Part 11

The wary Laroche, as he cast his eye over the spaces of the town, noted that the headmen were presently being sought here, there, and everywhere, and that a very considerable interval elapsed before, congregated together, they repaired to the state-house; he inferred from the fact that the meeting was no matter of previous arrangement, but altogether impromptu. The coming of Moy Toy had had about it all the _indicia_ of a mere personal visit to him to make sure of the state of his health and the date of his possible return to Tellico, where he was likely to be hardly less a prisoner because he was so valued as a guest, the prospect of his services being held at so high a rate. The conclusion was irresistible; the revelation of that vision of the dead watches of the night, which in his fatuity the Scotchman called a dream, and the Indian in his craft a delusion, had a significance, an importance that warranted the exertion of Moy Toy’s great influence in the nation to summon into council the headmen of a town, not his own municipality, without the forms, the heralds, the preambles so habitually required and accorded.

What did it mean, this dream? Oh for a soothsayer indeed!--for an interpreter of the masked fact rather than the fantasy of fiction! Laroche stood for one moment in despair, realizing that the lives of the trader’s household hung upon the result of the debate now in progress in that strange, clay-daubed, dome-shaped temple,--upon the wild will of those malignant beings endowed, as it seemed to him, merely with the semblance of humanity and yet with the mental processes, the moral insanity, the malevolent spite of fiends. All was the more barbaric, the more unholy, the more unearthly, because of the recollection of the grotesque features of that weird, silent circling and circling last night about the dwelling of their victims. Since that dwelling harbored her, of whom Laroche could not think save with a swelling heart, of whom he could not speak for the candor of words crowding to his lips which his deceit must disallow him, whom he could not thank for his life that he owed to her and hers, for gratitude was all inadequate, he must act, he must seize upon some device. And still he stood silent, inert, not knowing where to turn.

Was it as a penalty, he asked himself in sudden affright, that he was to be called upon to witness without recourse the destruction of this home, the hideous massacre of the hearthstone circle, to him now as the treasure of all the earth? Would he, indeed, do no penance till the leisure he liked awaited him? Was he to find what joy might be in the hugging of chains till he should choose to rouse his will and smite his soul free of its cherished shackles? Was he, unscathed, to steep his consciousness in the intense, sweet delight of this selfish affection, pure doubtless, but because of the unimpeachable, unapproachable virtue and innocence of its object, and not because of any restraints exerted upon himself by the dictates of honor or manly faith or kindness and tenderness of heart,--he who knowingly, intentionally, had won her love for naught, to cast away again, had, perhaps, wrecked her happiness, had certainly supplanted the true, devoted, loyal man fitted and once destined to be her husband.

Had he expected to decree his own punishment for his idle cruelty when surfeited with the semblance of romanticism? Beshrew his leniency!--he had devised a light one! To return to Great Tellico with an empty heart and a drear sense of separation from all on earth he loved; to work at the behests of the government that employed him; to obey the orders of his superior officers for which even morally he was not responsible; to dwell in a sad pleasure and a sweet pain upon the memory of a fair face, a tender parting word--had he thought to hold in the sanctities of his most secret heart the recollection of a kiss and tears of farewell? This his prophetic vision had viewed as his unkind fate,--and he had sighed in the anticipation of this romantic woe!

He now stood aghast between his trivial fancy of the future and its harsh face coming so near that it seemed half revealed. Heaven, just heaven, mindful of retribution, would so smite him, insensible though he had become, that he should feel its wrath. Was the blow to fall on him through the woes of others? Was he to see the brave and sturdy Scotch trader, so kindly and generous, suspicious of naught in his own open candor, smitten to the ground in his own house, gory, scalped, disemboweled, the gross flout of what once he was? All a-tremble, Laroche asked of himself should he who had inflicted much keen pain in ingenious wise on his young rival be compelled to witness the keener tortures of the stake? And how should he look on her golden hair that he had loved--save the mark!--dabbled and dulled with brains and blood!

Laroche gave vent to a hoarse, inarticulate cry. For this, all this, would result from his deception and his long lingering here in the false guise of Tam Wilson. Had he returned to safety at Tellico the machinations of the French among the inconstant Cherokees must have been gradually divulged by the fact of his continued presence there, and his identity as an emissary of that government suspected; thus this handful of British subjects, warned in time, would have taken prompt measures for their protection and have compassed their withdrawal from the country. The menace that now hung over them was his fault, the result of his treachery, his idle trifling.

He wondered if the fantastic threats of the previous night might be explained by the fact that the headmen of Ioco Town were inflated by the continued presence of the representative of the French government, the large splendor of his promises transmitted from one council-house to another, his secret mission to unify the tribes, organize and command their army. Were they already feeling their emancipation from the British rule; already emboldened by the knowledge of the great French king’s strength, as if the promised munitions of war were in store; already rejoicing in the blood of their earliest victims, even while it yet coursed with calm pulsations through their veins?

Would heaven only in its omnipotent goodness avert the blow, turn the time back, halt the sun in its irresistible march! He laughed in a sort of bitter scorn that these miracles of mercy must needs be invoked to undo what he had so willfully done. Yet he must know the full measure of the menace--and once more the hideous, significant phantasmagoria of that mystic midnight magic pressed upon his quickened consciousness.

This was a keen brain, essentially the schemer’s. Laroche was still standing near the spot where Moy Toy had left him. Close by, hitched to the bough of a tree, was the horse of the prince of Tellico,--a fine animal, bearing in his mien and form strong suggestions of his ancestors, the Spanish barbs. Though fiery he was as gentle, and he only reared with impatience and displeasure when the Frenchman, with a sudden thought, laid hold upon his mane, seeking to mount as usual from the near side. Remembering the habit of the Indians always to mount on the off side he was quickly in the saddle, and giving the spirited charger a cut with a whip to which it was unaccustomed he was out of the town like a flash and galloping at a breakneck speed along the trading path through the wild woods.

It was high noon at Great Tellico when he drew rein on the banks of the Tennessee River. Vernal languors were in the air; the richness of the waxing season embellished field and forest, the velvet blue of the Great Smoky Mountains, the intense, almost violet hue of the sky, the redundancy of the flowering shrubs and the growth of the grass and weeds underfoot. The river in the recent drought had shrunken since he last had seen it, revealing here and there a stretch of fine, amber-tinted sand, and again a rugged, shelving ledge of rock, and yet again beds of muscle shells, numbers of which, opened and searched for the fresh-water pearls, lay riven apart, giving an opalescent shimmer to the casual glance and a whiter margin to the gray and glossy stream. The shadows were limited, yet dense, so clear was the exquisitely limpid and fresh mountain air. The sun was not warm, despite its splendid effusions, yellowing with an effect of burnished glamour, prophetic of ripening glories.

The Indians who had marked his arrival gathered in groups at a distance, now sheltered by a shrub or a stump, now by the corner of a house, occasionally peeping out at him in the covert way which they affected to ascribe to their consideration toward guests. For, said they, openly to study the mien and dress and person of a stranger savors of discourtesy, but unobserved to mark all his qualities from a screen gratifies the curiosity and gives no offense. In this instance they were influenced by interests far deeper than sheer curiosity. They were all well aware of his identity, the terrible fate for which he had been destined, his reprieve and transference to the British trading-station at Ioco, that by the European remedies to which his system was accustomed he might be cured of his strange fever, which had defied the skill and magic of the cheerataghe. For what purpose he had been reserved, however, whether for the torture when his unconsciousness should not rob it of half its terrors, or as a slave, or as a hostage, or other ulterior view of Moy Toy and the rest of the headmen, the rank and file were not informed. Therefore a very genuine sensation pervaded the several coteries as they marked the free, independent air, the erect carriage, the easy, deft step with which Laroche, no longer splendidly arrayed in the dazzling French uniform, but always of a point-device effect, even bedight in buckskins, crossed the space in front of the mound where he had awaited his fate in such weary suspense and dread. Perhaps he might not have been able to maintain this valiant attitude if that hiatus of recollection had been once bridged over. The event had passed to him as if it had never been, and he sustained the gaze of the community as possessed of a unique interest,--a man who, but for an accident, might now have been, instead of a man, a handful of ashes, whirling about with no more substance or identity or cohesion of personality than the grains of sand strewn over the “beloved square.”

Laroche flung himself down upon the roots of the tree in front of the dwelling of Akaluka, and took off his coonskin cap to let the cool breeze refresh his throbbing temples. Akaluka, glancing suddenly out of the door, was startled to see him sitting there--startled and not pleased. She had had a great fright in the complication that had come so near to the bestowal of her in marriage upon the Choctaw chief, Mingo Push-koosh, who had slain in such grievous wise the unoffending braves of the town, whom he had found peacefully spreading their seines at the confluence of the Tennessee and the Tellico. Often with a morbid fascination she went to look at the spot where he had hung up “the war-brand,” a half-burnt stick swaying across the path, suspended by a grapevine--an open declaration of hostilities, according to the rules of Indian war. The cruel man! for as he had slain these he would have slain her; and the trouble all began with the “mad young men” who counseled the acceptance of the red scarf, and who cared for naught save that the Mingo should not be angered and that they should soon go to war again with the British. But they all blamed her, and they talked and talked with many sharp words, and she was tired of all mad young men, who were a vain and a vexatious creation, and she wished to see none ever again, and here was one who had come and had laid himself at her very door, as she still stood, barely discerned in the depths of the cabin. Whereupon she lifted her voice in the extremity of her disfavor and asked him why he was not burned long ago.

The tenor of the question roused Laroche to his normal mental attitude.

Perhaps, he said with affected humility in his ignorance that this fate had seriously menaced him, it might have been that in view of the debt she owed him she had seen fit to intercede for his life. Hence he had not yet been burned.

This politic reply brought Eve at once to the door. “What debt?” she asked, in frowning curiosity.

Her face wore a strong expression of racial ferocity strangely incongruous with feminine physiognomy, which reminded Laroche of the singular fact that in the crisis of the most exquisite anguish of the torture, the women and children were permitted and rejoiced to flout and buffet and sear and cut and aggravate in infinite ingenuity the woe of the quivering victim. Even thus lowering however, she was not devoid of beauty, and her dress betokened still a heedful eye to the values of decoration. The wings in her glossy black hair were alternately the red of the cardinal bird and the modest brown of his demure little mate. Her doeskin _jupon_ was also red, dyed deep with the blood-tinted madder-root. She had a great red sash, such as a pirate might wear or a major-general. Moy Toy had been constrained by many pleas and domestic tyranny, in a sort, to confer it upon her from the store of presents of the French pettiaugre in lieu of the scarf she had been bidden to restore to the Choctaw Mingo. She wore it like a voluminous cross-belt diagonally about her body, then passed around her slender waist. Here and there the silk had come in contact with her smooth, anointed skin, and the unguents had streaked the sash with a darker hue. Around her neck, which the arrangement of the sash made visible, being disposed in what is now called a V shape, a string of white pearls lay against the clear olive tint of her throat--the gems were large and for the most part regularly shaped. She was stringing others, which had been pierced for the purpose with a hot copper spindle--a practice which the early traders sought to discourage--the application of the heat discoloring the gem, diminishing its lustre, and spoiling its value for the European market. Her feet were bare, of an exquisite shape, small, slender, most delicately made. He had hardly dreamed that her narrow, liquid, velvet-black eyes, with lashes so long, so straight, they seemed to cast a shadow, could look upon any object with a stare so repellent, so infuriated, so brutal.

Before he could answer she asked another question, so dissimilar that he was at a loss and fumbled for a reply.

“Where is your hair?”

He had been accounted a logician, a mighty wrestler with arguments, even a subtle trickster with words, but his facility was never so alert that it could, without bewilderment, make a leap like this.

“Oh--ah--my hair? Oh--they took off my hair at the trading-station--for the fever, you know.”

“You look like a baby--a grown-up baby,” she said, surveying with objection his short ringlets.

“My hair is not like a wig. It will grow,” he said, with his gentle gayety.

“Your beautiful clothes are at the state-house,” she observed. “Tinegwa wears them at the dance.”

For his life Laroche could but change countenance. So is man, the civilized creature, artificialized by his need and custom of clothes that they seem actually a part of him. He felt the indignity as a personal affront, the more acutely since he had not fully realized his danger after the desertion of him by Mingo Push-koosh. His eyes rested on the soft shining of her anointed sash.

“Then I shall wear them no more,” he protested, with covert meaning. “Moy Toy and I,” he resumed, hastening to cloak his sarcasm lest her keen perception discern it, “have exchanged all our clothes, in token of our friendship.”

She gazed at him steadily. Such swift, radical reversals of policy were not altogether unknown to the Indian scheme, and it might well have chanced that beyond her knowledge the chieftain and his captive had thus, in the formal and accepted manner, the exchange of every garment, pledged and ratified a reciprocal fraternal bond.

Her mood was gradually softening. She came forward a few steps, pausing once in the sun to gaze at the pearls she held in her slender, deft hand; then, entering the overhanging shadow of the tree, she sank down in an easy kneeling posture, carefully selected and threaded a pearl upon a horsehair which she held in her right hand, half a dozen of the gems dangling at the end of the string, and looking up straight into his eyes, asked with sudden recurrence,--

“What debt?”

“Oh--ah--to be sure; why, the debt of your life,” said the wily Laroche. “But for me, Moy Toy might have given you in marriage to the Choctaw prince, who had boasted that he would slay you, would take your life, being a Cherokee born, should the two tribes fall to war with the English and the French. But for me--for I betrayed his counsels--the Choctaw fiend!”

Her hand trembled; she let the pearl fall. She searched for it with patient diligence and a deft finger in the green moss where it glimmered with a lunar lustre. When she had found and threaded it she desisted from her labor, although she still held the loose pearls in one hand, the partially strung thread in the other.

“I will marry no one,” she said apprehensively. “It is very dangerous.”

“It is very dangerous to marry Mingo Push-koosh,” assented Laroche, who had indeed paid dearly for his humanity.

“And the young men of the Cherokee nation,”--she shook her head deploringly. “Oh, they are all mad, too,--all quite mad--all dangerous. I will marry no more.”

She looked down at the pearls in her left hand, but did not resume the stringing of them.

“The warrior I married once,” she continued,--“he was older and very good--and brought much meat from the winter hunt. He would not scold with a woman--that was beneath a warrior’s notice. And if a woman wished to scold, she might go and talk to the Tennessee River. It would do her good and not hurt the river, and her husband would not be obliged to leave her. He was very good.”

She gave a vague glance over her shoulder into the open door of his house. Laroche, hyper-sensitive with all his recent anxieties, emotions, sufferings--even morbid--had an uncomfortable realization that deep beneath the thick clay floor of the dwelling the dead man sat, buried so close to the life he no longer lived, so intimately associated with the possessions he no longer owned.

The Frenchman affected a gayer tone.

“But all young men are not mad. Am I not young? I am not mad.”

She evaded the answer. “At their gambols they may well seem mad. One does not expect more then. But in war, in council, in marriage, it is not well that young men should be mad.”

“The gambols of various nations are different, as with their other customs,” remarked Laroche discursively. “But the young men participating are much alike. I have seen a game of the Cherokees in which the young men seemed mad--oh, very mad indeed.”

“What game was that?” Eve demanded; for in spite of her aversion to those bereft young persons, and her stern determination to marry no more, and her grateful recollection of the domestic placidity of an elderly spouse, her interest in the “mad young men” was very fresh and ever new, and easily stimulated to a discussion of their unruly traits and peculiar manners.

“Why,” began Laroche, shifting his half reclining posture, that he might support his head upon his hand, his elbow deep in the soft turf, while he watched her listening face, “what would you say if I should tell you what happened when I first came here to Tellico Great with the Choctaw embassy?”

A slight contraction passed over her features always at the mention of the delegation, a spasm of wrath, of reminiscent terror, of indignant and wounded pride that she, a Cherokee princess, holding a line of royal succession, should ever have been in danger of uncaring slaughter, as if she were a beast, at the hands of a grossly arrogant Choctaw, to whom she might have been given as a wife, and for no more provocation than that she had been born a Cherokee.

“What would you say, I wonder,” he went on as she bent her dark eyes anew upon him, “if I should tell you that one night I could not sleep; I had had dreams that waked me. And if I should tell you that I rose and walked a long time by the riverside--very quietly, wanting to wake no one. And when at last, refreshed and the dream forgotten, returning within view of the stranger-house--where the Mingo and his Choctaw escort slept.”--He paused and affected to laugh, but the laughter stuck in his throat. “The maddest, merriest game--the maddest game!”

She was leaning forward, her eyes shining strangely, the hand that held the thread moved mechanically, beckoning, beckoning, as if to lure forth the story; the other hand, holding the pearls, trembled like a leaf.

“Around and around the house was circling the strangest procession of ‘mad young men.’ Some wore buffalo horns and tails, and all had gourds cut like faces, with torches inside, on their heads; their faces were painted--painted! And one like a panther ran on all fours and leaped and leaped!”--

“Ah--h--h!” A sudden wild scream burst from her lips, which she struck with the palm of her hand, producing a sound indescribably nerve-thrilling, and which he had heard from braves on the war-path. “The spring of Death!” she cried in exultation. And again the wild scream split the air. “No game; no game!” she exclaimed in convulsive precipitancy. “That was the mock-rite, the funeral procession, of those they meant to destroy--and oh, I wish they had! Why did they not! why did they not!”

Laroche’s face was as pallid as the baubles in her hand.

“The Choctaw embassy--was it intended to massacre them?”

“It must have been--though I know nothing of it. This is the invariable prelude--the agreement--the seal of the compact. To circle three times round the house of your enemy, if one rests in your town, as if it were the house of the dead, and with mock and flout and spells to palsy resistance, and with lights to prove the path, and with knives to cut the pledge of friendship, and with the leaping Death to seize them by the throat--ah--h!--ah--h!”

VII

HOW he fared on his return to Ioco Town, Laroche never knew. The interval of his transit was a blank in his recollection. He was only aware of the crisis when he plunged out of the encompassing woods, still urging the horse to a wild gallop, lashing him at every bound with his cap, in default of a whip, which he had lost, when or where he could not say.