A spectre of power

IT so chanced that Eve, with all her primeval curiosity, dwelt in the Cherokee town of Great Tellico. Hence came disaster. To the inquisitiveness of the woman it was always imputed, although the undisciplined heart of man, the turbulent impulses of ambition, and the serpentine supersubtlety of a covetous political scheme were potent elements. Little, indeed, such as she might seem concerned with matters of high import. From afar, unindividualized among scores of the other subservient Cherokee women standing on the banks of the glittering Tennessee River, she had watched the approach of the herald of the embassy. A Choctaw Indian he was revealed as he ran holding broadly outstretched in each hand the great white wing of a swan, streaked with symbolic lines of white clay. The headmen of Tellico, the warriors of note, and the “beloved men” swiftly assembled in the “beloved square” to greet the arrival of the ambassador himself, and with no presentiment of personal significance in the event, she beheld the entry of the splendidly bedight Choctaw chief, Mingo Push-koosh.

Through the forests he had elected to come, and as he advanced with that wonderful, running gait of the Choctaw Indian, who could outwind, it was said in that day, a swift horse, he sustained impassively the eager, fixed gaze of the hundreds of Cherokees assembled in his honor.

The iconoclast, who was not born yesterday, was here and there in the crowd, and had a word of covert scoffing at his neglect of the great advantages of water carriage afforded by the numerous fine rivers of the Cherokee country; for the Choctaws had but little familiarity with navigation, owing to the few and very limited streams of their own region, and notoriously, of all nations of Indians, they could not swim.

Envy, however, could hardly spare a fling at so imperious a figure as the Mingo presented as he stood in the “beloved square” and delivered in rapid, fervid, poetic diction his oration of greeting to the headmen of Tellico. The afternoon sunlight glittered on the silver wrist-plates on his muscular, bare arms, his gorget and “earbobs” of the same metal, and a half dozen strands of the glossily white, fresh-water pearls of the region, exceedingly large and regularly shaped, which hung about the neck of his white, dressed doeskin hunting-shirt. His head was not polled after the fashion of the Cherokees, and his hair grew thick and long. A great cluster of scarlet flamingo feathers stood high in the midst of the straight, black locks, and he wore a broad, silver band on the backward slant of his forehead, artificially flattened thus in infancy, according to the tribal custom. His leggings and moccasins were also scarlet. He bore no arms except a pair of handsome, silver-mounted pistols in his embroidered belt.

The gentle breeze carried his full, rich, guttural tones to the uttermost outskirts of the crowd, and suddenly it was swayed by a new sensation and a straining of necks to see. For although the Choctaws beyond all tribes were most addicted to the punctilio of ceremonial observances, and scorned and resisted innovation, the voice which followed his words, substituting the familiar Cherokee equivalents, was the voice of no Indian interpreter. It was suave and fluent and easy of comprehension, but now and again an idiom occurred, a method of construction essentially French. For beside the Mingo, and in front of his escort of a dozen Choctaw braves, stood a glittering object, a white man, a French officer in full uniform, and with his hair curled and plaited and powdered.

The headmen of Tellico, all decorously listening to the ambassador, all respectfully gazing upon his bright animated face, as he declaimed his plea for welcome and his pleasure in beholding them, could not altogether cloak their surprised interest and covert glances at this resplendent apparition in the lowly functions of an interpreter. It was a relief when Push-koosh openly alluded to his companion, and he himself repeated in Cherokee the explanation of his appearance in this capacity, and they were free to let their eyes rest unrestrainedly upon him.

In his clear, ringing, military enunciation, he stated that the official Choctaw interpreter with whom they had set forth on the long journey from Fort Condé de la Mobile had sickened by the way, and sinking very low they had been obliged to strangle him, death being inevitable. But they had left his body on a scaffold out of reach of wild animals, whither the official “bone-picker” should be sent on their return to the southern country to perform the last sad rites of the Choctaw religion (which seems to have had few rites other than these frightful funeral observances). For these reasons they were fain to crave the indulgence of the great Cherokee chiefs for appearing without that essential functionary, an interpreter, since the lieutenant, Jean Marie Edouard Bodin de Laroche, was but scantily acquainted with the charming Cherokee language, so musical and of so elegant a construction, and Mingo Push-koosh, to his infinite regret, had of it no knowledge save a few scattered phrases.

The discerning and thoughtful Tanaesto, standing in the group of brilliantly arrayed Cherokee headmen, silently eyeing them both, noted naught significant in the face of the Mingo as the untoward fate of the strangled interpreter was recounted. This assistance in shuffling off the mortal coil would have been to the Choctaw a matter of course and a national custom. But Tanaesto knew that the white man was not used to so summary a disposition of the inconvenient dying. He was subject, like all the Catholic French, to many stringent religious restrictions, chiefly pertaining to the precise method in which he might take life, and although he looked as stanch as steel, and as glittering, his face was young and bland and as unmoved as if he were reciting a fiction,—which indeed he was! The heart of Tanaesto weighed very light with the thought,—there had been no interpreter to die.

“My brother,” he said in a low voice to Colonnah, to test his joyful suspicion, “why does a French officer speaking but indifferent Cherokee come to us with a Choctaw embassy without an interpreter from the governor of Louisiana?”

The wary Colonnah replied instantly. “That the Choctaw embassy may go back no wiser in certain things than the French officer may desire.”

The disclosure of a scheme within a scheme was thus promised. The series of notable successes which the Cherokees had achieved in 1760, in their war against the British, had been nullified in the campaign of the succeeding year by the inability of the French to convey to them adequate ammunition at the crisis of their final defeat. Doubtless some new plan was now imminent, some fresh attempt in contemplation to aid them to throw off the British yoke. Tanaesto’s heart leaped at the thought, although a solemn treaty of peace had just been signed at Charlestown with the Royal Governor of South Carolina, and a deputation of Cherokee chiefs now, in the early spring of 1762, were on the way to England as guests invited to visit his majesty King George in London.[1]

The craft of the Indians rendered craft difficult to disguise, and Tanaesto could but wonder if Mingo Push-koosh knew or suspected aught of the limitations of his powers or the secrets of his mission thus withheld from him.

His fine voice died away at last on the bland air; the oratorical display in which the Indians all delighted and the Choctaws so much excelled had been elaborately exploited; the stir of the wind, the lapsing currents of the river, were barely audible in the silence that seemed still to vibrate with the pulsings of his eloquent periods.

Then another voice arose, deep, full, impressive, as Moy Toy, the great chief of Tellico, pronounced the stereotyped sentences of welcome and protestations of a desire of friendship.

The Choctaw responded sonorously, “Aharattle-la phena chemanumbole!”[2] (I shall firmly shake hands with your discourse.) Whereupon Moy Toy, with eagle feathers upon his head and a splendid garb of feather-woven fabrics, advanced and grasped with both hands the Choctaw’s arm around the wrist; then seized him anew about the elbow; and again with the like fervent pressure around the arm close to the shoulder, as being near the heart. He drew back from the visitor for one silent moment. Then he waved a great fan of eagle feathers above the head of the ambassador, the plumes stroking him gently, and his formal reception was complete.

The Choctaw turned smilingly to the crowd, which was presently in motion dispersing along the river bank and among the scattered dwellings of the town. The official group of headmen had broken up into informal knots, and among them Push-koosh moved with a suave but princely arrogation, as tolerating the adulation which was equally his custom and his expectation. He had several claims to special consideration, of none of which was he oblivious, and all of which exerted a marked influence upon his personality. He enjoyed a certain distinction because of his well-known acuteness, his employment in the French interest, his war record, and his undoubted courage, which was the more noted because the Choctaws were not always considered brave; for although fighting furiously in defense of their own territory, they were accounted half-hearted and even timorous in invasion and aggression. Moreover, he had much family influence, having four elder brothers, all noted warriors, who championed his every plan and took that prideful, solicitous, censorious, half-paternal account of him characteristic of the fraternal senior, and often resented and ill-requited by the sophisticated Benjamins even of civilized tribes. To this simple trait of family affection is doubtless due the name by which he was known; for throughout his life and to the day of his death he was called Push-koosh, “Baby.” If he had any other name, it is not of record in the history of his times, in which, although cruel as death, hard as steel, and cunning as craft itself, this Choctaw warrior always incongruously appears as “Prince Baby,” Mingo Push-koosh.

The suavity and politic amiability of the carriage of the French toward the savage, which had so marked an influence on the earlier stages of the development of this country, were never more definitely illustrated than in the face of the young officer, Laroche. Its intelligence, its alertness, the military arrogance in the pose of the head, rendered the sudden, bright softness of his smile as flattering as a personal tribute. From an athletic point of view, his slender, erect, sinewy figure coerced the respect of his hosts, and in securing their friendship and confidence, he had a great advantage in his very tolerable command of the Cherokee language. His linguistic accomplishments were already considerable, but before he left Fort Condé de la Mobile, he was set to work under the instruction of the official interpreter, by the order of his superior officer, and he had acquired a colloquial facility as a military duty with the diligence which he would have manifested in mastering military theories and tactical problems. He talked continually, with much ease and good-fellowship, and a sort of elastic, volatile gayety. But he showed a deeply emotional impressionability. He manifested great and genuine pleasure in the aspect of the country. He gazed long and silently upon the azure summits and infinite lengths of the Great Smoky Mountains, as they received the last suffusion of the red, western sunlight like a benediction, and glowed to purer, higher, finer phases of color, becoming densely purple, then delicately amethystine, then all transparent and roseate. As they grew so crystalline of effect as to realize to the imagination the splendid jeweled luminosities of the Apocalyptic jasper, he caught his breath, exclaiming, “Nanne-Yah! Nanne-Yah!” (The mountains of God!) He declared to his entertainers that in Old France he was born near mountains such as these (for he was not of the Canadian French, who since the days of Iberville had so heavily recruited the ranks of the soldiery in Louisiana), and that he had no doubt that this mutual nativity to the heights was the reason why he already felt toward them as to brothers. Yet he was not bent upon flattery; for he was alone with Push-koosh when he said again and again, as they walked beside the Tennessee River, and he noted the swift flow of its currents all bedight in red and gold under the sunset sky, “Ookka chookoma intaa!” (How the beautiful water glides along!)

He broke presently from the pensive contemplation of its charms and stopped short with a crisp ringing cry, “Holà! là! là!” Push-koosh, glancing about for the cause of this excitement, perceived at a little distance some Cherokee youths, who were leaping from the heights of a craggy eminence and diving into the rippling depths with a temerity and facility alike admirable. But Push-koosh had no affinity with amphibian traits, being himself, in common with the rest of his tribe, unable to swim. He resented the interest and approval which the Frenchman accorded the divers, sundry of whom were now breasting the current with great speed, strength, and skill, and declared that it was beneath his ambassadorial dignity to waste the time in watching a half score specimens of the Cherokee Ka-noona (bullfrog), as they called the creature in their jargon, swim a race. He could not wait for this! Did the officer not see that the fires of split cane were already alight in the great state-house, whither they must at once repair to drink of the cacina (“the black drink”) with the headmen, as became visitors of distinction? Nevertheless, as they resumed their progress, Push-koosh himself, with the interest which a man of an active, outdoor life must needs feel in athletic feats, glanced again and again over his shoulder at the expert divers.

“I wonder they don’t drown!” he said at last sincerely. Then perhaps equally sincerely, “I wish they would!”

“Mon tendre Bébé!” cried the mercurial Frenchman in delight. The incongruity daily illustrated between the cruel, savage traits of the chief and his gentle, infantile sobriquet was of an unceasing and engaging drollery to Laroche’s mind, and doubtless often proved of service in keeping amicable relations between them.

Wending their way through the scattered dwellings of the town, and skirting the rows of log cabins on each side of the “beloved square,” they approached the state-house or rotunda hard by, built on the summit of a high, artificial mound of earth. The circuit of the fifteen Cherokee towns[3] burned by Colonel Grant, commanding the British forces, in the punitive measures following his victory at Etchoee the previous year, the Indians being powerless to resist, as their ammunition was exhausted, did not extend so far as Tellico Great, and therefore its aspect was as before the war, save indeed for the tokens of the prowess of the Cherokees themselves—the great dismantled Fort Loudon, still standing a massive, lonely shadow in the distance, which they had blockaded and reduced, massacring the garrison, and here and there down the river the stark chimneys of the burned dwellings of the murdered British colonists. A white glimmer stole out of the tall, narrow portal of the conical state-house, which showed dark and solid against the ethereal shadows of the atmosphere. For the blue dusk had fallen on the enchanted land. The wooded mountains loomed dim and sombre on the clear horizon; the encompassing primeval forests were thronged with glooms; the river was now a gray shadow, and now an elusive, silver glister; the many lowly roofs of the dwellings of the Indian town were dully glimpsed here and there in the light that flickered out through the open doors from hearthstones all aglow; and as the officer paused on the high mound at the portal of the state-house, and looked back over the clare-obscure of the unaccustomed scene, he caught the scintillations of a star a-glitter in the pallid expanse of the pearly skies. It was like a signal to him. Aldebaran! how long since he had seen it, poised over a craggy mountain summit, sending its brilliant, red lustres down through the fringes of the evergreen pine. Not thus, not thus had he seen it since the star and he were together at home! It was like the sudden greeting of a friend in a far and foreign land. He responded instantly as to a personal appeal. He turned suddenly and airily kissed his hand, the brilliant star shattered into a thousand stars among the tears in his eyes. Push-koosh, accustomed to ebullitions of his emotional, susceptible nature, gave him but one glance of superficial surprise, and together they entered the dome-like building. The red clay walls of its interior were illumined by the white light of the burning split canes, while the dim, blue scene beneath the home-star lay outside in the darkness.

Only for one moment did Laroche realize the poignancy of exile, although the homesick pang for the recollection of his kindred and his far-distant birthplace was supplemented by another hardly less acute, with a spurious domiciliary sense, for the scenes at the fort, his quarters, the presence of his brother officers. The more valid cause of troublous thought and sense of solitude,—that he was apart from them all, alone among wild and bloody savages, the Choctaws of the French alliance hardly less to be feared in their alert dissimulation and treacherous habit than the open ferocity of the Cherokees of the British faction, the only man of his country in a hundred miles of these dense and sombre wildernesses, in a torn and distracted region subject to a national enemy,—these practical considerations did not smite him at all. Even his æsthetic griefs were all forgotten in another instant, and with his swift, volatile transitions he was absorbed in the interior of the building. It was large enough to accommodate an audience of several hundred people, and ample illumination was afforded by the split cane, which, arranged in lines and serpentine convolutions along a low mound of earth in the centre of the clay floor and burning only at one end, was consumed very gradually, and would furnish light for a considerable time. The cane gave out but little smoke, ethereal, hazy, vaguely blue, mounting into the shadowy vault of the lofty dome above the heads of the crowd. Around the interior of the building, some four feet distant from the wall and supporting the unseen timbers of the roof, was a series of columns, and in the space between this colonnade and the wall was a continuous divan or bench, deftly made of cane, artificially whitened, and extending all around the circular structure. Here on the further side, opposite the door, were seated the headmen of the town, while those of lower grade were ranged according to rank, to the right and to the left. The more insignificant or younger tribesmen stood in the open spaces nearest the entrance, and seated on the floor on either side of the narrow portal were groups of women, admitted in lenient indulgence of feminine curiosity.

The two strangers were conducted as visitors of distinction to seats, one on either side of Moy Toy. The barbarous Choctaw, with his quick, racial adaptation to all the minutiæ of ceremonial, peculiarly elaborate in its observance, with his grace, his fitting words, his proud yet affable demeanor, was hardly more acceptable to the Indian scheme of etiquette than the Frenchman, foreign, white, strange, though he was. There was something about this officer that appealed singularly to the vivid imagination of the Cherokees,—the silken softness of his courtesy, his easily stirred and obvious sentimental emotions, his volatile pleasure in the passing moment, his quick changeableness in every current of the air, and yet incongruously, a certain bellicose keenness, and steadiness, and hardness in the glance of his bland eyes. He was like a military butterfly, if one could but attribute the potentiality of danger and venom and antagonism to so aerial and brilliant a flutterer. His very gestures riveted their attention as he expressively shrugged his shoulders or lifted his eyebrows in gay surprise, or contracted them in frowning doubt. These eyebrows were dark and distinctly marked, and he had long, dark lashes, but his eyes were of a light brown tint such as gravel shows when clear water runs above a sunlit channel. He wore his own light brown hair in lieu of a fashionable wig, but the long queue and the curls on the temples were heavily powdered, which was of complimentary significance; for it was by no means the habit of the French officers to submit to the gêne of such vanities while on the march in the wilderness, although in New Orleans the Marquis de Vaudreuil had long sought to maintain some state, since indeed he had first succeeded Bienville as governor of Louisiana, and fostered manners of ceremony, as he afterwards did in Canada, whither he was now transferred. The suggestion that Laroche was charged with a secret mission within a mission added importance to his personality, which Push-koosh obviously resented, now and again assertively flaunting his few Cherokee phrases, even in addressing his quasi interpreter, and more than once essaying some very queer French. The men looked at the officer with intense curiosity, and the women, as ever addicted to novelty, with open-eyed admiration, as he smoked the “friend-pipe” while he sat beside Moy Toy, who in his finest otter-skin robe was all a-glitter with many swaying fringes of “roanoke,” with a broad, gleaming collar of white swan’s down, and with streaks of white clay across his forehead. If Laroche dreamed of the approaching ordeal, he awaited it with the calm of a philosopher and the courage of a soldier.

Presently there entered two “beloved men,” each bearing a conch shell high in the right hand. They first crossed the apartment, one going to the right, the other to the left, singing mystic words in a low tone as they came; then once more taking a transverse course, they met in front of Moy Toy and the two guests of distinction, to whom they presented, with both hands, the two shells full of the so-called consecrated beverage. As these were lifted, with both hands, to the lips of the guests, the two “beloved men” broke forth with a sonorous bass note, “Yo!” then with a tenor effect they sang the syllable, “He!” prolonged to the utmost possibility of holding the breath, during which sound the visitor must continue to drink the cacina. It required, perhaps, all the strength of mind and stomach which the French officer could muster, but he did not desist nor lower the shell till the gasping “Wah!” placed a period to his torments.

Others then partook of the black drink in turn, and presently amidst the wreaths of blue smoke and the white flare of the burning cane, while the earthen drums began to beat sonorously, sinuous, leaping shadows were flung across the hard, clay floor and on the red walls of the circular building; for the eagle-tail dance was in progress in the presence of the honored guests, the great fans of feathers waving high in the uplifted hands of the agile warriors, as they sprang elastically into the air, exhibiting many intricate steps and difficult attitudes.

These solemn politico-religious ceremonies of welcome concluded, the Cherokees gave themselves over to various devices to amuse and entertain their guests, for this was a characteristic trait of their hospitality. There would be horse-races on the morrow and dances again, but without significance either political or religious, and long and elaborate feastings, for they could set forth a table with “fifty different viands.” The Cherokees had not at this period begun the downward course,—the relinquishment of their national customs, primitive manufactures, religion, method of government, habits of extreme cleanliness,—the wholesale degeneration which seems inevitable before new standards, new customs, new religion, a new nationality, can be adjusted to a people in a state of transition. The night being as yet but little spent, one of their ancient pantomimes[4] was essayed for the entertainment of the guests; and during its performance the frequency of the ringing laugh of the French officer, and the grunt of approval of the Choctaw chief, brought the same expression of gratified complacency and chastened thankfulness to the anxious faces of Moy Toy and the other headmen of Tellico Great that sophisticated hosts now wear upon the success of an entertainment upon which important interests depend. It began with a surprise. Suddenly a bulky shadow fell within the doorway,—the women clustering about the entrance shrieked in a sort of delighted affright and scuttled aside. The heavy, guttural laugh of the Indian—a merry soul at his sports—fell iteratively on the air. A bear had entered, clumsy, heavily shuffling, snuffing tentatively about, evidently to be imagined as ranging the woods, and with now and then a glance over his shoulder to see another bear ponderously lumbering in. So close was the imitation of the ursine gait and ungainliness, so crafty the disguise in the beast’s paws and hide, distended to full proportions by concealed wooden hoops, that one might have believed the manifestation genuine but for a lamenting “stage-whisper,” as it were, delivered in plaintive Cherokee, touching a bit of the burning cane which had lodged upon the slant of a too inquisitive snout nosing about the fire. It was hastily brushed off by one of the young tribesmen of the audience, all of whom laughed gleefully at the mischance and the helpless plight of the singed Bruin.

And now entered two hunters in full sylvan array. The bears skulked, chiefly among the audience; the nimrods stalked them; the bears fled; the hunters pursued; the beasts turned at bay,—when the hunters themselves fled frantically, amidst howls of derision from the younger people. This mockery seemed to restore the nerve of the hunters, who presently returned to the effort and with such ardor that they finally “treed” the bears, who nimbly climbed the sleek, round columns that supported the roof of the edifice. Thence they were pulled down forcibly, first by one foot, then the others; at last all fell, hunters and bears together, in an undiscriminated heap on the floor, where after a terrific mock struggle, the bears were dispatched by the expedient of cutting their throats, with a vast effusion of blood and howls of remonstrance from the beasts, expressed in excellent Cherokee.

The two vanquished animals as early as practicable crept out of their skins, left weltering in the blood on the floor, and mingled with their admirers in the audience, laughing a great deal and discussing the play:—how the struggle might have been prolonged but for this and that; how one bear, according to his own account, need not have been killed at all, so expert a beast was he, except that he had yielded himself at last a sacrifice to the popular entertainment; and how one hunter could have easily slain this same boastful bear at the very outset by a single blow on the head, to which his more than bearish awkwardness exposed him, but was moved to spare him and thus extend his career, also from the disinterested motive of promoting and conserving the sport of the indulgent audience.

It was all indeed very cleverly done, as even Laroche thought, who had seen pantomimes in Paris, and Push-koosh manifested as much hilarious good will as the Choctaw “Prince Baby” ever permitted himself to experience. The French officer, however, despite his absorption in the histrionic display, had not been unmindful of the notables in the audience either in Paris or here. More than once to-night his gaze was caught by a pair of eyes large and gentle, luminous as a deer’s and as untamed in expression, appropriately set in the face of one of the Cherokee women. She was hardly in her first youth, although she seemed singularly fresh, alert, spirited, enjoying the pantomime with childish delight. She was evidently not less than twenty-two or three years of age, and he being rather elderly himself,—some twenty-eight years,—thought this well advanced in life and an age of wisdom. She was slender and, like all the Cherokees, of notable height, and when the crowd was out of the state-house he saw her again, glimmering with willowy grace in the moonlight. The distorted, gibbous sphere of pearl was high above the violet mountains and the gray and misty valleys, and he thought the woman beautiful and picturesquely placed in the solemn and splendid environment of the ranges, for he was accustomed to the bizarre details of savage raiment. The skirt of her tunic-like garb of white, dressed doeskin reached a trifle below the knee, and she wore the long, white, doeskin buskin, fitting closely, that came half as high; around each leg, below the knee, was tied a soft, dressed otter-skin, hung with glittering, metal “bell buttons,” that tinkled as she walked. Her hair, anointed and glossy in the moonlight, was tied and dressed high on the head, and was stuck full of the quills of the white pigeon. Her head was clearly defined against the dark blue of the instarred sky, as she threw it backward and gazed at the moon as if to verify some calculation of time, its light full in her lustrous eyes. Then she turned, and running swiftly past, disappeared in the violet shadows.

He did not soon think of her again. She was only a picturesque element in this state of quaint barbarity, a momentary incident in the scenes of an evening overcrowded with impressive grotesqueries. He had no idea to whom Mingo Push-koosh alluded when he said suddenly, “Eho in-ta-na-ah!” (The woman has mourned the appointed time!)

The two French emissaries were alone now; they had been conducted to a building called the stranger-house, designed for the accommodation of casual guests, and which was assigned to them to be their headquarters during their stay. It too was furnished with the row of cane divans around the walls, which served as benches during the day and as beds at night. The house was the usual cabin of the Indians, built without nails, or a hinge, or a bit of metal in any sort, yet “genteel and convenient and so very secure, as if it were to screen them from an approaching hurricane,” says an old British trader, who lived for many years in one of them. The posts were of the most durable wood and deeply set in the ground, the timbers were accurately fitted to one another, the wall plates, rafters, and eave boards had been all stanchly bound together with the elastic splints of white oak or hickory, and with strips of wet buffalo hide, which tighten and harden as they dry. A partition separated the room from another, wherein was disposed the Choctaw escort. Within and without, the building was whitewashed with the coarse, marly clay of the region, and the walls sent back with responsive, silver glimmers the moonlight, falling through the narrow door and into the face of the officer, who had stretched himself at length in full uniform on the divan, to rest a bit before divesting himself of his military finery and disposing himself to slumber. The ceremonies and excitements of the evening, following a day of exertion and hard marching, had resulted in making his eyelids heavy.

“Omeh!” (Yes!) he assented, hardly hearing the remark, and answering at random.

Push-koosh sat upright on the opposite side of the room as if he could know no fatigue, and gazed loweringly across at the Frenchman.

“Che-a-sa-ah!” (I am displeased with you!) the Choctaw hissed out. “What makes your lying tongue so strong?”

The French lieutenant roused himself. “Mon cher enfant,” he declared, “I know you consider a lie no disgrace, it being your daily food, but I have told you once, and I tell you again, that if you throw it into my teeth I will beat that flat head of yours flatter than it is!”

“You don’t even know of whom I am speaking—you answer like a child!” said Push-koosh in a mollified tone.

Something had come to him out of the night, the moonlight, the soft lustre of dark eyes,—something as intangible as the flickering illusions of the heat lightning, as inexplicable as the fleeting wind, as tenuous as the wing of a moth,—a fancy!—and he must needs talk of it. Therefore he would concede. He would forego his resentment for this cavalier inattention. He smiled as if he had been in jest.

“Unta?” (Well?) said Laroche interrogatively.

“Eho in-ta-na-ah!” Push-koosh repeated.

The versatile Frenchman was sore smitten with sleep. “What woman?” he said drowsily. “What mourning?”

“Her husband is dead! The Muscogee killed him three years ago!” said Push-koosh, with stalwart satisfaction in the fact. “And she has mourned the appointed time. You could have seen, but that you are a blind French mole, that her hair is no longer flowing loose, but is anointed and tied and dressed full of white quills!”

Sleep suddenly quitted its hold on the French lieutenant. He lifted himself alertly on one elbow and looked animatedly at Push-koosh. “Eho chookoma!” (The beautiful woman!) he cried with enthusiasm. “Not so much of a mole as you think! Pas si bête, mon bijou. Pas cette espèce de bête!!”

He shook his wise head with emphasis and laid himself down again. Push-koosh glowered at him with a sudden, angry fear. This fervor of admiration on the part of the French lieutenant boded ill to that ethereal fancy which had fallen about the Choctaw chief as lightly as a gossamer web of the weaving spider, and now held him like a network of steel chains. He said abruptly, with seeming irrelevance and his infantile candor, “I wish you had killed yourself last week!”

For the mercurial Frenchman had often seizures of deep despondency, in which he sometimes announced with sincerity that he designed to place a period to his existence. Such a crisis had supervened on the journey hither, in which, however, Push-koosh was concerned as little as might be. True, there had been some peculiarly irritating incidents in their relations; they baited each other, and bickered on slight occasion, and argued violently on untenable grounds, for which neither cared an iota, and conducted themselves generally as young men do when constrained to work together with but scant personal sympathy. But Laroche’s discontent had a far more serious source. He was disappointed of the distinction which he had hoped to attain in this mission.

Apart from the diplomatic and secret details with which he was intrusted, and the check that he was expected to maintain upon the loyalty, or rather the suspected disloyalty of Push-koosh, whose personal presence was necessary to reconcile certain ancient enmities between the Choctaws and Cherokees, and thus facilitate and set forth the special values of the French alliance, Laroche was charged with an affair of professional importance which Push-koosh imagined was the only reason that he had been ordered to accompany the Choctaw embassy,—so crafty were the methods of the French with the crafty savages. Laroche’s open instructions contemplated the investigation of certain obstructions in the Rivière des Chéraquis (since called the Great Tennessee), which had hitherto proved an insuperable bar to the continuous transportation of goods from New Orleans to the Cherokee Nation by means of that great waterway. Not trinkets, the Indians craved, not paints, nor beads, nor even cutlery, but those costly treasures of arms, powder, and lead which the Cherokees valued beyond all things, because without constant and adequate supplies of such munitions of war they could never hope to take the field again, eventually throw off the yoke of the British, and keep foothold on the land which was their own, and which they loved with all the fervent devotion of the mountaineer to his native heights. Therefore they had hitherto listened to the counsels of the French, who were now especially eager to meet all expectations, perhaps because they were still involved themselves in hostilities with the English elsewhere, perhaps because they still cherished that old scheme of so many visionaries—from the logical plans of Iberville, futilely projected so long ago, to the subtle intrigues of the German Jesuit, Christian Priber, only twenty-five years previous—to invade the Carolinas and Georgia at the head of twelve thousand warriors of confederated Indian tribes.

But the transportation of supplies to the Cherokees by pack-train overland was impracticable, since the intervening country was held by the hostile Chickasaws, ever devoted to the British, and the French had still a lively recollection of their defeats by this intrepid tribe at the towns of Ash-wick-boo-ma, where D’Artaguette met his cruel fate, and Ackia, the scene of the discomfiture of Bienville. Therefore in the Cherokee War, a large pettiaugre laden with warlike stores was sent up the Mississippi from New Orleans, armed with swivel guns to repress the Chickasaws, who in flying squads nevertheless harassed the progress of the boat by a sharp musketry delivered from the river bluffs. This danger passed, the expedition failed for a different reason. It returned bootless, having abandoned the attempt on account of the insurmountable obstructions to navigation in the Cherokee River.

The French authorities at New Orleans had good reason to doubt the report of the extent of these difficulties, for hitherto their boats had ascended occasionally to Great Tellico,—perhaps in a different stage of the water. They ordered a survey of the locality with a view of such removal of the reefs as might afford a practicable channel at all seasons,—a second earnest effort to meet the needs of the Cherokees, with a systematic and continuous supply of stores, being in contemplation.

Laroche, who had served as a lieutenant of engineers as well as of artillery, had been charged with the duty of removing the obstruction if practicable, and a pettiaugre laden with such means as were deemed fitted to further this design had been dispatched up the Mississippi and Ohio in advance of the expedition overland from Fort Tombecbé to meet him at the point where the navigation of the Cherokee River became difficult. The young officer had expected to encounter some reefs, a goodish stretch of rapids perhaps, a few dangerous, troublesome rocks. He found vast whirlpools, and endless vistas of maddened waters, and shoals, shoals, shoals,—twenty miles of muscle shoals, three miles wide. Even Push-koosh had cried out in amaze at the phenomenon of the turbulent rapids, declaring that the devils, the hottuk ookproose, were dancing under the waters, for he had heard for ten miles the devil’s own song that they sung, tarooa ookpro’sto (the tune of the accursed one).

As Laroche realized the total impossibility of the undertaking, and saw vanishing all his hopes of distinction in this valid and valuable service, he forthwith sat down on a rock beside the rioting waters, bowed his head on his hands, and cried out to a “juste ciel” that this was really too strong, that there was no use in trying to live any longer, and that he was minded to kill himself.

Suicide is always more or less fashionable among Frenchmen. Perhaps the passionate grief of his utterance was not wholly devoid of intention. But as he lifted his dreary eyes, the animated interest and curiosity to see him take his life which the face of Push-koosh expressed effectually deterred him. The spectacle would be too delightfully gratifying to the Choctaw! The humor of the situation appealed to the mercurial French lieutenant, and the pendulum swung back again.

The thought of self-destruction had not recurred to his mind until to-night, when Push-koosh mentioned his bootless threat.

“But why, mon pauvre Bébé, mon petit chou,—why should you wish that I had killed myself?” Laroche demanded.

Push-koosh hesitated. He felt that his jealousy was a derogation, and was glad that his hasty words had not betrayed it to the officer, whom he esteemed a dull, inattentive fellow at best, continually occupied with his little idols, which he carried in a box and would let no one else touch,—his spy-glass, his spirit-level, his quadrant, and his compass, which last he declared knew the north, and without which he could not draw a map, as Push-koosh could on a gourd or a bit of bark or a stretch of clear sand,—he knew little, very little, that French officer, Laroche!

“Unta—Illet minte!” (Well—Death is coming!) the Choctaw said casually, as if he spoke generally and at random.

“Not yet! not yet!” cried the officer, remembering the diabolic tumult of the waters. “Let the devils dance! I can be merry too! I have a scheme to outwit them. A great thing, my Baby, to outwit the devils!”

Twice he paused to think of it in laying aside his sword and drawing off his coat. Push-koosh made no move toward preparing for slumber. Long after the lieutenant was still, quite still, beneath the delicately dressed and softened panther skins that sufficed for bedding on the elastic cane-wrought mattresses, Push-koosh sat upright on the couch on the opposite side of the room gazing steadfastly at him,—the long, thin figure suggested beneath the folds of the drapery of the primitive bed; the white powdered hair that had lost much of its frosty touches streaming backward, long, loose, the ends slightly curling; the eyes meekly closed; the moonlight in the white, tired, sleeping face, youthful, but grave, pensive, saddened vaguely. That was the way, perhaps, he would have looked had he taken his life as he had threatened. And Push-koosh, still intently eyeing him, wished again that he had.