XII
A FINE outlook at life the Ancient Warrior enjoyed. The sun came splendidly up from over the blue and misty domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, and the beautiful Chilhowee Range suddenly sprang from the nullity of darkness into all the chromatic richness of autumnal color. A wind went chanting blithely through its dense woods, as if it were fitting there to be happy where all was so gay. The river, a trifle of fog blurring its silver sheen here and there, reflected the gorgeous tints of the red and gold forests on its banks and caught the light with an added glister. The world was so fresh, so misty sweet, so newly created! The rocks echoed the barbaric notes of the blasts blown on the conch shells, as with the joyful cries of the ritual of their ancient religion the Cherokee braves went down into the water in their symbolic ablutions.
Smoke had long been curling up from the hearths of the houses, and presently the brisk “second man” of the town was marshaling out his cohorts of women and girls to work in the fields. Callum was surprised to see the placid and smiling faces that they wore, for field work in these rich soils is held to be far less drudgery than housework, and even now a feminine farm laborer is hardly to be found to exchange willingly. The Indians always protested that their division of labor, which allotted field work to the woman, favored the weaker vessel, and by no means implied that indifference and scorn of her attributed to them by the white people.
The “second man” in a civilized community would have been accounted a wag or a buffoon. So very funny he made himself as he sat on the ground near the effigy of the Ancient Warrior that Callum was more than once diverted from his own troublous thoughts and moved to wish for a few additional phrases of Cherokee, that he might more fully understand the quip and song and tale with which this genius of the field beguiled the labor. The elder women listened with slow and languid pleasure; the children sometimes interrupted with a breathless inquiry. He did not lack his critic to remark, in the course of a twice-told tale, that last year the fox had not thus replied to the admonition of the Ancient Warrior, whereupon, with the privilege of response, the raconteur doubled like the animal in question and averred that it was not that same fox! One of the women, a girl of eighteen, perhaps, showed a brilliant, imaginative face as, at the crisis of each story, she turned toward the Ancient Warrior and gazed spellbound upon him with dark, lustrous, liquid eyes, until the “second man” had seen him safely through an adventure of a series for which, had he lived from the days of Noah, the centuries scarcely held space. Then with a long-drawn sigh she would fall to work again, reaching up with lissome ease for the ears of corn which she gathered. Only the children picked the peas and beans and other small crops that the corn had sheltered. For the working force comprised all the laborers of Chilhowee, these being the public fields destined for the common granaries filled for emergencies, and not the individual gardens adjoining each domicile. She was notably expert despite the patent fact that her thoughts were oft so far away; although obviously strong, she was tall and delicately slender, which made picturesque her garb of ordinary doeskin, so fashioned as to leave her arms bare; her buskins were dyed scarlet; and a cascade of red beads, the valueless trinkets of civilized manufacture, bought at a round price from an English trader, fell from her neck. But she was not in gala attire, by reason of her occupation. Her fingers were long and deft and exquisitely shapely; her feet slender and small. She was endowed with a sort of stately bloom and a consummate grace, that justified the sobriquet by which she was distinguished, the “Cherokee Rose.” She obviously cared less for what was done and said here yesterday than for the discourse of the fox and the Ancient Warrior some two or three hundred years before, according to the elastic chronology of the “second man.” For when other Indians, evidently of a high grade in the tribe, came up and began to discuss together the commissioners’ expedition, she worked on with far greater industry, and only occasionally paused to lift her head from where she stood, half shrouded in the tall maize, to gaze meditatively upon the Ancient Warrior,—the hero of so many fancies, for she was of the type of woman who loves the renown of exploits,—with a patent admiration embarrassing to the fair-haired Callum, even although masked by the gourd. At times he experienced a more formidable embarrassment. He was in terror of a strong inclination to cough. As the day had worn on the smoke and smell of distant burning forests suffused all the currents of the air, for the weather had lately been singularly dry. Sometimes he was almost suffocated by the acrid vapor, collecting in the restricted compass of the gourd mask, and again it was dissipated by the freshening of the wind.
As the headmen lingered and talked, the laborers were rapidly moving on under the directions of the “second man,” for the Cherokees never permitted women or boys to hear aught of political machinations or import. Callum began to understand that a runner had brought to Chilhowes the details of the unlucky winning of the French gold by the Highlander, and the ineffectual attempt by the Cherokee headmen to buy it back out of notice with English guineas. So important did the Chilhowee warriors consider this circumstance that they evidently had half a mind to assemble in council in their town-house to debate the matter, but they were deterred by the remonstrances of the runner, who seemed to give also warning of an approach. Thus Callum was apprised that Everard was in the saddle and on the road hither. It would never do, the messenger argued, for the English officer to find the Chilhowee headmen in solemn consultation,—in effect an official recognition of the importance which they attached to the incident. While admitting the justice of this reasoning, they were nevertheless fain to secure at least a hasty word together as to how they should meet the officer. Therefore it was that the “second man” urged forward the laborers, and the councilors gathered about in the field as if they had been participating, as they often did, in relating the traditions and legends of the tribe, that were thus handed down from one generation to another.
They grouped themselves near the Ancient Warrior, whose pedestal stood in a heap of fodder that usually concealed certain ungainly posturings to which his straw-filled moccasins were prone, but that now served to hide the strong, stanchly planted feet of the hardy infantry-man. Had Callum’s knowledge of the Cherokee tongue been more complete and accurate,—in fact it consisted but of sundry fragments caught up at haphazard in his campaigns in this region the two previous years, and from the Indian guides of the present expedition, and his short stay at Jock Lesly’s trading-house,—he might have comprehended all the subtleties of which this secret discussion was rife. Even as it was, however, he understood that the Indians feared much from the discovery of the French money here.
“The French coins must be taken from the officer—if they were his eyes, if they were his heart; they must be taken from him,” a fierce, straight, stiff warrior, Yachtino, the chief of Chilhowee, was continually saying as he stood pacifically in the midst of the corn, his feathered crest, his quiver and bow, his garments decorated with fringes seeming not unlike the growth itself, as if he had been thence incarnated.
Another Indian, with a swift, furtive step aside, ever and anon bent to gaze down the trading-path, interjecting from time to time the phrase, “Usinuli! Usinuli!” (Quick! Quick!), which agitated the course of the deliberations, usually so slow and decorous, like the sudden striking of a flaw of wind on the surface of placid water.
They all stood in silence and looked stolidly at the ground.
“But how?” said Tlamehu, the Bat, at last. And then another, “How can the coins be taken from him?”
Callum, noting the dismay in their countenances, fumbled mentally for the significance of the French money. That this currency should be common among them seemed natural enough, as their intercourse with the French had been great, even before the Cherokee War against the British government. During its progress, indeed, it was believed that in several engagements the Cherokee forces were commanded by French officers.
The next words let in the light.
“And so the coins that had the king’s head, pictured in the fine gold, spoke with a deceitful forked tongue, and tells the English that it was made in sixty-two?”
“The date is stamped on the metal—all, all!” impatiently responded the informant.
The words were echoed with an intonation of perplexed despair. Then a despondent silence ensued until Yachtino, the warrior who had first spoken, reiterated: “The coins must be taken from the officer—if they were the breath of his life!”
“But how?” the question came again.
Callum wondered no longer at their agitation. The louis d’ors were of the coinage of 1762, and therefore revealed the fact of renewed machinations with the French, in direct contravention of the terms of the treaty of peace of 1761 between the Cherokees and the British government, which expressly forbade all trade on the part of the Indians with other nations, especially the French, who, being still at war with Great Britain, were to be denied admission to any of the Cherokee towns and intercourse with the tribe, the Cherokees pledging themselves to surrender or kill such intruders. The Indians, indeed, had much to fear from the discovery of this breach of the treaty. They gloomily foreboded therefrom the collapse of the favorable phases of the cession. This secret hope on their part was to effect from the purchase money the speedy supply of the tribe with powder, and thus perpetuate their national existence. The ammunition must needs be secured before any intimation of renewed hostilities, and thus the British government actually would furnish the money for another attack upon its own frontiers. The French would doubtless afford the Cherokees substantial aid, but despite the fairest promises, they were unable to fully supply the savages with ammunition in the last campaign of the furious Cherokee war against the British, failing the Indians at their utmost need. Thus at the critical juncture all their previous fierce and bloody successes were brought to naught. For as a nation the Cherokees were now practically disarmed and at the mercy of any demand made from a basis of powder and lead. It was a new point of view from which to contemplate the proposed cession of land, and Callum felt as if the gourd on his head had spun quite round, since from the English standpoint the cession was designed to bring the Cherokee tribe more definitely under the domination of the British government by strengthening its occupation among them, and thereby monopolizing their trade.
And here, in the British officer’s keeping, was the unfortunate French money of the coinage of 1762, that told so straight a tale amidst all these subtle and devious windings of savage statecraft. Callum recognized an imprudence on Everard’s part, against which, however, only superhuman wisdom could have guarded, in having overlooked, in the agitation of the moment, the presence of Wahuhu, who had lost the coins at the races,—the sad Screech-owl, who yet perceived with great keenness, and argued with an impeccable ratiocination, and witnessed the transference of the money to official keeping after the lieutenant had scrutinized the date of the coinage. The mere transference of the louis d’ors Callum regarded lightly. Their equivalent in “ta guinea” would undoubtedly be returned, when the force should reach Charlestown, to the man who had at so many risks won the money, and who would easily be reconciled to the English currency in the bliss of the exercise of its purchasing power. Everard intended to reserve the coins themselves to be shown to the royal governor, with the significance of date and freshness of mintage, and these facts would be made a part of the lieutenant’s report to his superior officer, offering in support of his account of the matter ocular demonstration of the louis d’ors. Anything that touched upon French machinations among the Cherokees, from whose atrocities the English had suffered so severely in the Cherokee War, and who had been subdued at so great a cost of blood and time and treasure, was of paramount importance in this year of grace 1762, and not to be lightly argued aside.
As Callum watched the fiercely reflective faces of the group, he realized that they contemplated more in the enterprise to serve their object than the mere recovery of the coins. An accident might adroitly account for the event. Some opportune misfortune often befell men charged with disaster to others.
“But how?” the question came again, as if it voiced a common train of thought. In fact they all seemed to think in unison, until one of the group, suddenly looking up, said,—
“But the tongues of the ugly commissioners are strong. They eat much food, they drink much wine, and the British government pays them money for their wisdom. The many black marks that they put on paper will report the French money, the coinage of this year, to the governor. And yet the wings of the eagles overshadow the commissioners, and for the sake of the cession they must not be touched.”
“Usinuli! Usinuli!” urged the voice of Time, as once more the self-constituted lookout scanned the reaches of the path.
“The commissioners have never shaken hands firmly with the speech of the lieutenant,” replied an authoritative voice, “and the lieutenant tells nothing to the commissioners.”
Canting his eye askew, to look through the orifices of the ear of the image painted on the gourd, Callum saw—to his surprise and indignation, for his heart was still in the undertaking—the Cherokee guide of the commissioners’ expedition, whose utilities as a spy for his own people must have been very marked and duplicated his services. He went on with great animation to discuss the mutual relations of the personnel of the expedition.
“The commissioners have never tied fast the old beloved friend-knot with the lieutenant, and the lieutenant despises the commissioners. They are not soldiers, and they look very small in his eyes. And they talk till his ears are tired. When he is scornful he speaks of them as ‘lady-like old men,’ and when he is angry he calls them ‘gentlemanly old ladies’! He trusts them not at all—with nothing!”
“Usinuli! Usinuli!” The sound of doom!
“But though the lieutenant has taken the coins into his own keeping the soldiers have seen them,” said the Indian, who seemed to evolve all the objections for the others to combat, that the scheme might thus be battered, as it were, into solid shape.
“Only the bird that flies high sees far,” retorted Yachtino quickly. “The flock of pigeon soldiers see nothing—they would never notice the date of the coins—the man in command keeps his eyes open and his thoughts awake. Besides, what are rumors among mere soldiers,—the chatter of grasshoppers! The French gold that they have seen—what does French gold signify? It may have been here for years for all they know,—those years when the true emblem of the French was the white dressed doeskin, and the British the long scalping knife. Now those conflicts of the past are wiped out by the treaty, and its strong lying mouth has said that our tears are dried and our wounds closed. But the coinage of 1762—that is a far different matter! It proves a direct breach of the treaty, and that once more we have taken the great French Father fast by the arm and close to the shoulder. And the path is straight no more! If the French coins of 1762 were hidden in the heart of the officer they must be cut out!”
“Usinuli! Usinuli!” The sound was like the beating of a muffled drum in the ears of Callum MacIlvesty, for he realized that the life of the officer was forfeited to the knowledge, which he alone had acquired, of the date of the coins. Should he be permitted to reach Charlestown, whether with or without the fatal pieces, his disclosure of the facts would mean added punishment and renewed restrictions for the Cherokees, already so heavily chastised, the cautious hampering of the Indian trade, and the rupture of the terms of the land cession, through the purchase money of which they hoped for ultimate freedom. It was too plain: the officer with this knowledge in his possession would be prevented from ever again reaching Charlestown.
But how—that suspicion might impute naught to the agency of the Indians? they asked again of one another. How could he be found accessible and alone? How could he be secured without an attack upon the whole party, which was not to be contemplated, since this would of necessity involve the destruction of the proposed scheme of the cession of land and its financial value to the Cherokee nation—possibly resulting in the extermination of the whole people. Therefore still, “But how?”
“Already they have lost a man,”—once more the current of the common thought flowed in words,—“this is a wild country. Many paths lead far—far—with no return. All our little brothers—the panther, the wolf, the wildcat—are many, many—and they none of them are the little brothers of the white man. Should he offend the little brothers he would hardly know how to hide from them! Then there are many wandering Indians from the French settlements, and knowing that the great French Father is still at war with the English king, they would rejoice to slay a man in the British uniform. The British have already lost a man on this expedition—they may well lose another.”
Yet how to compass this that the force of the blow might have no recoil! And once more an interval of deep and silent meditation fell upon the group.
The Cherokee spy and guide, whose sensibilities had been evidently ruffled by the manner of the man who employed and paid him, suddenly threw himself into an attitude mimicking Everard’s stiff military carriage.
“Agiyahusa asgaya! Agiyahusa asgaya!” (I have lost a man!) he cried in Cherokee, but marred with a queer English accent. A slow smile pervaded the grim circle. “Agiyahusa asgaya! the Capteny bleats this through every town. His redcoats search every house and field.”
The Ancient Warrior trembled.
“‘Capteny, asgaya gigagei?’” (Captain, a red man?—meaning a British redcoat.) The spy rehearsed this with an affectation of the bated breath of extreme solicitude and a crouching mockery of his own manner of respect. Then with a perfect reproduction of Everard’s petulant arrogance, despite the broken English, “No, no, my good man! I have lost no red soldier, but my plaid soldier, my tartan man, my MacIlvesty! Five guineas reward to the man who brings him to the guard-house before nightfall!”
The officer evidently would pay roundly for the privilege of the lash. His vengeance was indeed afire, and Callum’s cheek burned with a flame to match. They should never take him alive he swore beneath his breath.
“Usinuli! Usinuli!” The words swung back and forth like a pendulum chronicling the passing of the moments; and suddenly Callum recognized, blended with the iterative chant, the regular throb of the hoof-beat of horses approaching along the trading-path at a fair pace.
In another moment there issued from the forest a dozen of the English soldiers all mounted, and with Lieutenant Everard riding at their head. Beside him was Mr. Herbert Taviston, bland, smiling, perceiving in the stir and the difficulty that beset the officer only a fine opportunity to browse about a bit in the woods safe from Indians and panthers—the unique advantage of botanizing with a military escort. The lieutenant’s keen eyes, falling upon the group around the Ancient Warrior, discerned at once in them men of station and authority, judging merely from the expression of their countenances, for the occasion being unofficial, they wore no insignia of rank. He at once halted his party, and called out in his crisp, peremptory tones a request to be allowed to search the town. His guide interpreted, and as the chief, Yachtino, gravely and ceremoniously assented, Everard thanked him curtly and turned to admonish the corporal.
“See to it that the varlets give no offense, Baker,” he said. “If the man is taken bring him before me at once.”
“Oh, the poor young man, to be sure!” exclaimed the botanist, his eyes gloating the while upon Chilhowee Mountain; every leaf of the myriads it flaunted, red and amber and purple and brown, he could call out of its name with Latin equivalents as flamboyant as the foliage. “Not found yet!”
He had utterly forgotten the provocation that occasioned the arrest and the object of the search, that it held aught more serious than the acquisition which he had made of a certain parasitic plant, the Indian pipe—or let us imitate Mr. Taviston and say Monotropa uniflora—delicate, wax-like stems of which he now held tenderly in his spare white fingers, not altogether devoid of similarity to that unique growth.
“I wish to God I could lay my hands on him! I can give my mind to nothing else till I take him,” declared the officer fervently, all unaware that as he looked casually at the effigy he was gazing straight into the eyes of the man whom he sought, and who returned a look of fire.
It was a somewhat fluctuating scrutiny that Everard gave the scarecrow, as he sat upon his fine bay horse, for the animal, in spirited impatience of the detention, shifted his position continually, pawing the ground and tossing his head, despite the rein and spur and curb. Thus splendidly mounted, Everard presented a gallant aspect, his showy scarlet coat, white breeches, cocked hat, and polished boots as perfect and precise in this wilderness as if worn on parade. His fine dark eyes and expressive features only needed in general a cast of gravity and dignity to render them imposing, and this his anger and sense of responsibility had compassed.
The Indians of the group gazed fixedly at him. They had their own reasons, intimately associated with the louis d’ors in his pocket, to regard him with a deep morbid curiosity—very shocking to a civilized mind—as a living man who must soon in their interest be dead. And once more the question stirred every brain, “But how?” The Highlander saw his enemy resplendent in all the regalia and rank equally appropriate to his own condition by right of descent, and remembered and repeated in his sore consciousness every word of the foolish, half drunken, brutal fleer of the night before. And the Indian girl, the Cherokee Rose, still at her work hard by, unobserved in the midst of the standing maize, hearing yet unheeding all that had been said, gazed upon the officer with a dazzled reverence, as one might behold the glittering martial vision of the archangel Michael.
Nothing so glorious had ever blazed in her wildest dreams. All her imaginings of the graces and glamours of the Ancient Warrior in the charm of his youth and the heyday of his achievement paled and grew dim and faded out of comparison with this magnificent palpitant reality. Her hands rested petrified upon the ear of corn which she was about to wrest from its stalk. Her eyes, dilated, fascinated, glowed upon him. She scarcely dared to breathe, and for one moment silence encompassed the group. The breeze only vaguely rustled through the crisp, sere blades and stalks; the usual sounds of the town were annulled now, with its “beloved square” vacant, its council-house still, and its women and girls all away at their labors in the further fields. It sent up a mere murmur that came drowsily to the ear on the perfumed suave air of this sunlit autumnal day, for the search, orderly in its conduct, was not resisted, and made scant stir. The officer’s horse broke an interval of almost absolute stillness when it once more lowered its head and fretfully beat the earth with its high-stepping, impatient forefoot. Suddenly the elderly commissioner started from his saddle with an exclamation of bland delight.
“Found, sir, found at last!”
The officer’s horse executed an abrupt demivolt as its bewildered rider looked hastily around, expectant of seeing the fugitive. The Ancient Warrior himself crouched appalled in his flimsy disguise.
The amiable Mr. Taviston went on in his address to the lieutenant. “Do you remember last night?” he sweetly queried, while Everard mentally asked himself would he ever forget it. “I had then the pleasure to direct your attention to it—the Nicotiana rustica.”
The learned man was afoot now and in the path, and it may be doubted if a person of his quality, so dapper, so sprucely clad in his fine brown cloth and silver buckles, ever sustained a glance so surcharged with contempt as the look which the officer bent upon him, albeit Everard had just had a sharp lesson touching undue intolerance, and Mr. Herbert Taviston was of far more worshipful presence in his worldly minded wig and cocked hat than in his intimate, reclusive, betasseled nightcap. His trim legs were carrying him briskly into the field, and a beatific smile of scientific satisfaction was upon his serene, smoothly shaven cheeks and his slightly doubled chin. He paused where a row of plants of the “old religious tobacco” had once flourished and one or two had chanced to escape the garnering knife. Before plucking a leaf he said with punctilious courtesy to the nearest astounded Cherokee, “May I?”
The stolid Indians were obviously thrown into confusion by this unexpected demonstration. It seemed to them that the white people, even those of the same nationality, were infinitely various, and that there was no reasoning on the basis of the common customs and traits of a gens. Here were two Englishmen as unlike, as far apart in every pulse and every phase of character, as if no national tie bound them together. The inherent courtesy of the savage aided the botanist, however, and the nearest Indian vouchsafed a bewildered mutter of assent. With “A thousand thanks, my dear sir—monstrous obleeged, I’m sure,” Mr. Taviston plucked some leaves of the old religious tobacco and still happily ambling, retraced his way to the side of the horse of the officer, who had hardly yet recovered from the impression that the sudden cry of discovery heralded the finding of the fugitive and the appropriate finale of his dilemma.
“Now, my dear sir,” said the botanist, holding up to the lieutenant a few of the leaves, “let me beg that you will do me the favor to taste these. My own tongue is still tingling with the pungency of mint, and the discernment of my palate thereby blunted.”
And once more he offered the leaves.
It is possible that the officer had no fear of a probable tobacco worm in the unwashed foliage, still lush and green, and he was also strongly conscious of the inscrutable, attentive faces of the Indians. He had always given orders that his men should observe caution in the presence of the savages to show no divisions, no discourtesies, no quarrels among themselves, thereby bringing each other into contempt or ridicule which might be shared among the Indians, and the opportunity improved by their machinations. Therefore, mindful of the observation of sundry of the soldiers, he practiced his own admonition. Albeit infinitely against his will, he thrust the leaves, possible tobacco bug and all, between his strong white teeth, which he brought crunching down upon them.
“And how does it compare? how does it taste?” demanded the botanist, smiling his soft, white shaven benevolence.
“Nasty, sir, very extremely nasty,” said the disgusted lieutenant. “And as I am not a browsing animal generally, sir, I have no other experience of green forage with which to compare it.”
As, despite his intention, some of the juice went down his throat, he was suddenly reminded of the botanist’s laudation of the skill and extraordinary knowledge of the Cherokees in the matter of vegetable poisons, and felt that he was relying too implicitly upon the scientific learning and plant identification of this gentleman, of the justice of whose pretensions he had no means of judging. For aught he knew the stuff might be poison. It was certainly unlike any tobacco that he had ever seen. He at once thrust the leaves from his mouth, and then several times spat copiously upon the ground, the action of the saliva being stimulated by the tobacco.
At that moment the corporal came up with the report that the search had resulted fruitlessly. Everard took leave of the Indians merely with a ceremonious bow, and the party rode hastily off, straight down the river and once more toward Choté.
For one instant the Cherokees stood silent and motionless, watching the flying horsemen, the sun glittering on their red coats and burnished arms. Then to Callum’s amazement an elderly Indian, with a sudden sharp cry such as an animal might utter in seizing upon its prey, sprang forward, dropped upon his knees in the path, and caught up the dampened tobacco leaves and the clod of clay upon which the saliva had fallen. Half articulate exclamations of guttural triumph rang upon the air from the group, and Callum, glancing from one fiercely joyous illuminated face to another, felt as if his senses were in the thrall of some fantastically horrible nightmare. For the possession of the man’s saliva gave them, according to their savage creed, power over the man’s life. It would end when the spell should be worked.
Perhaps because of the superstitions of his native land, in which his childhood had been deeply imbued and which his nerves still accredited, while his mind resolutely repudiated them, Callum watched with a sort of sickened fright the preparations for the necromancy. Far away the laborers in the fields were working now, even the girl who had lingered so long, and the sere stalks of the tall corn concealed the secret ceremony of the schemers from the other denizens of the town. Only the Ancient Warrior, who had seen so much of yore, was to behold the calling down of the curse.
Suddenly—Callum could not believe his eyes—there issued from among the tall cornstalks the figure of a man, a familiar figure, a face that he knew well, or was he bereft of his senses? For here was Tam Wilson, arrayed in buckskin, fantastically beaded and fringed after the Indian fashion, his head bare and polled like a Cherokee’s and decorated with feathers. Yachtino, stepping hastily toward him, greeted him in the Cherokee language, and pointed out the preparations for the necromancy. Tam Wilson, also speaking in Cherokee, questioned minutely, and stood for a moment gazing after the cheerataghe. Then as he turned away—miracle of miracles!—he spoke to himself in French.
“Tant pis pour lui!” he commented upon the working of the spell. “À bon chat, bon rat!”
He was gone in another moment among the corn, and Callum understood at last the mystery of his continued presence here,—that this was the arch-plotter whose machinations threatened the peace of the Cherokee country.
Callum was dizzy with the significance of the discovery, the thoughts of import, that crowded upon him. Only as in a dream he beheld the group of the scheming headmen of Chilhowee, eager, breathless, expectant, standing close at hand while one of the cheerataghe, a man with the frenzy of a fanatic in his eyes and the fury of a savage, came slowly down the space between two rows of the corn. He was clad in the usual buckskin garb, but draped above it was a large dressed hide decorated with painted symbols and strange hieroglyphics. Upon his head he wore the horns and head of a buffalo, and as Callum listened to the incantation, delivered in a weird, chanting undertone, with frequent interpolations of a sonorous, exclamatory “Ha!” and anon pauses of impressive silence, he felt his blood go cold.
“Usuhiyi nunahi wite tsatanu usi gunesa gunage asahalagi. Tsutu neliga.” (Toward the black grave of the upland in the Darkening Land your paths shall tend. So shall it be for you.)
The increasing excitement of the moment showed in the attitude of the other Indians, motionless, yet with an electrical energy of pose, as if on the point of springing forward. They looked on, fiery eyed but silent, from among the cornstalks, save that now and again an inadvertent “Ku!” breathed out from surcharged lungs, and once Yachtino muttered “Nigagi!” (This ends it!)
As the magician paced along he carried in his hand, like a sceptre, a hollow reed of the poisonous wild parsnip, filled with a paste compounded of earthworms and the spittle-moistened clay, to be buried at the foot of a lightning-scathed tree in the forest.
“Tsudantagi uskalutsiga. Sakani aduniga. Usuhita atanisseti, ayalatsisesti tsudantagi, tsunanugaisti nigesuna. Sge!”[9] (Now your soul has faded away. It has become blue. When darkness comes your spirit shall grow less and dwindle away, never to reappear. Listen!)
The wizard had reached the gloomy shades of the dense woods, and the terrible words of the spell came floating back on the air, dwindling with the distance like the diminishing thread of the life which it affected to attenuate and reduce and finally cut short.
Listen! not even an echo now of that weird voice! Only the river’s song; the sound of the wind blaring about Chilhowee Mountain; the vague, far-off tones of the “second man” still at his quips and quirks in the field; and suddenly the shrill, callow laughter of happy children.
But for the icy drops starting on his brow Callum might have thought he had been dreaming. Yet he stood in the burning sun, and so shivered that had now the Cherokee Rose gazed upon the hero of her fancies, she must have deemed the Ancient Warrior stricken with the palsy. He was alone, however, none near to mark his lapse from the verisimilitude of deportment. A bee came buzzing by, and crawled up and down the quaint lines of the gourd vizard for a time, making the Highlander tremble for a possible entrance through ear or eye spaces, but at last it took droningly to wing. A lizard basked in the sun, as doubtless it had done for many a day, on a stone at the feet of the scarecrow. A blue jay, the sauciest of feathered rufflers, even alighted on the crown of the dingy old bedraggled war-bonnet, and there preened his brilliant blue and white plumage, and clanged his wild woodsy cry, and so off again to the splendors of Chilhowee Mountain, gold and red above the silver river and against the azure sky. And these wights were all the passers-by, while Callum shivered and trembled from head to foot and scarce could stand. He had no need of knowledge of the Indian character to be aware that the savages would not fail to assist the workings of the charm by non-magical powers. Everard, undoubtedly, by some crafty device would be lured to his destruction.
The tempter, ever present, did not fail to suggest thereby the solution of Callum’s own problem: with Everard gone, his accuser had vanished. Even the corporal supposed his incarceration was but the result of some slight insubordination, or perhaps Everard’s own hasty and arbitrary whim while in liquor. As to the bewildered Mr. Taviston, his incoherent impressions were hardly to be considered, so confused was he by the sudden altercation. Thus Callum might escape the shame of the lash that he dreaded more than death itself, and also save his own life. He put the thought from him. He would return now willingly, willingly; he would in this cause face aught that might menace him—and not for sheer conscience’ sake, for at heart he loved the fop like a brother.
Yet should he issue forth and return to camp, he well knew that Everard would laugh the threat to scorn, and fancy the whole adventure feigned to win his gratitude and save the culprit from the lash. Callum’s invention would respond to no goading. How could he forecast and thwart the strange, savage lure which the Indians would devise? That it would be apt, efficient, and bold withal, on the strength of their faith in their own necromancy, thus crediting the spell with the result of their own efforts, he was sure. And yet strive as he might, he could not rouse his jaded faculties to divine, to baffle, to counterplot.
Some time had passed thus, when a sudden movement close at hand caused him unthinkingly to turn his head. Fortunately the gourd vizard was so ample as to permit the motion without stirring the mask. There again was the Indian girl who had gazed so lovingly upon the effigy as almost to disconcert the fair-haired Callum that it masked,—not gazing upon him now, however. The same girl it was, he was sure, although she passed by her ancient hero with so fickle an unconcern. But for bewitchments! the Cherokee Rose was metamorphosed by a simple splendor into the rarest bloom. White beads were twined in her long black hair, where they glistered like pearls. A strand of the large, beautiful, genuine pearls, still found in the rivers of the region, only slightly discolored by the heated copper spindle which the Indians used to pierce them, encircled her round, roseate-tinted throat. Her dress of fawnskin dappled with white had a belt of many rows of white beads and a low collar or cape of swans’ feathers. Above her high white buskins two small skins of otter fur, worn like garters, were each trimmed with straight stiff swan’s quills that stood out horizontally, and gave the suggestion of wings to her feet, if one were open to poetical imagery, or a bantam-like decoration, if prosaically inclined. Her face was turned toward the road with a wistful, fascinated expression in her soft, liquid eyes that would have been charming to view if any but the supplanted Ancient Warrior had beheld her. Now and again, with an incomparably graceful, lissome gesture, she lifted one bare arm and silently beckoned the unseen.
The expectation of an approach along the path reminded Callum of the sinister consultation of the headmen here to-day, and suddenly the Ancient Warrior spoke.
“Higeya tsusdiga! Higeya tsusdiga!” (Oh little woman! Oh little woman!)
Instantly she was palsied, stricken dumb. Faithfully as she had believed in the Ancient Warrior, she had never thought to hear him speak. Human credence has ever its reservations. She gazed wide-eyed at the image, her lips parted, her hand on her plunging heart.
Sunset was on the face of the effigy; the soft red light freshened the effect of his tattered old war-bonnet and gilded the stalks of the high Indian corn amidst which he stood. Whether or not Callum was conscious of his enhanced comeliness, the awe and respect in her face and the obvious simplicity of her mental endowment nerved the young daredevil to venture further speech. And indeed something must needs be risked in view of the unwelcome knowledge that had come to him and the restrictions that hampered its use. He mustered his best Cherokee.
“Who are you waiting for, little woman?”
“No Chickasaw, oh good grandfather,” she cried hastily; for one of the best stories of the “second man” chronicled the hatred which the Ancient Warrior had cherished against that tribe, and his valor, which had nearly exterminated them from the face of the earth. His sentiments were pointed by the fate of a Cherokee maiden who married a Chickasaw and went to his tribe to dwell, and daily the Ancient Warrior dispatched the magic messenger bird that lived among the Tuckaleechee towns in the Cherokee country, on the banks of the Canot River, to remind her of her home; and as the memories she could not shake off clung about her, she finally became imprisoned in their convolutions; and to this day she can be seen in the Chickasaw country, where they think she is nothing but what she seems,—a tangle of grapevines!
The Ancient Warrior said nothing in reply. He was making a strenuous mental endeavor to adjust another Cherokee sentence. His silence terrified her. His anger was full of spells, as the “second man” well knew; an ageya lost her garters, for instance, and none would ever again stay on, and thereafter she presented an appearance painfully undecorated. The Cherokee Rose abruptly cut short the silent linguistic toil of the Ancient Warrior by hurriedly explaining of her own accord.
“A strange British warrior, oh good grandfather,—a splendid red captain, most beautiful and brave, who will come up the path and pass the mountain to-night on the way to Talassee Town. The same, oh good grandfather, that made the road bright and shining to-day. And even if he should come after the sun has gone down, one could never miss the light of the day, but could see him yet ride his horse along the river bank. For he is like the sun in splendid red, and his hair shines with a white glister, and the look in his eyes warms the heart.”
The Ancient Warrior marked how the mental image she had summoned up diverted her attention from him, for the fascination of the supernatural had waned as she spoke, and she turned half away from the effigy, which she had once so reverenced, to gaze along the curving westward path for the vision of her anticipation. The Ancient Warrior, all sullen and serious, gazed calculatingly and doubtfully at her.
The ranges were purpling along the perspectives of the background; the forests of Chilhowee Mountain flamed gorgeously gold and red in the middle distance; the sky above was all radiant with a uniform amber tint. As she stood amidst the sun-suffused Indian corn, the sere hues of which so harmonized with the deeper shade of her garb of white-dappled fawnskin, and the dense white of the swan’s feathers about her shoulders, she looked as might some primeval ideal of the mystic harvest moon. Half mechanically she still beckoned, as if thus she might bring the sun of her fancy to meet her upon the horizon line.
“Ha, Capteny Gigagei!” she cried. “Usinuliyu! Usinuliyu!” (Oh great red captain! Haste! Haste!)
The Ancient Warrior suddenly spoke sternly. “Higeya, hatu ganiga!” (You, woman, come and listen to me!)
Once more with that unquestioning subjection to the superstitions of the cult in which she had been reared,—oh wily second man!—she turned submissively toward the Ancient Warrior, albeit her docile obedience might cost her eyes the first resplendent glimpse of the Capteny Gigagei, riding his gallant war-horse straight out of the red west and the illumined amethystine mountains, whither that humbler scarlet splendor, the god of day, was now slowly disappearing. She lifted her appealing child-like eyes to the gourd vizard of the young Highlander, and well it was that he wore this impassive mask, for his own face was pallid with exhaustion from a sleepless night and the exertion of standing all day without food, drawn with the stress of much anxiety, and lined with the many perplexities of his thoughts. The gourd face, however, acquiring naught by propinquity, looked as it always did, as its Indian draughtsman intended that it should,—arrogant, surly, threatening, and very majestic.
“Oh good grandfather!” she faltered.
“Higeya tsusdiga (Oh little woman), how do you know he comes?”
“Oh, he comes, he comes without doubt!—the headmen said late, but I hoped early, so that I might see him as he rides his splendid horse along the river bank. The headmen know he comes; they are ready for him; he will be received at the house of the chief of Talassee. He comes because a wicked man—one of his own soldiers—has fled, has deserted the great red Capteny, and is in hiding at Talassee Town, and the headmen have sent him the message that he may come and take him with his own hand, lest the plaid soldiers, the comrades of the runagate, wreak vengeance on Talassee, should the town deliver him up to penance. The headmen have only secretly sent messages where the fugitive can be found. Oh good grandfather, the Capteny comes, he comes! To-night he will abide at the house of the chief of Talassee, where a great feast is made in his honor, and the braves will dance the eagle-tail dance, and then the young girls will dance in three circles with the braves, and I, too, I am to dance. And there will be good store of wine at the feast (lowering her voice mysteriously)—French wine, oh good grandfather, but surely the Capteny Gigagei cannot taste its French-ness! And to-morrow the army of the commissioners will start back to the Carolina country and overtake the great red Capteny at Talassee, and he will march at the head like the king of his tribe.”
The heart of the Ancient Warrior turned cold and seemed to cease to beat. The ingenious scheme was thus unwittingly outlined before him. He knew that the thought of personal danger would never occur to Everard as the result of the French coins in his keeping and his knowledge of their significance, since any personal violence offered to a man of his note would result in instant discovery and speedy vengeance. From the beginning of the negotiations there had been more or less interchange of friendly courtesies and mutual hospitalities between the Cherokee headmen, the commissioners, and the commander of the military force. Although Everard kept the rank and file close in camp, in view of the disastrous possibility of clashing between the boisterous young soldiers and the “mad young men” of the tribe, he himself went about the country freely enough. He would not hesitate, Callum was sure, to leave his orders with the first sergeant for the march of the troops on the following day, and accompanied by a single orderly, or perhaps by only the Cherokee guide, proceed to the tryst of the headmen, where he would expect to capture the runaway Highlander, and rejoin the escort when its vanguard should come in sight from beyond Chilhowee Mountain.
No prophet need one be to foretell how the lines would straggle past; how the sergeant in command would hourly expect his superior for a while; then being without orders to halt would proceed for a day or so, Everard’s lingering stay being of course within his own discretion. And at last anxiety would develop, increase to troublous forecast, to panic fear; a halt would be called, a detachment sent back, to find—nothing! A mysterious disappearance,—some crafty, subtle, convincing story to account for it innocuously. Callum did not dream what this could be; only afterward its details were made clear to him by another, more discerning.
What fate? he speculated—the river? No. The first sergeant, quailing under his awful responsibility, would drag it for miles and miles in search of the body. The stake?—a handful of ashes could tell no tale. Surely the magic compound of earthworms and spittle-moistened clay, mysteriously potent, buried at the foot of the lightning-scathed tree, might spare room for the sepulture of so trifling a residuum of all that gay spirit exhaled in smoke. Perhaps a more stealthy method still—Everard might be drugged into quick insensibility by some mysterious poison mixed with the French wine, and buried forever out of sight somewhere in the infinities of the illimitable wilderness.
The Ancient Warrior trembled till the pole which aided to support him shook in the ground.
One by one the schemes of possible rescue of his erstwhile friend and his present enemy, and above all and before all his commanding officer, fell to shreds as he sought to hold up the fabric in contemplation of its feasibility. He said again that he would surrender himself now most willingly; he would resign himself to any punishment rather than this disaster, this treachery, this cowardly massacre, should ensue. But how would surrender now avail? He could not regain the camp without the danger of passing Everard, coming hither on another path. He resolved that as soon as the first beat of the horse’s hoofs should herald an approach he would rush out from his hiding-place, seize the officer’s bridle, and compel him to listen.
Alack, the sun was already down; the dun shadows were on the land; far away the dim stretch of the sere cornfields held all the fading light between the slate-hued clouds, coming up from the south over the Great Smoky Mountains, and the deep purple ranges that loomed close about and limited the horizon. A dark night was at hand, without a star. How should he distinguish the hoof-beat of one horse from another? Everard might well pass without a word.
As thus the difficulties of the situation baffled his flagging invention, the Ancient Warrior unwittingly lifted his hands and wrung them together in the hard stress of his contending emotions. His grotesque vizard was upturned appealingly to the darkening sky, and he uttered a deep sigh.
The Cherokee girl, with a sudden look of appalled discernment on her face, stepped back abruptly in affright, then stood in the shadows of the denser stalks of corn, all writhen and twisted about her, and gazed through the deepening dusk at the effigy.
In this crisis, this emotional revulsion of loyalty to his officer and affection to his friend, Callum would not have grudged the sacrifice had he rushed out blindly in the night and by mischance revealed himself to Indian horsemen and certain capture, if it would not also entail the success of their treachery in decoying Everard to his death.
“Eh, gude God—he maunna come—he maunna ride at a’ the nicht,” he said aloud in a strained, poignant voice, all oblivious of the Indian girl, who still stood hidden in the dusk and the tall stalks of the maize, and silently, breathlessly, stared.
Much accomplished as she had known the Ancient Warrior to be, not even his vaunting biographer, the “second man,” had ever claimed that he spoke English.
The poor Ancient Warrior! His head drooped quite low, despite the arrogance of the expression of his vizard. There was something in his eyes that scalded them, for the Highlander was still very young, and had been gently reared in a household of sisters; and his great proficiency in the use of the broadsword, which made him so valued a soldier, was superimposed upon simple, tender-hearted, ingleside habitudes. In fact he must needs slip a hand up under his roomy vizard to wipe off the very genuine tears which were burning his cheek—not that he acknowledged these tears, no, not even to himself.
“Hegh, sirs,” he exclaimed, “this singeing reek is fair blindin’ me!”
As he spoke a new thought struck him. He lifted his head once more and snuffed the odor of the distant burning woods.
It was dark now, quite dark. The color of the cloud and the mountain had blended indissolubly in densest invisibility. Not a star was alight in the sky. Only to one standing in the cornfield, hardly a yard away, and with a discernment keenly whetted by previous sight and accurate knowledge of the surrounding objects, could aught have been perceptible as Callum straightened himself, and turning, looked carefully around him.
“The bit lassock ha’ flitted awa’,” he said, quite satisfied.
But close at hand, still screened by the darkness and the tangled growth, she watched the Ancient Warrior fling his vizard into the peas, strip off his buckskin shirt and leggings, and emerge in the kilt and plaid of one of the Highlanders of the escort. With the quick, keen wits of her race she made no doubt that here was the wicked renegade who had incurred the displeasure of the splendid red sun-god of a captain, and who was falsely reputed to be lurking in hiding at Talassee.
Callum, without a moment’s hesitation, struck off in a long, rapid stride through the corn. Silently, stealthily, she followed him—not like a shadow, for not even a shadow could follow thus through the densities of that dark night.