Part 16

Fantastic and impotent as this tenuous scheme may seem now, long ago shredded by the mere wind of the flight of time, a forgotten fantasy, not to be more considered than the snares of any humble spider of to-day throwing its fragile enmeshments from crag to crag on the banks of the Tennessee, it struck cold terror to the hearts of the royal governors of the adjacent British provinces. The Spaniard, insolent and powerful, openly menaced them on the south, and with the combination of the French and Indians they were surrounded and without recourse. They had little to hope from one another, save perhaps an unacknowledged aspiration on the part of each that the other might first tempt the attack of the designing projector of the new Indian alliance and serve as a sop to Cerberus. Each was in terror of a plea of assistance from the other, for the colonies themselves lacked that strength which comes from union and which Laroche sought to instill into the policy of the tribes. Each province being incapable of self-defense with its weak, untrained militia, its inadequate supplies of munitions of war, its vast wildernesses and stretches of unfortified frontier, was averse to dividing its slight resources. Roused, however, to the terror lest immediate massacre of outlying stationers ensue, a consultation was held and a remonstrance, adroit, sugared, promising yet threatening withal, addressed by the Governor of South Carolina to Cunigacatgoah[8] of Choté, now the nominal head of the Cherokee government, was framed and sent by the hand of one of the Kooasahte Indians, who chanced to be in Charlestown, with whose tribe the Cherokees were now at peace.

He returned after a swift journey with a most pacific answer, protesting and reproachful, Cunigacatgoah demanding to be informed of a single infraction of the terms of the treaty, bating, of course, wild, irresponsible rumors. If the governor could cite one such for which the nation could be fairly considered responsible, he would himself come down to Charlestown to answer for it in person.

Governor Boone, surprised yet reassured by the unexpected character of this reply, sought to further assuage his anxiety by catechising his messenger as to the state of matters in the Cherokee country. He found the mind of the Kooasahte, never forceful at best, in that flighty, agitated state to be described as all agog. Obviously the man had been immensely impressed by what he had seen and been able to learn. By no means willing to disclose all, still his eyes were opened to new possibilities of savage ascendancy. Under adroit cross-examination he divulged extraordinary suggestions of the suddenly developed magnificence of Moy Toy of Tellico and of the wonderful powers of a strange magician who was Moy Toy’s friend, yet whom he affirmed was a white man, and whose nationality he accidentally disclosed as French.

Whereupon Governor Boone grew more mystified than before. Finally he bethought himself to send for Jock Lesly as one who, having been intimately acquainted with the personnel and conditions of the Cherokee country for years past, might perchance explain the inconsistency of all these antagonistic details.

The doughty Scotch trader had accounted the burning of his buildings and the plunder of his goods, of which he had been informed indirectly by rumor, as but an accident or a bit of unwarranted and wanton mischief, and by no means as the definite threat that Laroche had supposed he would perceive therein. His daughter, however, had insisted that the demonstration was inimical and in no wise to be braved. Jock Lesly enjoyed much domestic oratory in these days which his “Whist, whist, my bairn!” was powerless to silence, and feminine logic won the battle when she persisted that if he returned, to Ioco Town she would accompany him, for if it were safe for him it was safe for her! Thereupon he hauled down his flag; and now as he needs must rebuild wherever he should go, he was idly awaiting in Charlestown a propitious opportunity of reëstablishment elsewhere under more permanent conditions.

Jock Lesly, cocking his sharp blue eyes at the cringing Kooasahte, a degenerate specimen of a warlike tribe, obviously regarded the whole history of his visit as a fable.

“Gin your excellency wad forgie the freedom, the man is a beautiful liar!”

“Was there no white man there when you left?”

“Nane, sir--that is--forbye a bit chiel o’ a Firginian on his way hame--he had cam doun wi’ a wheen o’ neighbors to herd up some stray horses that had been sold to the Williamsburg region and had gane back to their auld grass in the Cherokee country. He fell ailin’, an’ his friends went on wi’ the horses an’ lef him amang the Injuns,--an’ he foregathered wi’ us. He cam part o’ the way hame wi’ us, but struck aff a considerable way aboon Fort Prince George to go aff to Firginia.”

“He could not be this man, you think? Does he speak French?”

“He? Tam Wilson speak French?” exclaimed Jock Lesly, with a hearty rollicking laugh in his enjoyment of his superior discernment. “Your excellency disna ken thae carles out on the frontier! Tam Wilson ha’ enow to do to speer his wull in English,--puir fallow!”

This seemed definitive; Jock Lesly therefore was presently dismissed, and the gratuity which the Kooasahte received was of limited value and quality, which he had not expected nor had the governor intended, because he had told the truth, which chanced to be unwelcome and discredited. He went away, his heart hot within him, sending forth fumes of rum, which the present sufficed to procure, and sedition, which the present was not adequate to annul.

Meanwhile life on the banks of the Tennessee at Tellico Great flowed on as gently as the river. Laroche had received orders to seek adoption into the Cherokee tribe, according to the wont of the intriguing French, that he might thereby recruit his influence and improve his control. Thus he could better restrain their bellicose demonstrations till the time was ripe for revolt, lest precipitancy annul its values. Hence he became officially a Cherokee.

That singular atmosphere of fraternity peculiar to the Indian method of adoption encompassed Laroche like a native element. It seemed no longer inspired by self-interest. He was as one of the nation,--theirs in success or defeat, theirs in weal or woe! He had polled his head and painted his face and donned their garb. He had been initiated into their mysteries and had accepted their religion; for the Cherokees were no idolaters, and without mockery he could bow in worship to a Great Spirit, albeit with many a mental reservation and evasion in the ceremonies in which he participated. His suspicions were never allayed,--but they were in his mind, not in theirs,--and he was not the more content. Now and again as he danced with the braves in three circles on the sandy spaces of the “beloved square” to the shrilling of a flute, fashioned of the tibia of a deer, and to the thunderous drone of the earthen drums, while strange figures such as might grace pandemonium whirled about him,--hardly human figures; some with grotesquely frightful masks of gourds hiding faces scarcely less hideous; some almost nude; some smeared over with unguents as a groundcoat to make adhere a medley of feathers and foster the semblance of gigantic birds,--a great repulsion would seize him; every civilized pulse would clamor against these uncouth follies, against the sacrifice of time and identity and wonted usage in this cause; and he would feel that the destruction of all the British colonies, could it be compassed, was not worth the price which he paid. The recollection of the sane, orderly customs of the life to which he was native rose up before him with a sentiment of reproach, as one might feel in ascertaining the realities in the lucid interval of some tormenting mania. He was abashed by the mere contemplation of the mountains rising on every side, silent, austere, as majestically aloof from the farce which he enacted as the sky above or the world--the civilized world that he had known and loved--far, far away.

To add to his discomforts the interval which he was to spend thus was destined to be longer than had been anticipated. Aggressive measures were again postponed, and his activities suspended by orders which he received from New Orleans. For it had latterly been developed that the British government contemplated securing a considerable cession of land from the Cherokees, thinking that in thus increasing its holding in the Indian country to keep the tribe more definitely under its domination and influence, and to quiet the title to certain territory, on which they claimed the government had encroached. The French, with their resources much exhausted by the Seven Years’ War, now slowly dragging its length along, were almost crippled in America for the lack of ready cash, and their plans for the Cherokees would be considerably recruited by the purchase money of the land thus poured into the tribal coffers. The wily Indians were enchanted with so hopeful a prospect of securing the means to purchase sufficient arms and ammunition to repel the British and attain their old independence anew. Though they had never doubted the will of the French government in Louisiana to forward these measures, its capacity to furnish adequate ammunition had failed signally more than once.

At this period, while Laroche was awaiting decisive advices from New Orleans, the progress of events seemed suspended. Hope, anxiety, fear were in abeyance. He spent much time in the perfecting of the details of his plan and in the correspondence incident to the enterprise. As he grew more wearied with the monotonous association with the Indians, he took advantage of his leisure to send long discursive letters to his comrades in the southern forts whenever he chanced to have a messenger going that way,--to Captain Pierre Chabert at Fort Tombecbé or the Chevalier Lavnoué at Fort Toulouse.

Cold, wet weather set in late in the summer, a long, dreary, unseasonable interval. When the rains came down in thin, persistent, fibrous lines, and the surface of the river palpitated and throbbed beneath its multitudinous touches, and the gathering gray mists half shrouded then half revealed those endless lengths of dark-hued solemn mountains, and the trees dripped drearily, and the wind surged and sobbed amidst their boughs, the susceptible Frenchman reached the lowest ebb of his isolation, his dissatisfaction, and his yearning wish to feel again the throbbing pulse of civilization.

Thus it was that for many hours of those chill nights in the quaint winter-house, without window or chimney, while the rain would pour down the conical earthen roof, resounding like a drum, he would seek for solace in writing those long letters to his military friends describing his plight, and commenting on the news of the day received chiefly through their responses.

All unmindful of him and his occupations, the other inmates of the house lay sleeping, stretched in a line, on the couch of cane that ran along the red clay walls of the circular room, behind the row of pillars which upheld the conical roof. Even the heads were covered with the wolfskins and bearskins that formed the drapery of their elastic cane mattresses. All unmindful of him they were--all except Moy Toy.

The fire would flare up now and again, showing the colonnade of pillars, the cane couch, and above, the circular wall of the rich red hue of the clay of that country, with here and there upon it quaint hieroglyphics in parti-colored paints, or a decorated buffalo hide suspended, or a curiously carven pipe of stone with some famous scalp attached, while the scroll-like thin blue smoke eddied overhead, pressing closer and closer to its exit at the smoke hole. All gradually flickered and dulled and blurred into a dusky red glow in which naught was distinguishable but vague reminiscent shadows, the mass of smouldering coals in the centre of the floor, and the spirited blond Gallic face of Laroche with his incongruous Indian garb, bending intent, eager, absorbed, above the page as he wrote. Not till the page also grew dim would he rouse himself and throw off the gathering ashes. Then as the responsive flame leaped up white and vivid, he would look back along the paper to review the last paragraphs, and with a freshened brightness of aspect apply himself anew to his task. Moy Toy’s keen eye had grown to distinguish a certain difference of expression when the military expert wrought upon the problems of his enterprise,--the alert, elevated look, puzzled now and then, but intellectual, powerful, confident, and in contrast the twinkling eye, the sarcastic curving lip, the sly, devil-may-care, gibing nod, and yet sometimes the plaintive dejection with which he made those “black marks” which he sent away to his correspondents in the southern forts.

“You are my friend, the friend of my heart, and you know everything,” Moy Toy once said suddenly out of the dreary midnight, when the dizzy rain was whirling abroad in a witch’s dance with the wind, the mountains were lost in the density of night, and the river had become but a voice in the vast voids of the outer atmosphere.

Laroche looked up suddenly from where he sat on a buffalo rug before the red glow of the coals. He wrote upon one knee, but the inkhorn was close by on the floor, and he placed one hand over it, in careful forethought, that a friendly dog, nosing about with the conviction that it held refection of worth, might not overturn it. However Laroche’s hair was clipped it sprang anew and there was a curling fringe under the edge of his cap, which was fashioned of otter fur and bordered with white swan’s feathers. His hunting-shirt was of otter fur and his leggings of buckskin heavily fringed and terminating in a pair of buskins; these were dyed scarlet and gayly decorated with quills. His face, with its expression of intellectual absorption, was inconceivably at variance with his attire and the place. He said nothing, but his hazel eyes looked an expectant inquiry, and seeing him silent Moy Toy spoke again.

“Wonderful friend! though your knowledge is no more to be moved or shaken than the mountains, yet you have the changeable countenance.”

“It is you who know everything!” said Laroche, laughing, but very distinctly embarrassed.

Moy Toy, encouraged by this appreciation, began to put his impressions into words. “When you make black marks on those papers which you treasure, and which I am sure must belong to your beautiful artillery, or else to make powder, or perhaps to the fine plans for the great fort which we are to have here one day, your face is the same it has always been, and as those who love you must love to see it. But when you write the black marks which you send to the commandants of the forts in the south, your eyes grow little, and they twinkle, and your mouth is pursed for lies, and you nod your head with a risky air, and you look more wicked than clever!”

Laroche listened in silence. Then suddenly he burst out laughing. He hastily suppressed the tone of loud hilarity, for one of the sleepers stirred and turned, but fell a-snoring again.

“It is the commandants who are wicked,” he said, smiling retrospectively. “I answer them only in their own vein--sardonic, witty, half-malicious fellows.”

“And what makes them so wicked?”

“They are so close to the English, perhaps,--they learn all they know from the English.”

Moy Toy gazed at the smiling face with a doubtful anxiety, some withheld thought, a half formed purpose in abeyance.

Laroche had had occasion to note that jealousy of the “black marks” of civilization which seemed to animate all the Indians of that day, powerless to restrain this mysterious opportunity of communicating the most secret thought a thousand miles by the stroke of a pen. He had been somewhat irked to discover in addition a sort of pettish tribal jealousy on the part of Moy Toy toward this interest in the southern forts. The chief desired that the officer’s entire attention should be concentrated on the welfare of the Cherokee nation, and deprecated that any advancement or opportunity should be afforded through his means to the various Alabama tribes congregated about those forts. Laroche was an adopted Cherokee, and why should he so delight in writing to the forts _aux Alibamons_!

It had always seemed to Laroche that the intercepting of a letter was essentially a civilized emprise, but the process was invented, as it were, in the brain of this specious Indian. As the commandants of Fort Tombecbé and Fort Toulouse knew so much about the wicked English, perhaps it was not well to keep longer between the folds of the soft panther and wolf skins that formed the furnishings of the couch of the chief a missive addressed to Lieutenant Jean Marie Edouard Bodin de Laroche, and sealed with a big official splash of wax.

“Here,” said Moy Toy, without the least confusion as he produced it, “I thought too many times you nodded your head toward Fort Toulouse and you might soon speak with the forked tongue of Lavnoué. But perhaps he may tell the truth when his heart weighs heavy with the thought of the English.”

Laroche stared with amazed displeasure. The color rose indignantly to his cheeks. He was about to utter a vehement remonstrance, but paused to break the seal which should have parted under his fingers three weeks earlier. Then he forgot this encroachment upon his vested rights.

For the letter was a warning, heralding the approach of British soldiers.

X

THERE stood a quaint, grotesque figure in the midst of the level spaces about Chilhowee, Old Town. It maintained its stiff, stanch pose alike through shadow and sheen; oblivious of night or day; unmindful of the rain that the sudden mountain storms now and again sent surging down from over the summit of the Chilhowee Range, looming high above; disdainful of the wind that fluttered the fringes of its buckskin shirt and leggings and slanted the feathers of its war-bonnet askew, and flouted and buffeted its aged, painted, fantastic face.

So like a grim old warrior in good truth was the adroitly constructed effigy that Callum MacIlvesty long remembered the day when first he beheld it upon entering the Cherokee town of Chilhowee, and was moved to wrath because of its surly, important, inimical attitude and fixed aggressive stare. Only the closest scrutiny enabled him to realize that it was but a scarecrow, albeit the cleverest of its type, with a painted gourd for a head and a gaudily arrayed body of fagots and straw. But he did not then even vaguely divine that he was ever to hold a closer association with the image, or that years afterward and far away the mere recollection of its aspect in his sleeping fancies would wake him to a breathless fright and dreary reminiscences of a most troublous episode in a chequered history.

The scene was bright with the varying luminosity of the azure tints of the mountains of the distance; nearer the hue of the wooded heights deepened to the richest autumnal crimson and bronze as they drew close about the gap where the Tennessee River flows through the Great Smoky Mountains and pierces the Chilhowee Range to the very heart. The metallic lustre of the water was now like silver, now like steel, and again showed a burnished copper glister where its surges had washed a bank of red clay; occasionally a white drift of swans was on its current, or a deer swam gallantly across; and once a group of buffaloes, pausing to drink at the margin, lifted their heads, apparently as unafraid as tame neat cattle, to gaze with a dull bovine curiosity at the party of equestrians and the detachment of British foot-soldiers on the opposite shore.

All the ancient Cherokee customs were still in vogue, although destined soon to fall away with a suddenness that confounds history and almost baffles tradition, suggesting, indeed, the instantaneous transition to dust of some prehistoric skeleton at the first touch of the disintegrating air. Even at that date, however, with the obvious doom of evanescence upon them, a certain curiosity concerning them was very general among those equipped for the archaic speculations in which Laroche had found an interest; there was a general quickening of the pace of the horses as several riders closed about a sedate, middle-aged personage, spare and tall, of great length of limb and evident strength and toughness, who wore a suit of buckskin and was a surveyor of long experience on the frontier, and who proceeded to explain the reason for the extraordinary _vraisemblance_ of the effigy.

“The Indians have aye a crafty turn,” he said. In illustrating this fact he narrated how the “second man” of the town, “a bailiff belike,” induced the young people to believe that the scarecrow was the reincarnated spirit of an ancient warrior, an ancestor, who had come back to overlook their work. Keeping them at a sufficient distance, the “second man” was wont to tell wonderful stories of the exploits of the mythical warrior of Chilhowee, the evil influences of his anger against the idle, and the benefits of pleasing him by industry. The women and girls would believe this, and thus to song and story the work would go merrily on.

The gentleman directly addressed by the surveyor was apparently of a higher and more fastidious grade. He was sprucely arrayed in brown cloth of a trim cut and a fine texture, with a cocked hat, dapper yet sober. His fresh pink cheek and chin were smoothly shaven, the first slightly wrinkled, the latter cleft with a line that duplicated its contours. His black “solitaire” was accurately adjusted about his neck. His bag-wig was the most decorous appendage of that fantastic sort that ever swung behind a well-furnished and elaborately trained brain. That he was the exponent of some kind of careful scientific learning was apparent to the most undiscerning wight at the first glance. Indeed, the English surveyor in offering this bit of information as to Indian customs was making but a scant return for the largess of botanical lore that had strewn the way from Charlestown full five hundred miles thicker than ever were leaves in Vallombrosa.

As the botanist contemplated the broad fields in cultivation he began to speak. “This pompion, now,--the variety of _Cucurbita Pepo_,--that the Indians grow,”--and at the phrase a British officer resplendent in scarlet coat, white breeches, cocked hat, and powdered hair, with a look of shocked revolt checked his horse so suddenly as to throw the animal back upon the haunches and to discommode the advance of the infantry escort that followed, consisting of thirty English soldiers of his own company and a detachment of twenty Scotch Highlanders.