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A SPECTRE OF POWER
A SPECTRE OF POWER
CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY MARY N. MURFREE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published May, 1903_
A SPECTRE OF POWER
CONTENTS
PAGE
Chapter I 1
Chapter II 23
Chapter III 49
Chapter IV 75
Chapter V 101
Chapter VI 118
Chapter VII 133
Chapter VIII 150
Chapter IX 175
Chapter X 192
Chapter XI 213
Chapter XII 227
Chapter XIII 255
Chapter XIV 279
Chapter XV 302
Chapter XVI 324
Chapter XVII 334
Chapter XVIII 344
Chapter XIX 357
Chapter XX 368
Chapter XXI 380
Chapter XXII 396
A SPECTRE OF POWER
I
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.