds,—a great repulsion would seize him; every civilized pulse would clamor against these uncouth follies, against the sacrifice of time and identity and wonted usage in this cause; and he would feel that the destruction of all the British colonies, could it be compassed, was not worth the price which he paid. The recollection of the sane, orderly customs of the life to which he was native rose up before him with a sentiment of reproach, as one might feel in ascertaining the realities in the lucid interval of some tormenting mania. He was abashed by the mere contemplation of the mountains rising on every side, silent, austere, as majestically aloof from the farce which he enacted as the sky above or the world—the civilized world that he had known and loved—far, far away.
To add to his discomforts the interval which he was to spend thus was destined to be longer than had been anticipated. Aggressive measures were again postponed, and his activities suspended by orders which he received from New Orleans. For it had latterly been developed that the British government contemplated securing a considerable cession of land from the Cherokees, thinking that in thus increasing its holding in the Indian country to keep the tribe more definitely under its domination and influence, and to quiet the title to certain territory, on which they claimed the government had encroached. The French, with their resources much exhausted by the Seven Years’ War, now slowly dragging its length along, were almost crippled in America for the lack of ready cash, and their plans for the Cherokees would be considerably recruited by the purchase money of the land thus poured into the tribal coffers. The wily Indians were enchanted with so hopeful a prospect of securing the means to purchase sufficient arms and ammunition to repel the British and attain their old independence anew. Though they had never doubted the will of the French government in Louisiana to forward these measures, its capacity to furnish adequate ammunition had failed signally more than once.
At this period, while Laroche was awaiting decisive advices from New Orleans, the progress of events seemed suspended. Hope, anxiety, fear were in abeyance. He spent much time in the perfecting of the details of his plan and in the correspondence incident to the enterprise. As he grew more wearied with the monotonous association with the Indians, he took advantage of his leisure to send long discursive letters to his comrades in the southern forts whenever he chanced to have a messenger going that way,—to Captain Pierre Chabert at Fort Tombecbé or the Chevalier Lavnoué at Fort Toulouse.
Cold, wet weather set in late in the summer, a long, dreary, unseasonable interval. When the rains came down in thin, persistent, fibrous lines, and the surface of the river palpitated and throbbed beneath its multitudinous touches, and the gathering gray mists half shrouded then half revealed those endless lengths of dark-hued solemn mountains, and the trees dripped drearily, and the wind surged and sobbed amidst their boughs, the susceptible Frenchman reached the lowest ebb of his isolation, his dissatisfaction, and his yearning wish to feel again the throbbing pulse of civilization.
Thus it was that for many hours of those chill nights in the quaint winter-house, without window or chimney, while the rain would pour down the conical earthen roof, resounding like a drum, he would seek for solace in writing those long letters to his military friends describing his plight, and commenting on the news of the day received chiefly through their responses.
All unmindful of him and his occupations, the other inmates of the house lay sleeping, stretched in a line, on the couch of cane that ran along the red clay walls of the circular room, behind the row of pillars which upheld the conical roof. Even the heads were covered with the wolfskins and bearskins that formed the drapery of their elastic cane mattresses. All unmindful of him they were—all except Moy Toy.
The fire would flare up now and again, showing the colonnade of pillars, the cane couch, and above, the circular wall of the rich red hue of the clay of that country, with here and there upon it quaint hieroglyphics in parti-colored paints, or a decorated buffalo hide suspended, or a curiously carven pipe of stone with some famous scalp attached, while the scroll-like thin blue smoke eddied overhead, pressing closer and closer to its exit at the smoke hole. All gradually flickered and dulled and blurred into a dusky red glow in which naught was distinguishable but vague reminiscent shadows, the mass of smouldering coals in the centre of the floor, and the spirited blond Gallic face of Laroche with his incongruous Indian garb, bending intent, eager, absorbed, above the page as he wrote. Not till the page also grew dim would he rouse himself and throw off the gathering ashes. Then as the responsive flame leaped up white and vivid, he would look back along the paper to review the last paragraphs, and with a freshened brightness of aspect apply himself anew to his task. Moy Toy’s keen eye had grown to distinguish a certain difference of expression when the military expert wrought upon the problems of his enterprise,—the alert, elevated look, puzzled now and then, but intellectual, powerful, confident, and in contrast the twinkling eye, the sarcastic curving lip, the sly, devil-may-care, gibing nod, and yet sometimes the plaintive dejection with which he made those “black marks” which he sent away to his correspondents in the southern forts.
“You are my friend, the friend of my heart, and you know everything,” Moy Toy once said suddenly out of the dreary midnight, when the dizzy rain was whirling abroad in a witch’s dance with the wind, the mountains were lost in the density of night, and the river had become but a voice in the vast voids of the outer atmosphere.
Laroche looked up suddenly from where he sat on a buffalo rug before the red glow of the coals. He wrote upon one knee, but the inkhorn was close by on the floor, and he placed one hand over it, in careful forethought, that a friendly dog, nosing about with the conviction that it held refection of worth, might not overturn it. However Laroche’s hair was clipped it sprang anew and there was a curling fringe under the edge of his cap, which was fashioned of otter fur and bordered with white swan’s feathers. His hunting-shirt was of otter fur and his leggings of buckskin heavily fringed and terminating in a pair of buskins; these were dyed scarlet and gayly decorated with quills. His face, with its expression of intellectual absorption, was inconceivably at variance with his attire and the place. He said nothing, but his hazel eyes looked an expectant inquiry, and seeing him silent Moy Toy spoke again.
“Wonderful friend! though your knowledge is no more to be moved or shaken than the mountains, yet you have the changeable countenance.”
“It is you who know everything!” said Laroche, laughing, but very distinctly embarrassed.
Moy Toy, encouraged by this appreciation, began to put his impressions into words. “When you make black marks on those papers which you treasure, and which I am sure must belong to your beautiful artillery, or else to make powder, or perhaps to the fine plans for the great fort which we are to have here one day, your face is the same it has always been, and as those who love you must love to see it. But when you write the black marks which you send to the commandants of the forts in the south, your eyes grow little, and they twinkle, and your mouth is pursed for lies, and you nod your head with a risky air, and you look more wicked than clever!”
Laroche listened in silence. Then suddenly he burst out laughing. He hastily suppressed the tone of loud hilarity, for one of the sleepers stirred and turned, but fell a-snoring again.
“It is the commandants who are wicked,” he said, smiling retrospectively. “I answer them only in their own vein—sardonic, witty, half-malicious fellows.”
“And what makes them so wicked?”
“They are so close to the English, perhaps,—they learn all they know from the English.”
Moy Toy gazed at the smiling face with a doubtful anxiety, some withheld thought, a half formed purpose in abeyance.
Laroche had had occasion to note that jealousy of the “black marks” of civilization which seemed to animate all the Indians of that day, powerless to restrain this mysterious opportunity of communicating the most secret thought a thousand miles by the stroke of a pen. He had been somewhat irked to discover in addition a sort of pettish tribal jealousy on the part of Moy Toy toward this interest in the southern forts. The chief desired that the officer’s entire attention should be concentrated on the welfare of the Cherokee nation, and deprecated that any advancement or opportunity should be afforded through his means to the various Alabama tribes congregated about those forts. Laroche was an adopted Cherokee, and why should he so delight in writing to the forts aux Alibamons!
It had always seemed to Laroche that the intercepting of a letter was essentially a civilized emprise, but the process was invented, as it were, in the brain of this specious Indian. As the commandants of Fort Tombecbé and Fort Toulouse knew so much about the wicked English, perhaps it was not well to keep longer between the folds of the soft panther and wolf skins that formed the furnishings of the couch of the chief a missive addressed to Lieutenant Jean Marie Edouard Bodin de Laroche, and sealed with a big official splash of wax.
“Here,” said Moy Toy, without the least confusion as he produced it, “I thought too many times you nodded your head toward Fort Toulouse and you might soon speak with the forked tongue of Lavnoué. But perhaps he may tell the truth when his heart weighs heavy with the thought of the English.”
Laroche stared with amazed displeasure. The color rose indignantly to his cheeks. He was about to utter a vehement remonstrance, but paused to break the seal which should have parted under his fingers three weeks earlier. Then he forgot this encroachment upon his vested rights.
For the letter was a warning, heralding the approach of British soldiers.