Part 19

The object of his aid, desirous of speaking for himself, now and again turned upon his interpreter with a furious Gaelic phrase of repudiation, to which the better soldier, who had run no guard and consequently had won no money, vouchsafed no retort, only commenting indirectly by shaking his head and exclaiming, “Hegh, sir, she’s but a puir creature!”

“I am not so sure of that,” said the lieutenant dryly, “unless I can count what he has got in that sporran!”

Suddenly something in the aspect of the glittering coin which the Highlander still held in his fingers struck Lieutenant Everard’s attention. His face changed sharply. He asked for the coin, and calling for a candle keenly scrutinized the piece by the flickering taper, as the corporal held it, screening with his hand the feeble flame from the wind. In another moment the lieutenant demanded the transference of the remaining five louis d’ors to his custody, sternly insisting, despite the wild plaintive protests of Eachin MacEachin.

All this, the Gaelic being as intelligible to Callum as the English, came to him on the chill night air, and he marveled at Everard’s persistence in taking custody of the coins, for although it was the habit of the Highland soldiery to make their officers their bankers, this trust was altogether voluntary, and not by duress, as in the case of poor Eachin MacEachin and his ill-gotten “gowd.” As it was the favor of chance, like fairy gold, its possession may have seemed equally precarious; or as it was won in direct disobedience of orders, he may have even entertained doubts of the lieutenant’s intentions in the matter of its ultimate return to him, for the Highlanders were as a rule peculiarly averse to the control of any officers save those of their own regiments and more than once mutinied rather than serve under strangers. For whatever reason, so valiantly indeed did Eachin MacEachin resist Lieutenant Everard’s orders that force at last became necessary, and his voluble insubordination in the pain of parting with his gold made Callum acquainted with the fact that he might presently expect company in his imprisonment. This recalled his mind summarily to his own plight. He realized the importance of the officer’s efforts to avoid a clash with the Indians, and wondered what effect this circumstance would have in the discipline of the military offenders. Suddenly he turned sick and his blood ran cold. The corporal punishment, then in vogue in the British army, was regarded by the better class of soldiers as so great a degradation that a man once brought to the lash was practically ruined, socially and morally. The indignity came all at once into Callum’s mind as a possible solution of Everard’s difficulty in his case. He knew that he could not be shot without a regularly organized court-martial, which, necessarily delayed, in view of the personnel and conditions of the force, until their return to Charlestown, would also publish far and wide the officer’s derogation of his dignity in associating on equal terms with a private, who had struck him over their drink as an equal might have done. Everard would flinch from this disclosure, for it would impugn his fitness for his position. And yet he could not challenge a private nor submit as man to man to the ignominy of a blow in the face. The summary punishment of a flogging at the head of the line would dispose of the matter with the utmost contempt and amply avenge the indignity. Callum was terrified lest Everard’s authority in this independent command of a detachment, so remote from superior military jurisdiction, gave him such latitude, or could be so stretched in view of his dilemma. With the mere thought Callum sprang from the floor with a suddenness that loosened every taut strand of the ropes that bound him. His breath was short; he gasped; the blood almost burst from his veins as his heart plunged and the arteries throbbed. He must be quick; the little makeshift prison would soon be recruited; and of captives, one was a spy on another. He could scarcely see, through the blue swirls of smoke, the sentry at the door, whose attention was still riveted on the excited scene without. Callum had caught at the first wild scheme of release, hardly canvassing its practicability. He did not reckon with the pain or the danger when he thrust his bound hands into the flames to burn off the cords. The thought in his brain, the ignominy that threatened him, seared far tenderer perceptions than appertain to the flesh. The fire caught at the hemp, and he set his teeth hard. The ligaments had at last fallen away when discovery suddenly menaced him.

“Look out for your plaid in there, Callum,” said the sentry abruptly. “I smell something burning.”

“’T isna wool,” rejoined Callum promptly. “My plaid isna even scorching.”

And the sentinel, thus satisfied, once more turned his attention without.

Callum looked about him wildly. His first impulse was to throw himself upon the sentinel’s back, overturn him, and fly down the dark aisles of the woods--to what? Certain recapture, and an ignominy that overawed his proud spirit more than death.

“Gae cannily--gae cannily,” he said to himself, as he crouched uncertainly behind the flare of the fire and the veiling tissues of the smoke.

The house, like all of its kind, had neither window nor chimney. It seemed to him of far ampler proportions than such as were used for a single family, and yet it did not approach in dimensions the great assembly rotunda, which could contain an audience of several hundred persons. It occurred to him that it might have been used as a fort at some date long previous, when perhaps Ioco had served as a barrier town, and this was its outlying defense. He remembered having noted the vestiges of an ancient stockade outside, and with the idea that it might have once held an Indian garrison, his keen eyes searched the interior. The old cane-wrought divan, that once perchance encircled the clay-plastered walls, had long ago vanished, leaving only a mark to suggest it. But above this, on a level with the ground outside, for the floor was fully two feet lower than the surface of the earth, he detected a series of vague circles of white chalk. These white circles indicated where loopholes were concealed beneath the clay of the wall, to be utilized by the forted party in firing on an approaching enemy. He rushed to the nearest in a sudden frenzy. The clay gave way in his blistered baked hands; and suddenly, with an inrush of the sweet woodland air without and a glimpse of the black night beyond, was revealed the loophole, adroitly fashioned by savage skill how many years agone! A limited opening it proved, however, barely sufficient to admit of the flight of an arrow thence, and just above the surface of the ground, but it gave a purchase to the frantic clutching of his strong hands and for the use of a clasp knife of an ordinary sort that had been stowed in his sporran; for although he had been searched for concealed weapons, it had been but a cursory investigation, as his wrists were bound. The blade broke when the work was nearly completed, but his fingers, although almost nailless and lacerated to bleeding, finished the enlargement of the aperture, and he dragged himself through the narrow horizontal space and stood, breathless, exhausted, in the dark woods without.

Only for one moment did he pause. The clamors at the scene of action warned him that a crisis had supervened. Wild cries of “Ohon! Ohon!” betokened the despair of the erstwhile lucky gambler, the fact that the five louis d’ors were temporarily transferred to the custody of the officer, and that the Highlander and his fellow culprits who had so gallantly run the guard and played the races were being hustled along to the half demolished prison, which they would find empty. The thought lent wings to Callum’s feet, for in another moment discovery would ensue and the pursuit come hot upon his track.

Yet his spirits revived as he felt the fresh wind, cool and pure upon his face; his muscles, supple and strong, responded to the demand upon their activities. Like a deer he sped straight through the town and along the sloping bank of the watercourse. At that hour he encountered not a living creature. Only the currents of the Tennessee came to meet him. All was silent save the flow of the water and the flutter of the wind. So definite were these sounds in the night as he went that he began to take heart of grace and hope rebounded anew. The pursuit, he reflected, had probably gone in the opposite direction, since the camp lay on the edge of the town. This gave him time to scheme, to secure some place of concealment, for horsemen, once on his heels, would soon run him down. For this reason he left the river bank and took his way among the fields. His pace grew slower, for the rugged cultivated ground and now and then great masses of weeds in ill-tended and neglected spaces made the going difficult. Twice he caught his foot in the vines of pompions and came heavily to the earth, where he lay for a time stealthily listening before he dared to rise again. He had great fear of the Indians--the fear of the straggler. They hated the soldiers now more than ever heretofore, and above all the Highlanders, so conspicuous in the recent Cherokee War. A wreaking of many grudges they would find should he fall into their hands while fleeing from the wrath of his officer. A terrible fate this! a sly, treacherous capture, torture, the stake, a mysterious and unavenged disappearance from the knowledge of all the world! Military discipline could threaten no such horrors save to a man of his proud temperament. Once or twice he slackened his speed to a walk, swinging onward with a good long stride, but he could not now continuously run; his strength was spent. Suddenly he came to a full pause, with the weight of doom on his heart. There in the space between two rows of corn the figure of a man stood not three paces distant! Callum in a panic marveled how he had not noticed this approach. Above, the night was silent, and high over these alien mountains glittered stars that he had known of yore, that still shone over the mountains in far, far Scotland as placidly as before ever Woe came in to sit by her hearth and her sons went forth to exile forever. Nothing stirred save their palpitant scintillations. He could hear naught except the pulsations of his own heart beating like a drum. The figure of the man stood motionless and gazed at him, as motionless, fascinated, helpless, he stood and stared.

“_Canawlla!_” (Friendship) Callum at last said softly, although in the dense darkness he could not have stated why he thought it was an Indian.

A moment of suspense passed leaden-weighted.

There was no response. The world was so silent that he heard the almost soundless flight of a bat winging past.

The next instant a strange doubt entered his mind. He put forth his hand gingerly, and laid it on the figure’s arm. There was no quick stroke of a tomahawk, as he had half feared. The man’s arm, as he stood so stiff and silent, was all unresponsive. In fact, it was but a couple of fagots, and Callum realized that he was in Chilhowee, Old Town, and that this was the image of the Ancient Warrior he had noted in the fields.

“Take that for the leein’, fause face o’ ye!” he said, striking the gourd in sudden wrath, his cold fear growing hot anger, as he thought of the waste of time that the fright had cost him, and the imminence of the danger in which he stood.

The gourd wavered and dropped suddenly to the earth, and as he mechanically stooped and picked it up, a strange idea struck him. It was a great gourd; he lifted it with its bedraggled war-bonnet to his head, and it slipped easily over and down to his neck. He began in a fever of haste to disrobe the effigy. It had been of gigantic stature, and the hunting-shirt even concealed the kilt of the big Highlander; the leggings went on over his stockings and hid his bare knees; the sleeves came down over his hands. Half supported by the stake which had upheld the scarecrow, he took the stiff pose that he remembered. And why, he asked himself, should he not stand here as safely, thus masked, as lie all day in some Indian hut, if he could gain admission? Doubtless every house on the river bank would be searched by Everard’s orders, and most probably he would be delivered up by treachery to this demand, if not murdered to settle old scores. At nightfall he would array the figure anew and slip off, traveling by dark and hiding by day, and returning thus to Charlestown, surrender to his own captain. He fancied the officers of the Highland regiment could understand the situation, and would relish the allusion to scaffolds and grinning skulls scarcely more than he. If he had been left in his station as a private soldier, he argued, all would have been well. But he had been admitted to familiarity and friendship with the officer as a gentleman, and when over their liquor he had repelled an insult with a blow, as an equal might, he was suddenly relegated to the status and penalties of a private soldier. If the members of the court-martial were minded to account his escape under these circumstances desertion, they could make the most of it: he would rather choose to be shot on this charge than flogged for the blow.

Punctures in the egregious painted physiognomy of the gourd served for sight and breath. The nostrils, the eyes, the mouth, the ears, had all been curiously and faithfully delineated by the Indian artist, according to his lights. Callum tasted the dawn even before he saw that the night was turning vaguely blue. When in this dim medium figures of Indians began to appear, he experienced a sudden elation to perceive that none cast a second glance at the effigy of the Ancient Warrior in the cornfield.

XII

A FINE outlook at life the Ancient Warrior enjoyed. The sun came splendidly up from over the blue and misty domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, and the beautiful Chilhowee Range suddenly sprang from the nullity of darkness into all the chromatic richness of autumnal color. A wind went chanting blithely through its dense woods, as if it were fitting there to be happy where all was so gay. The river, a trifle of fog blurring its silver sheen here and there, reflected the gorgeous tints of the red and gold forests on its banks and caught the light with an added glister. The world was so fresh, so misty sweet, so newly created! The rocks echoed the barbaric notes of the blasts blown on the conch shells, as with the joyful cries of the ritual of their ancient religion the Cherokee braves went down into the water in their symbolic ablutions.

Smoke had long been curling up from the hearths of the houses, and presently the brisk “second man” of the town was marshaling out his cohorts of women and girls to work in the fields. Callum was surprised to see the placid and smiling faces that they wore, for field work in these rich soils is held to be far less drudgery than housework, and even now a feminine farm laborer is hardly to be found to exchange willingly. The Indians always protested that their division of labor, which allotted field work to the woman, favored the weaker vessel, and by no means implied that indifference and scorn of her attributed to them by the white people.

The “second man” in a civilized community would have been accounted a wag or a buffoon. So very funny he made himself as he sat on the ground near the effigy of the Ancient Warrior that Callum was more than once diverted from his own troublous thoughts and moved to wish for a few additional phrases of Cherokee, that he might more fully understand the quip and song and tale with which this genius of the field beguiled the labor. The elder women listened with slow and languid pleasure; the children sometimes interrupted with a breathless inquiry. He did not lack his critic to remark, in the course of a twice-told tale, that last year the fox had not thus replied to the admonition of the Ancient Warrior, whereupon, with the privilege of response, the _raconteur_ doubled like the animal in question and averred that it was not that same fox! One of the women, a girl of eighteen, perhaps, showed a brilliant, imaginative face as, at the crisis of each story, she turned toward the Ancient Warrior and gazed spellbound upon him with dark, lustrous, liquid eyes, until the “second man” had seen him safely through an adventure of a series for which, had he lived from the days of Noah, the centuries scarcely held space. Then with a long-drawn sigh she would fall to work again, reaching up with lissome ease for the ears of corn which she gathered. Only the children picked the peas and beans and other small crops that the corn had sheltered. For the working force comprised all the laborers of Chilhowee, these being the public fields destined for the common granaries filled for emergencies, and not the individual gardens adjoining each domicile. She was notably expert despite the patent fact that her thoughts were oft so far away; although obviously strong, she was tall and delicately slender, which made picturesque her garb of ordinary doeskin, so fashioned as to leave her arms bare; her buskins were dyed scarlet; and a cascade of red beads, the valueless trinkets of civilized manufacture, bought at a round price from an English trader, fell from her neck. But she was not in gala attire, by reason of her occupation. Her fingers were long and deft and exquisitely shapely; her feet slender and small. She was endowed with a sort of stately bloom and a consummate grace, that justified the sobriquet by which she was distinguished, the “Cherokee Rose.” She obviously cared less for what was done and said here yesterday than for the discourse of the fox and the Ancient Warrior some two or three hundred years before, according to the elastic chronology of the “second man.” For when other Indians, evidently of a high grade in the tribe, came up and began to discuss together the commissioners’ expedition, she worked on with far greater industry, and only occasionally paused to lift her head from where she stood, half shrouded in the tall maize, to gaze meditatively upon the Ancient Warrior,--the hero of so many fancies, for she was of the type of woman who loves the renown of exploits,--with a patent admiration embarrassing to the fair-haired Callum, even although masked by the gourd. At times he experienced a more formidable embarrassment. He was in terror of a strong inclination to cough. As the day had worn on the smoke and smell of distant burning forests suffused all the currents of the air, for the weather had lately been singularly dry. Sometimes he was almost suffocated by the acrid vapor, collecting in the restricted compass of the gourd mask, and again it was dissipated by the freshening of the wind.

As the headmen lingered and talked, the laborers were rapidly moving on under the directions of the “second man,” for the Cherokees never permitted women or boys to hear aught of political machinations or import. Callum began to understand that a runner had brought to Chilhowes the details of the unlucky winning of the French gold by the Highlander, and the ineffectual attempt by the Cherokee headmen to buy it back out of notice with English guineas. So important did the Chilhowee warriors consider this circumstance that they evidently had half a mind to assemble in council in their town-house to debate the matter, but they were deterred by the remonstrances of the runner, who seemed to give also warning of an approach. Thus Callum was apprised that Everard was in the saddle and on the road hither. It would never do, the messenger argued, for the English officer to find the Chilhowee headmen in solemn consultation,--in effect an official recognition of the importance which they attached to the incident. While admitting the justice of this reasoning, they were nevertheless fain to secure at least a hasty word together as to how they should meet the officer. Therefore it was that the “second man” urged forward the laborers, and the councilors gathered about in the field as if they had been participating, as they often did, in relating the traditions and legends of the tribe, that were thus handed down from one generation to another.

They grouped themselves near the Ancient Warrior, whose pedestal stood in a heap of fodder that usually concealed certain ungainly posturings to which his straw-filled moccasins were prone, but that now served to hide the strong, stanchly planted feet of the hardy infantry-man. Had Callum’s knowledge of the Cherokee tongue been more complete and accurate,--in fact it consisted but of sundry fragments caught up at haphazard in his campaigns in this region the two previous years, and from the Indian guides of the present expedition, and his short stay at Jock Lesly’s trading-house,--he might have comprehended all the subtleties of which this secret discussion was rife. Even as it was, however, he understood that the Indians feared much from the discovery of the French money here.

“The French coins must be taken from the officer--if they were his eyes, if they were his heart; they must be taken from him,” a fierce, straight, stiff warrior, Yachtino, the chief of Chilhowee, was continually saying as he stood pacifically in the midst of the corn, his feathered crest, his quiver and bow, his garments decorated with fringes seeming not unlike the growth itself, as if he had been thence incarnated.

Another Indian, with a swift, furtive step aside, ever and anon bent to gaze down the trading-path, interjecting from time to time the phrase, _“Usinuli! Usinuli!”_ (Quick! Quick!), which agitated the course of the deliberations, usually so slow and decorous, like the sudden striking of a flaw of wind on the surface of placid water.

They all stood in silence and looked stolidly at the ground.

“But how?” said Tlamehu, the Bat, at last. And then another, “How _can_ the coins be taken from him?”

Callum, noting the dismay in their countenances, fumbled mentally for the significance of the French money. That this currency should be common among them seemed natural enough, as their intercourse with the French had been great, even before the Cherokee War against the British government. During its progress, indeed, it was believed that in several engagements the Cherokee forces were commanded by French officers.

The next words let in the light.

“And so the coins that had the king’s head, pictured in the fine gold, spoke with a deceitful forked tongue, and tells the English that it was made in sixty-two?”

“The date is stamped on the metal--all, all!” impatiently responded the informant.