III
LAROCHE, abandoned thus among the Cherokees, was in the extremity of peril. Apart from their spirit of tribal cohesion, the strongest of national sentiments, all those more intimate ties of family affection, of municipal unity, and of neighborly custom, in which they were peculiarly bound, were insistently asserted in the calamity, as the massacred braves were all of Tellico Great. When the gory figures of the unarmed, unpainted youths, still limp and warm, not yet stiffened into the starkness of death, were borne into the precincts of the town, the wailing of the women and children, and the hoarse cries of fury and despair and grief of the men, filled all the bland, sunlit spaces of the morning, and were a heavy burden to the air.
It was with no definite sense of the wisest course that Laroche had not moved from the portal of the great state-house whence he had beheld Mingo Push-koosh, followed by all his braves, rush across the “beloved square” to the pettiaugre and accomplish the destruction of the powder. He was stunned, bewildered, as by the fall of a thunderbolt. Only afterward he realized that he had no choice. The craft still lay at her moorings, but his single strength could not have sufficed to float her, even if in the confusion he had escaped. He had a shrewd surmise of the secret source of the wrath of the Mingo, and he doubted if the jealousy of the Choctaw, once unleashed and dipped in blood, were less formidable than the wild frenzy of the Cherokees. Moreover, at their freest pace, speeding for their lives, he knew that he could never have sustained the gait of the marching Choctaws, and must eventually have fallen by the wayside or lagged to certain capture.
He began to appreciate, as he stood, an aspect in the accident of his posture which his craft recognized as savoring of more wisdom than he could have attained by his own mental processes. His isolation implied that he was no accessory to the crimes in which the mission had terminated. The desertion of him by the Choctaws augured scant value of his functions in the embassy, and still less friendship for him personally,—his safety, indeed, they disregarded. He began to hope preposterously, as his heart swung into more normal palpitations, that his nationality, his secret mission within the Franco-Choctaw mission, his obvious freedom from any conspiracy with the Indian ambassador who had so conspicuously abused his trust, might serve to protect him.
Then he perceived suddenly that he was arguing from the probabilities on a civilized system of ratiocination. For himself, he did not love the spectacle of suffering nor the smell of blood, albeit so skilled in the designing of lines of tenailles and en crémaillère, in which men were to lay down their lives in much agony. His own development of barbarity was on a different basis and had a vocabulary quite distinct and scientific, his jargon of trou-de-loup and cheval-de-frise and chausse-trappe; and he watched with a very definite sentiment of reprehension and mental disapproval, as well as a deep and numb despair, the approach of a half dozen fierce, lowering-eyed braves, full-armed, who stood for a moment looking up at him and then seated themselves, obviously to remain, at the base of the mound, assuming the functions of a permanent guard.
In fact, Laroche had been unobserved at first in the clamors and confusion of the disaster, the departure of the horsemen on the heels of the flying Choctaw pedestrians, the ghastly return of the young Indians of the massacre, who had gone forth with all the imponderable lightness of life and joy in the morning and now were brought back in weight with death and woe. The first vague suggestion of the alleviation of the public calamity came with the stern thought of vengeance and its opportunity. In that moment the eye of one of the headmen chanced to be lifted to Laroche. The guard was dispatched in an instant, and whatever might have been the issue of an effort to escape, the possibility was now gone forever. He began to perceive that they would take no thought of an absence of conspiracy. He was one of the embassy—its accredited interpreter; he was also a Frenchman, and the Cherokees were still in open alliance with the British. Moreover, he was in their power, and blood for blood was ever the Cherokee rule.
For a time he made no effort to appeal to his guards, even by a glance or a gesture. Hour after hour passed away. He heard the vague sounds, in the distance, of the chanting of the funeral songs; he perceived, undistinguished, colorless, meaningless, like shadows through a dark glass, the passing of the funeral processions here and there around the houses of the dead. Again and again there smote on the air wild outbursts of the protesting woe of the mourning, the note of incredulity, the appeal against injustice, and that pathetic plaint of a heart all bruised and tender—and yet in a sense he heard naught. He was conscious of a degree of quietude when the actual details of the interment were in progress within the houses, for with the Cherokees the dead were always buried deep, deep under the floor of their own homes, and a sense of extreme fatigue ached in his muscles. He realized how long he had maintained a standing posture there without a motion—a sentinel who habitually mounted guard his eight hours out of the twenty-four would hardly have been capable of such resolution. As his eye met that of one of the guards, he saw in the inexpressive face of the Indian a sort of appreciation of his strength of will that coerced the endurance of the flesh, and at last he spoke:—
“Moy Toy cannot think me to blame—why does he guard me here?”
They all gazed at him with a sort of concentrated fury. The racial hatred against the white man—ineradicable, unappeasable, now and again only pretermitted for a time in favor of some special individual—showed in their strongly marked, savage features, with the primitive passions of the rule of force and the thirst for revenge painted upon them in a breadth of expression that pigments could not emulate.
“Blood for blood,” one of them said, and spat upon the ground.
“If I were one of the Choctaws—yes! But I am French. I have done naught. They have deserted me. I am entrapped here. It would please them that you should shed my blood.”
There was a momentary silence under this logic. Then another of the Indians, always of a far greater intellectual pride than might be readily imagined, and keen and quick in argument, came to the spokesman’s rescue. He was the man whose eyes had applauded the prisoner’s endurance—a mere tribesman, of the rank and file only; he had a broad, animated countenance, a high, aquiline nose, a long, upper lip, and a distinct accentuation of the lines of his features. He wore the scanty raiment of the lower grades of the Indian, but the careful and elaborate tattooing of blue, red, and green indelible paints disposed about his limbs, in which he must have spent much arduous labor, had almost the effect of long and elaborately embroidered hose and gloves. He had a shirt of buckskin, devoid of beads or ornaments, save a fringe about its edge, but which seemed remarkably plain in contrast with the decorations of his arms and legs. He leaned upon a gun of very doubtful intentions, unlike the smart, British “Brown Bess,” with which the tribe, however, was generally armed. With a vivacious air, he demanded of the Frenchman if he had forgotten “Ablaham” so soon.
“Abraham?” said Laroche vaguely.
“The white man’s poor memory! It was his treaty he forgot, usually, but now he had forgotten too his religion. He had forgot Ablaham—the great white chief whom he was telling Moy Toy about yesterday!”
Laroche remembered, with a pang as for a folly, an effort at the conversion of the ignorant savage. Yesterday—only yesterday!—he had sought to explain to Moy Toy the plan of salvation and to enlist his interest. He laughed aloud in bitter mirth—a short, hollow note, and then must come contrition and a mutter of prayer. Abraham and Isaac—how far away they seemed!
“But, my friend,” he said, “the injunction to shed innocent blood was for a purpose—to test the faith of the great chief; and the blood of the innocent was not exacted. I have done nothing. I only am deserted, caught here as in a trap.”
“Likewise was the ram whose blood was shed,” declared the specious Indian, his eyes flashing fire,—“caught as in a trap by the horns in a thicket. And the ram had done nothing.”
The Frenchman was fairly silenced; the others, hardly comprehending the discourse, not having burdened their minds with Abraham and his experiences, conceiving him to be an Indian agent, or in some other position near the governor of Louisiana, Georgia, or South Carolina, only discerned from the facial expression of the two men that the Cherokee’s keen wits had come off victorious in the encounter, and despite their gloom, they made shift to smile at each other in ostentatious amusement, and in derision of the purblind white man.
Laroche’s anxiety and apprehension were hardly assuaged by the recollection of the blood-offerings among the religious observances of the Cherokees, intimately connected with their system of government and warfare, which had recalled strongly to his mind associations with the Mosaic dispensation. Many minute requirements and ceremonies savored of the Hebraic ritual, and in their distortions had impressed him as survivals of actual customs, and were thus more significant than the legends found among the tribes betokening Scriptural suggestions and supposed to be the result, disjecta membra, of the teachings and traditions of Catholic truths which Cabeza de Vaca left among the Southern Indians.
Laroche sought to compose his mind. He was a soldier, and would muster all a soldier’s courage,—a Christian, whose hope was in no help of man. He would calm himself and await the worst or the best, as God should choose to send it, with the serenity of one whose life is, after all, not his own. As he stood there in the wide glare of the sun, it seemed to have grown speedily and strangely very hot. His eyes were on the mountains far away, that through the silvery, vernal mists, forever shifting, belied their stanch and massive solidities by a shimmer like some wavering, blue sea; not a breath of air was in the deep, green shadows of the darkling ranges close at hand; the river, a wide blade of steel without flaw, bore the polish of a mirror and a blinding glitter. Suddenly a cold chill struck through him. At first it crept along his spinal column, slight, insidious, vaguely shivering; then in its icy thrall he shuddered again and again; the drops that fell from his brow upon his hands were ice cold, and as he looked down, wondering, at his long, thin fingers he saw that they were blue under the nails to the first joint. Some change in his face had attracted the attention of the Indians. They were all gazing up at him in surprise, as shudder after shudder went over his features, pallid even to blueness. He instinctively put up his hand to his brow, and he found that even to his cold fingers its touch was like marble. He was obviously very near death, done with the world and with worldly pride, but he was still a soldier, and his pulses beat to a martial point of honor. He could have died with shame, albeit the spectators were but savages; for he thought this manifestation purported the subjection of fear, and that thus the staring Indians recognized it.
Averse as they were, they accounted him no coward. In truth, his stanch, compact physique and his bold spirit promised good sport at the torture, and they had discussed with one another from time to time the various details of the anguish which his strength and courage would enable him to sustain, and which sometimes weaker and fainter hearted men eluded and despoiled by dying prematurely. They could hardly explain the change in his complexion and expression of countenance, and only wondered while they looked, and presently it passed away, leaving the flesh of a ghastly, uniform pallor, flabby and listless.
But Laroche had hardly recovered his normal temperature. He was suddenly weak and tremulous. He could no longer sustain the standing posture. In another moment he would have fallen. With his winning affability and gay grace, that became his ghastly, stricken face as a wreath of flowers might a death’s head, he remarked that since they were all sitting he would take the liberty of sitting too, and ran down two or three of the grassy steps of the mound and there dropped upon the turf, half reclining, one elbow on the step above him, supporting his head in his hand, and with his limbs stretched out at length across the stairs below. The Indian guard at the foot of the mound did not stir, save that the acquaintance of “Ablaham” placed a finger ostentatiously on the trigger of his loaded gun. Laroche looked at him with a laughing sneer that taunted him to do his worst. The slug of the charge would have been too merciful.[6] There was no intention in the threat, and the Indian laughed like a roguish child detected in a bit of mischief.
The sky was reddening at last and Laroche, looking over to the far west, felt as if that incarnadined glow in the heavens was rising in his veins as the sun went down. It was not the red reflection on his face, but the blood mustering close under the skin when he again changed color. He felt it racing and rushing through his veins, ever quickening, ever wilder.
His mood changed. He had been saying to himself that it was no matter when or how painfully he died. He wished that he might see a priest—the good Père François; he caught himself hastily, remembering that piteous death of the father. Alas, when and how painfully have died many, many of the Order of Jesus, here, there, in every clime! He said to himself that he should be proud that it fell to his lot to emulate the mortuary example of those undying missionaries, that yet in the flesh died so hardily.
“Quibus dignus non erat mundus!” he declared in swelling phrase, ore rotundo.
But with the sudden surging of his fevered blood he protested. They,—God knew he wished to detract no whit from their credit,—but they were spiritual-minded men, many convent-bred, ascetic, he had almost said superstitious, solicitous for the martyr’s crown, with a talent for dying, and a positive genius for remitting to everlasting opprobrium throughout all the ages their misguided murderers.
He broke off from these reflections with a sudden, loud, hilarious laugh that echoed far through the quiet town on whose death-stricken ways the dusk was gradually descending, and brought his Indian guard to their feet with an abrupt spring, staring at him with vague wonder through the gloom.
His eyes, meeting theirs, were large, dilated, curiously bright. There seemed no recognition in them. He did not answer when they spoke, but shifting his posture slightly went on muttering to himself; his mind thus beyond the control of his will, he formulated more candor than his disciplined judgment was wont to recognize. They were spiritual-minded men, he reiterated, the Jesuit martyrs. For himself,—he was a soldier, not a martyr. Dying was the last thing a soldier should do,—and once more his foolish, frivolous laugh rang through the melancholy glooms of the bereaved town. He was not fitted to die thus,—the prey of unreasoning devils called by complaisance savages, to whom he had been sent on a mission of importance to French politics. His grave, his honorable grave, awaited him on some stricken field of battle. He had thought a hundred times how it might come,—in the rebuilding of some destroyed bridge which the enemy—peste! he always destroys the good bridges!—or perhaps in pushing a parallel closer and closer to the lines of the doomed defenses,—a ball from the chemin convert of the fort might find a vital spot. Would he shun it?—fear death?—“Je te fais mes compliments!” He stood suddenly erect and saluted. Then he collapsed upon the ground. A soldier’s hasty grave on the field of battle,—he coveted it. For shrift,—the pressure of a good comrade’s hand might bid him Godspeed. A soldier has few sins to confess. Little is required of him—he is merely a soldier—all body and heart—a mere bit of a soul! But these priests—these spiritual men—they who can profess so much, why should they fail?
A light was presently glimmering in the dusk,—clear, luminous, a pyramidal flare approaching rapidly, then pausing as in uncertainty, flickering through the blue darkness, and once more drawing near.
“The lanthorns of the burial parties,” he said, contemplating with a gentle melancholy the battlefield of his fancy. “Many a fine fellow coming to-day that must be carried to-morrow.”
Then swiftly repeating a series of measurements and mathematical calculations, he rose as the light paused at the foot of the mound and the flare of the torch fell upon the face of Moy Toy, summoned hither by the weird sound of that strange, hilarious laughter, and minded to advance the hour for the prisoner’s torture and death, since he must needs be so obtrusively merry in the face of their distresses and disasters.
Laroche recognized him vaguely, but naught of the circumstances which environed him. He lifted his voice as he pursued his train of remarks, expressing the jumble of his ideas.
“Un bastion, Moy Toy, avec un ravelin,—et une fraise d’épine ne serait pas inutile!—là,—là,—sur le bord de la rivière,—quatre-vingts toises de distance,—pour enfiler les colonnes,—la fosse,—à la portée du canon,—donnez dix-huit pieds de large au parapet,—et puis,—et puis,”—
He ran down the steps and laid his hot hand upon the arm of the Cherokee chief, who stared aghast at this manifestation of a strange distemper.
It was well for Laroche that the Cherokees did not feel it incumbent upon them to preserve the grace of consistency. If he had continued in health, he would assuredly have been put to death with tortures, in satisfaction of the iniquities of the embassy of which he was a member, but his wandering mind, his evident delirium, precluded his knowledge of his own fate, and thus robbed the torture of its choicest delight, the fear and mental misery of the victim, as well as his bodily agony. A postponement of the sentence was hastily agreed upon, and the patient, still declaiming upon the advantage of one system of fortification and contemptuously disparaging others, was gently conveyed, for he could no longer walk, to the stranger-house which he and Push-koosh had occupied, put to bed on the elastic cane-wrought mattress, and the medicine-men were summoned to exorcise this strange demon of fever which had possessed the guest.
The skill of these primitive people in the art of healing was said to be very considerable. But in this instance the Cherokee physicians found themselves at a loss. Laroche had duly absorbed the atmospheric miasma of the swampy country near Mobile and New Orleans, which, had he remained there, might have occasioned no trouble. But upon his sudden removal it instantly manifested itself in a virulent type of malarial fever, all its poison elicited by the pure, clear air of this mountain region. Hence this salubrious clime has been called “the unhealthiest country in the world” by suffering subtropical wights who would not be at rest at home and could not be well elsewhere. This theory, exploited long since those times, was not familiar to the two cheerataghe, who rattled their calabashes at the fever demon with hearty good will. They administered the varied decoctions of herbs famous as febrifuges. They repeated aloud their ancient incantations, both mandatory and contemptuous, bidding the malign spirit depart. They arrayed and painted themselves in frightful guise to terrify the fever demon, and decorated with buffalo horns and buffalo tails, they rushed roaring from right to left in front of the bed, and when this proved futile, from left to right. They subjected the patient to sudden immersion in hot water, and then in cold, and again to a steaming process, placing him in an oven-like structure of heated rocks, over which water was poured,—all without avail. The Cherokee magicians began to look very grave and ill at ease, for a dark cloud was ominously gathering on the brow of Moy Toy. All at once Moy Toy had come to covet the life of this man. It must be captured from death. He must be snatched from the already open grave. Not for the satisfaction of exacting that terrible penalty, as one of the treacherous Choctaw embassy; not for the keen delight of the spectacle of his death by torture. Any unlucky French wight captured from the Illinois country; or some helpless English body, unknown or of scant note, wandering away from a kindly colonial settlement and heard of never again; or even a stanch Indian of one of the inimical tribes,—Muscogee, Tuscarora, Seneca,—any mere man, in short, who had blood to spill, and bones to break, and nerves to writhe might furnish this sport. With this man’s death more was lost,—a subtle, keen brain, technical military knowledge, practical military experience, a tongue of wondrous craft trained in various speech, a secret cogent influence with the French authorities at New Orleans,—all calculated to subserve the Cherokees, and this a trifling kindliness would reinforce by the claims of gratitude, a claim paramount in the Indian scheme of ethics.
So overwhelmed had been the wary Moy Toy’s brain by the surprise, the fury, the grief attending the catastrophe of the massacre of his young tribesmen, that these considerations were not even dimly presented to his alert perceptions till the moment that Laroche dashed down the stairs of the mound and impetuously flung himself into his host’s arms with his delirious babble of military works and munitions of war. It was at first but a vague impression, a doubtful suggestion. The crafty Indian mind dwelt upon it in the days that came and went. Time seemed to embellish, to perfect it. And now it had become the dearest boon of fate, and the Indian could not, would not forego it. For this man could design and build a fort that could withstand a British assault! He could so dispose the Indian facilities as to enable them to defend it. He could by reason of his connection with the French government secure such munitions of war as would complete its armament. An impregnable stronghold in the wilderness, with scientifically handled artillery, could set at naught British aggression and hold the country.
Turned in whatever light, the idea presented a perfect symmetry. It was like a many faceted gem. And thus the two magicians, men of herbs and simples, found their equanimity shaken and their capacities seriously hampered by the continual presentation of Moy Toy’s imperious countenance at the door of the stranger-house, and the sight of his agitation and anger that the cheerataghe had failed to exorcise the demon of fever and work a cure. Therefore they besought him to leave the sufferer to their ministrations; for his angry countenance caused their hearts to weigh very heavy within them, and his sharp speeches gave great offense to the demon of fever, who had never within all their experience conducted himself in the wayward, troublous manner of his present manifestations.
“But the man will die!” said Moy Toy, looking down in angry despair at the wasted face and form, as the restless head of the patient turned from side to side, always weary, vainly seeking rest.
“Is he the first?” asked one of the cheerataghe. For like a physician of civilization, he by no means guaranteed the continuance of life by virtue of his science.
It was very honestly and earnestly exerted, and both he and his colleague felt all the virtuous rage of sustaining a grievous injustice when Moy Toy said, with a rancor that surprised them (for quarrels and unkindness to one another were almost unknown in the tribe, the utmost placidity of temper and mutual forbearance being de rigueur), “You promised rain,—and behold at this season of the year a drought lasting six weeks, and the planting of corn delayed till a famine threatens, and not a drop till to-day.”
“A visitation! a visitation! because of the sins of the people and their hardness of heart!” cried the two magi in a breath.
Wherein they improved an advantage over the faculty of to-day.
Moy Toy silently gazed down at the rolling head and the fixed, absorbed eyes bent steadily on some phantasmagoria of the fever. He noted the weakness of the once clear, strong voice,—the definite, trained enunciation had sunk to a husky mutter. Still Laroche babbled of military operations, for now and again Moy Toy caught the phrases “quatre mortiers—Coehorn—champ de bataille—barils de poudre,” although the rest was unintelligible, for now he spoke continuously in French.
“He must live! He must live for the Cherokee nation!” exclaimed the chief, with the insistence of hoping against hope.
One of the cheerataghe had a fine, steady, acute eye, a hideously painted face, with the aspect of a bedlamite, arrayed as he was with buffalo horns and tail, and with his body stuck over with wings of owls, the calves of his legs hung with a dozen garters of rattling bell buttons, and a long-handled gourd filled with pebbles in his hands, which were covered with bear’s paws. Perhaps the patient’s delirium could present nothing more grotesquely, absurdly frightful.
“You, Moy Toy,” he said, in his grave, sonorous, sane voice, “you have given offense to the demon of fever. For when the sun is rising the man revives; he will take drink, although he cannot eat; he will speak Cherokee, softly, softly; he will close his eyes and sleep. And then come you!—with a troubled face, and a harsh voice, and an eager step, and a fierce hurry! And the demon of fever is angered, and the fever grows quicker, and more eager, and harsh, and angrier than you! And it rises and rises till the man will not drink and cannot see, and has no speech but a shred of French and screams for dreams that are without sleep!”
He looked to his colleague, who gravely nodded his fantastic head in corroboration.
Moy Toy silently studied the face first of one of the magicians, then of the other. Although immeasurably superstitious and credulous, he was yet grounded in craft and suspicion. And, in truth, perhaps he was not without justification; the cheerataghe, like more modern disciples of Æsculapius, doubtless often attributed to other causes disasters consequent upon a lack of skill or its misdirection. In this instance, however, the value of the stake at hazard, the imputation of the malign personal influence of his presence, a vague indignation that he should be esteemed obnoxious to any being—even a demon of fever—rendered Moy Toy peculiarly alert, watchful, disposed to exact to the extremity of the possibilities.
The two cheerataghe, as his glance once more sought the pallid face, the ever-turning head on the pillow, looked anxiously at each other. For the face seemed death-stricken. The next moment they took sudden hope. A change, a vague, indefinable change, quivered over it. The jumble of French words faltered on Laroche’s feeble tongue. With unexampled resolution, he pressed firmly his silent lips together. And in that silence the wary Indians heard what had come first to his ears. Even in the dullness of fever and the frenzy of delirium, he had interpreted its significance, so momentous it was to him. A voice it was in the broad spaces of the “beloved square” without, a bold, hearty, roaring voice, speaking the English language with a blatant Scotch accent.
The three Cherokees gazed at one another in tumultuous and contending emotions. They experienced much gratitude that the spark of perception intimated they might still hope. They could hardly repress their admiration of the finesse, the courage, the mental balance, that enabled Laroche to perceive the crisis, interpret its meaning, and meet it with a sane judgment,—his self-control, which even in the thrall of fever could curb the infirmities of that weakly, babbling tongue, and silence the self-betrayal of the French speech upon it. All their excitement, however, was subordinated to the triumph in his craft that stimulated their own emulous resources. He was indeed in great danger. Emissaries of the French among the Indians, having done so much to instigate and maintain the late Cherokee War, were peculiarly obnoxious to the British authorities. In fact, rewards had been offered for their scalps, and by the late treaty the Cherokees themselves were pledged to arrest and surrender these enemies of the English. Moy Toy, making a gesture imposing secrecy, stepped out of the door to meet the visitor, who was clamoring as loudly and boldly in the “beloved square” as if he were in his own byre.
“Hegh, Moy Toy!” he cried bluffly, breaking away from the “second men,” as the subordinate authorities of the town were called, “how’s a’ wi’ ye, man?”
He was a tall, heavy, awkward fellow, with a boisterous, assured address, a broad, red face, light almost flaxen hair, plaited and tied with a leather thong in a queue, arrayed in buckskins but with long cowhide boots, and enveloped in a great match-coat, for it had been raining heavily, and the drops still clung upon the tufts and fibres of the cloth. His cap of coonskin, with the tail as a pendant, was pushed back from his brow, revealing remarkably straight, regular, and well-formed features and shrewd, blue eyes. He held under his arm a stout horsewhip as a companion rather than a weapon, for his pistols were in the holsters on the saddle of his nag, which, drenched to the skin, hung down its head where it stood unceremoniously hitched to a stake whereto was sometimes bound a victim for the torture. The guest made no pretense of adapting to the Indian ceremonials the manners in which he had been bred, as was the custom of strangers and traders generally, or of recognizing any princely arrogations on the part of Moy Toy. He advanced with great, muscular strides toward his averse host,—who visibly winced from the overpowering redundancy, as it were, of his presence,—seized upon the limp hand of the Indian, and crushed it in his cordial grasp as if Moy Toy had been also a bold Briton.
“How’s a’ wi’ ye?—an’ what d’ ye hear frae Charlestoun?”
There was scarce similarity between this hearty, warm-blooded entity and a snake, but Moy Toy, of his own volition, would have touched neither except upon necessity or in the way of business. The fibres of his hand tingled with the consciousness of the detested impact long after the trader’s unwelcome grasp had relaxed and his manual energy was expending itself in aimlessly cracking his whip at the sand of the smooth spaces of the “beloved square.” There was a spark of smouldering fire in the eyes of the Indian, a tense restraint in the muscles of his shoulders and his straight back, as if he would fain hold himself under strong control. Albeit his interlocutor spoke English he understood Cherokee, and Moy Toy replied in his native tongue; thus each talked without solicitude, for each was comprehensible to the other. The Indian said that he had no news from Carolina and inquired in turn, but with scant show of interest, “as to the Muscogee?”
“I begin to think a’ thae carles are dead!” exclaimed Jock Lesly, with a vigorous snap of the whip. “They were looked for to join the Chickasaw and the English agen the French away yon to the south. But deil ane o’ them hae minted a word yet!”
The Cherokee’s stately dignity, his cautious, reserved speech, contrasted strongly with the Scotchman’s unsuspicious plainness, as he waited with an air of expectation. If the Indian had had news, he would not have bartered it with the trader, nor indeed had the trader repaired hither for what he could hear. This mutual realization embarrassed the pause, yet Jock Lesly still sharply cracked his whip at the sand and hesitated as to what he should say.
With all the thrifty instincts of the canny Scotch pioneer of that day, with all the bold, bluff courage of his vigorous personality, Jock Lesly had been the first, and as yet the only trader to venture back within the remote mountain region, whence the fury of the terrible Cherokee War had driven all mercantile enterprise. Indeed, the treaty was hardly signed before he was again in the place that had known him of yore, his trading-house rebuilt, depending for his safety partly on the treaty and partly on his utility to the savages, his popularity among them, and his conscience void of offense against them.
“I hae had as muckle o’ the rack an’ rief o’ the war as ye,” he was wont to say, “an’ the Lard kens I wad wuss to be canty and quiet enow.”
As he stood looking aimlessly about, he noted that the ranges were all full of mist between the domes, and from the soft densities of its white, fluffy masses those eminences rose in sombre, purple hues and massive effects against a pale gray sky, along which lay horizontal clouds, of a darker, denser gray. The river, with lace-like films of mist hanging in the budding green willows and pawpaws of its banks, had the tint of burnished copper. The great trees of the limitless forests, and those gigantic growths around the town, dripped with moisture as they hung down their sodden branches about the newly washed boles, the bark so dense of color as to suggest the effect of being freshly painted. A dull day it was, and the atmosphere, devoid of all elasticity, seemed almost too lifeless to breathe. He broke at last from his dubitation and began in his neighborly wise:—
“A-weel, a-weel, Moy Toy, there hae been a wheen idle, feckless loons frae your toun o’ Tellico down to Ioco Town aboot my trading-house. An’ there they lifted a few trifles frae the stock,—but I’se no grudge that,—a few bit duds. But then they slartered a couple o’ sheep,—an auld yowe and a yearlin’.”
Moy Toy’s face grew dark with anger, and yet almost kind with concern.
The good-natured Scotchman hastened to qualify. “They never carried aff the meat nor yet the pelts,—they scalpit the twa puir beastises first, an’ then cut their throats. I’m no the waur for the lack o’ mutton, but”—
Moy Toy’s countenance of amazed disfavor, astounded at the account of this curious emprise, coerced sudden intelligibility.
“Jus’ a wheen feckless laddies aping their elders,” explained Jock Lesly, doubtfully. Then with an uneasy laugh he added, “An’ the bairns cam hame wearin’ the scalps at their belts. I chased them a’ the way with the powney.”
Moy Toy did not laugh. Indian children play as do children of other nations, reducing to the circuit of their narrow round—a juvenile microcosm—all the methods and events of the elder world. But this exploit transcended the limit of verisimilitude and entered on the realms of the verities. The small banditti unchecked would soon venture further and bring upon their elders anger, retaliation, embroilment, with the trader, and premature fracture of the treaty.
“They shall be dry-scratched,” said Moy Toy promptly.
“Oh, wow, man!” exclaimed Jock Lesly sharply, as if he had been suddenly pinched. “Na,—na,—not dry-scratched! Odd! I could na sleep in my bed if the hempies were dry-scratched for me!—they ran sae supple—the knaves! It is an unchancy, ugly thing, that dry-scratching! Cuff the bairns weel—or gie them a flogging they’ll remember. Man alive! flogging is healthy for boy or beast! I’ve had it a thousand times frae my auld daddy, God bless him! Flogging is what’s made the British nation what it is,—but dry-scratching,—I’d die of it mysel’, now. Oh, man,—oh, man,—flog ’em a little,—but dry-scratched—oh, wow, wow!”
He caught at the arm of the august Moy Toy, who was more accustomed to order the torture and burning of Christian captives than the punishment of a few children who had offended against the municipal law. He made no sign and stood as adamant, but other Cherokees, who had joined them, were smiling and looking at each other with the softened countenances that express a gentle ridicule. Despite their friendly scorn, the kindly trader’s deprecation of the punishment of the children and his wild and earnest plea in their behalf could not fail to commend him to their tolerance, and went far to explain a sort of popularity that he had enjoyed among them. They knew that the little drama of the storming of the sheep-fold and massacre of its inmates was too significant to pass without notice, and for this very significance the punishment decreed was to be immediate and sharp, to teach the youngsters where fun ends and serious fact begins. Indeed Moy Toy himself saw to the preparations for the capture and condign penance of the miscreants, who, having returned from the war-path scathless, were now in full swing of a mimic celebration of victory, the triumphant scalps in evidence, and all the wide-eyed children of the town in joyful participation.
“Deil hae ye, then, for a fause-hearted, unceevilized tyke as ever lived!” exclaimed Lesly, as the chief drew off from his grasp. “Egad! I can ne’er abide to hear ’em skreigh like that,—wow,—wow!” And clapping his hands to his ears, the Scotch trader fairly ran off as the first shrill plaint of protest rose upon the air.
Now it was a point of juvenile honor to bear this kind of punishment as stoically as might be, and a severe dry-scratching, always carefully adapted in ferocity to the age of the delinquent and his capacity to support pain, usually drew forth a tear or two and sometimes only murmuring sighs. The habitual gentleness of the savages with their children doubtless convinced the rising generation that the punishment was only intended for their benefit and no whit administered in anger or tyranny. Therefore in submitting with a good grace they were contributing so far as in them lay to their own moral culture, and were ambitious of the stoical poise, perhaps to make the penalty as salutary as possible and go as far in reform as it would.
The two little Indians were easily stripped of such semblance of garments as they wore, and as they were being bound to the stake they craftily set up a wild and poignant shriek upon seeing the Scotchman in full flight across the “beloved square,” being apprised by the comments of the laughing bystanders of his intercession in their behalf and his aversion to the sight and sound of their woe. This had considerable justification, for thus bound and helpless they were sharply scratched from head to foot repeatedly with an instrument formed of snake’s teeth fastened in the end of a stick.
Because of the unusual commotion with which the affair had been invested, no one noticed that the refuge to which the Scotchman, familiar enough with the place, bent his steps was the stranger-house. He burst in, and started back astounded at the figures of the cheerataghe arrayed to frighten the fever in such manner as might have frightened the devil. Then the trader’s eyes fell upon the white man lying helpless on the brink of the grave, as it were, the victim of the fever.
“Lord save us!” exclaimed Lesly, with a sudden change of countenance, “wha hae we here?”
The two cheerataghe, unaware of the very disconcerting effect of their own professional appearance, themselves showed every sign of fear, incongruous enough with their terrifying aspect. In fact they could scarcely have been more alarmed had Satan himself appeared, for they were unacquainted with him and his reputation, while quite well aware who and what was Jock Lesly. The presence of the French emissary here was a breach of the treaty lately renewed, under which the Cherokee tribe traded with the British, and a menace to the privileges promised to the Indians under its stipulations. They hardly knew how to reply, and the abrupt entrance of Moy Toy was like a rescue from mortal peril. The chief had bethought himself suddenly of the possible suspicion of the stranger’s presence here that might be casually conveyed to Jock Lesly’s perceptions, while free in the town unguarded and unwatched. Anything so complete, so inexplicable, so irrefutable as his intrusion and the evidence of his own eyes the chief had not anticipated for a moment, and his ready resources of subterfuge failed him for the nonce.
“Puir chield! I doubt na he is in the dead thraw!” the trader muttered, his compassionate instincts uppermost. Then impressed by something unfamiliar in the cast of the features, he asked doubtfully, “Is he frae the colonies,—or overseas?”
Laroche had been divested of his fine French uniform when he had been brought here ill; it had been carefully put away in view of its future use by his captors, being an official garb, for the crafty Moy Toy fancied some occasion might arise when it would serve a diplomatic turn. Moreover the gold lace and fine cloth were much too dazzling, considered merely as booty, to be spared to the prisoner as habiliments in which to be ill or tortured or buried. In the varied experiments of the cheerataghe, contending with the rigors of the chill following the fever, Laroche had been clad in buckskins, supplemented now and then in the convulsions of the shudders and shivers by one of those feather-wrought mantles that attracted so much attention from the early travelers in this region, the effect of which was pronounced “extraordinary charming.” There was naught to indicate his nationality or his estate as captive. Every evidence of care and solicitude environed the patient, and Moy Toy’s explanation seemed obviously genuine.
The sick man had come to Great Tellico, the chief said, with some of the Cherokee tribesmen who had been up to Virginia, and being taken ill they had left him to recover while they went their various ways homeward. He did not ask the man’s name of them, thinking to learn it from himself. He had been only a little ailing at first, but now one hardly knew what to make of him.
Jock Lesly seated on one side of the cabin on the divan, with his hands on his ponderous knees, his head bent a trifle forward, gazed thoughtfully across the room at the fevered patient, as not so long ago the Choctaw Mingo had sat and glowered at the recumbent frame then sunken in sleep.
“He is gaun to dee!” the trader remarked dolorously, at length, and the words, bespeaking his own fear, fell with a crushing force on the hopes of Moy Toy.
Jock Lesly drew a long and labored sigh. If the sorrows of the little dry-scratched Indians—wicked varlets—could take such hold upon the sympathies of that frank, compassionate heart of his, how the sight of this tragedy racked him,—this valuable life going out in exile, among savages, with not one intelligent, civilized effort made to save it.
“Gin I had him ance at hame!” he cried, in futile aspiration, “I doubt but what Jeemes’s powder might wark a cure!”
“Carry him there! The demon of the fever may not dare to cross a stranger’s threshold!” cried Moy Toy, with a sudden inspiration. He was thinking very rapidly. If some untoward chance should reveal the secret of the nationality of the man, which even in delirium he instinctively guarded, why Jock Lesly and his household were practically alone here, hundreds of miles from any English settlements, and accidents were lamentably common in the distracted Cherokee country at present,—so frequent, indeed, that the discovery might go no farther! “The Cherokees will aid their guest. The brothers of the tribe will rejoice to bear the burden of a litter,” he continued. “The demon of the fever maybe does not know the way to Ioco Town and cannot follow!”
Jock Lesly, heeding little of these hopeful schemes for confounding the demon of the fever, sat doubtful nevertheless and dumfounded. A vague sentiment of suspicion had been lurking in his mind,—first, that the Indians had not expected him to discover so unusual an inmate of their stranger-house as this white man, and that he and his status were not as represented. Then as Moy Toy so freely and instantly relinquished his custody, the trader experienced as vague a doubt if the patient had had fair play among them, since they were eager to get rid of him and of such responsibility as his care imposed.
“The puir Injun!” Jock Lesly said to himself reproachfully, “if I’ll suspicion him o’ ane thing I’ll e’en doubt him o’ the contrary.”
The man lay as in a “dwam,” to use Lesly’s expression. The trader crossed the room, felt the temperature of the forehead, noted the dull, opaque eyes, and laid his hand almost paternally upon the light brown hair of a fine, silky quality, dense and curling.
The trader was an unsophisticated man, unlearned and of a scanty experience of the world, his life having been spent for the last ten years in the treadmill round of a British factory in the Cherokee country. He realized his responsibility and he shrank from it. He looked at the impassive cheerataghe and received no light upon his course. He glanced out of the door.
A change had come over the landscape. The wind was astir,—the clouds were flying before it. Between their dense white masses the sky showed intensely blue, inconceivably high. The sun shone with a vernal brilliance,—it would not be unduly chilly by noon. Fragrance was in the air, so fine, so fresh, so illusive. One might say that it was the scent of the budding wild cherry; or, no,—the early blooming grape; or, stay,—the delicate aroma of the bark of a tree, touched to this distillation of incense by some happy combination of sun and wind and rain. The whole scene beckoned, lured, besought.
“An’ what for no?” cried Jock Lesly, his resolution taken at last. “As weel dee under the canopy o’ heaven as in an Injun’s cabin!”
Every precaution that could be devised was taken. The litter, fashioned under his directions, was furnished by Moy Toy munificently, freely, with the softest skins for mattress, with fine fur mantles for covering that were impervious to water in view of sudden rain, and with others, feather-wrought, light, and warm, to fend off all deleterious effects of exposure. A dozen tribesmen bore it, stepping lightly, easily, on their springy feet, unshod save for the elastic moccasins, and a dozen more mounted men accompanied it to act as relays, and, thus relieving one another, suffer no fatigue to retard their progress.
“A body wad think the creature was a Christian instead of a doited heathen!” Lesly said to himself, impressed by Moy Toy’s liberality and anxiety in this work of mercy.
For Moy Toy had despaired of the efforts of the cheerataghe to exorcise the demon of fever and save this life to the utilities of the Cherokee nation.
“It is some devil of the paleface that has taken hold of him,” the chief said sagely to the cheerataghe. “Let him have the white man’s charm worked on him!”
For if the French officer should die on the way to Ioco Town, would he not also have died at Tellico?