Part 25

His eyes twinkled as if in reminiscence, and Everard, remembering the peculiarities of the Highlander’s accent, was minded to mark anew the familiarity of this Tam Wilson with him. He himself had not spoken his Christian name aloud, but the stranger knew it, and with no prompting called him “Callum.”

Bewildered, raging internally, humiliated, Callum was ordered to his former place in the ranks, having only succeeded, because of the artifice of this arch-strategist and the intractability and paucity of the perverse facts, in identifying this Frenchman as an Englishman, to the satisfaction, or rather dissatisfaction, of his superior officer.

Of all people incompetent to use power without its abuse the Cherokees were preëminent. The turbulent mob had been quick to discern in the result of the conference that their adopted tribesman, the French officer, was obviously triumphant; that Moy Toy, although standing like a statue, was overjoyed, with gleaming wide eyes and an elated port. They could ill afford magnanimity toward these people, so many grudges as a nation and as individuals did they owe the English, consequent on the slaughters and fire-raising and punitive famine they had suffered at the hands of the British troops in the warfare of the preceding years. Their note of comment had lost its tone of appeal, of indignation, of protest. It was swelling now and again into a savage roar of awful import, of reprisal, of scorn, of eager brutality.

Laroche heard in it the knell of all his hopes. This precipitate action would forever frustrate the fruition of his work here,--the gathering and organization of the tribal forces, the transportation of supplies, the plan of his campaign,--and with this, his success, his promotion, his hard-earned guerdon, for which he had labored so diligently, so discreetly, so valiantly. He was not ready to strike yet--not yet! A premature blow now would preclude all those sequences of aggression so carefully planned, for the forces of the campaign were as yet unprepared; the English would be first in the field, and the tribal remnants of the Indian nations taken in detail and succession would be overwhelmed, intimidated, scattered, before the carefully aggregated resources of the French expedition could be made effective and available.

It was necessary that he should think very fast. And yet when he spoke his words seemed quite casual, almost irrelevant. “As to Callum MacIlvesty,” he said to Everard, “why, I hardly know what to make of Callum! He always seemed jealous of me on account of Jock Lesly’s beautiful daughter, Miss Lilias,--who was much too good for either of us!” he stipulated gallantly. “But I should never have suspected Callum of an invention like this!”

Everard looked at him keenly. This added another point in favor of his identity as a Virginian,--his familiarity with the names of the members of the trader’s household; another reason why his image should intrude into the troubled delirium of the Highland soldier,--an old romance, with heart burnings and rivalries. Little wonder that in the distorted mental images of fever the hated figure of perhaps the fortunate suitor should appear invested with the added opprobrium of the national enemy.

The buoyant airy grace of this figure, even in the Indian garb, the volatile but bated aggressiveness of manner, the joyous, yet capable, intellectual expression of face, the handsome eyes and regular features suggested that he might appear to no contemptible advantage in the estimation of a girl as contrasted with the grave, reserved, proud, and exacting Highlander, with many an inherited sorrow to make him serious and many a personal privation to make him bitter. With his youth and strength and the natural amiability of his nature Callum could on occasion throw off the consciousness of these weights and be merry. But this fellow’s element was the air itself, and the necessity to be serious was like the clipping of wings.

“Come, sir, let us have an end of this,” said Everard. “Being English you cannot object to go to Charlestown and make your standing clear to the authorities. I pledge my honor that you shall be put to no expense and shall be indemnified for any financial loss you may sustain by reason of your absence.”

“If I should agree these people would regard it as if I were taken by force,” Laroche protested. “Your life would be the forfeit. Indeed, I am already concerned for your safety. I cannot control the Cherokees. You know what they are! You must admit that your errand here is futile!”

It was so contrary to Everard’s temperament to accept defeat in any form that he could only accede metaphorically. “I’m not half blind!” he said.

Laroche pressed the point. “The effusion of blood is threatened. You must perceive it.”

“The knife is at my throat,” assented Everard debonairly, as if scornful of his peril.

Laroche tried him on a more vulnerable topic. “The commissioners’ party would never get out of the country. But to save the lives of your brave soldiers and the civilian commissioners, who have no quarrel with any one, if you will at once draw off your force I will use what influence I have with Moy Toy to let you go scot-free through the country.”

The eyes of Everard were large, but the astonished white showed all around the iris. He gasped once or twice and caught his breath,--that the man whom he had come to arrest under the authority of the British government and bear away captive should engage to see him clear of the Cherokee country!

Only after many stormy wrangles with Moy Toy, however, and the other headmen, did Laroche, secretly urging upon them the jeopardized interests of the cession and the disastrous effects of precipitancy in the imminent emprise of the united tribal armies, secure acquiescence in this plan of permitting the expedition to depart in peace. It was, nevertheless, a perilous time. The air seemed freighted with treachery. Along the route among the Overhill towns lying on the Tennessee River, always reputed the most warlike and implacable and powerful of the Cherokee nation, through which they must needs pass to retrace their way, hardly an hour elapsed in which some inimical demonstration did not seem impending. Now the march was checked by a deputation from some more remote town desiring to send by their hand a memorial or a present to Governor Boone. Now a formidable group of savages, splendidly armed and mounted, rejoicing in the terrible suspicions of sinister designs and lurking ambuscades in force, which their presence must foster, begged to take personal and individual leave of the notables of the expedition.

Everard, in all his military experience, had never known such anxiety. He could not have watched a father’s danger with more tender and self-reproachful solicitude than he felt for the elderly civilians, with their wrinkled countenances and bewigged heads wagging affably under the ceremonious ordeal of parting from these friends, who might at a wanton blow bloody the one and break the other, and account the deed righteousness and patriotism. Alas, for the point of view!

“I can never forgive myself for extending and increasing your jeopardy,” Everard said to them in uncharacteristic dismay one night, as he sat with the commissioners around the camp-fire, each man with a sort of automatic motion of looking over the shoulder at intervals, to descry, perchance, in the shadows something more dangerous than the green shining of a panther’s eyes or a wolf crouched ready to spring. The sound of the sentry’s tramp, as unmolested he walked his beat hard by, was a reassurance that naught else could bestow. “I ought to be court-martialed, I ought to be broke, I vow and protest!”

He cared little for the military views of the polite and “lady-like old men,” but the chorus of indignant negation that rose upon the suggestion was as salve to a wound. He had moved with the entire sanction of the commissioners themselves, one of them argued.

“And if the man had been that fellow Laroche or Louis Latinac, think of the repose his capture would have insured the frontier!” exclaimed the member of the council, the diplomat.

“Either one is worth a regiment to the French cause,” growled the basso profundo of the geologist. “The mere chance was not to be neglected.”

“We are not required to achieve the impossible. We are all held down to metes and bounds, course and distance,” said the surveyor.

“And the _best_ of us are subject to mistakes. Think of me,” exclaimed Mr. Taviston, fitting together his waxen-white, knuckly fingers and casting an aquiline smile at Everard, on one side of the fire. “I actually sent a misdescription of a specimen to the Botanical Society, and the mistake, when discovered--so overwhelming, so important, so humiliating--I took to my bed!”

Lieutenant Everard did not in his contrition seek this refuge in recumbency, but as Mr. Taviston entered upon a long, minute, and learned account of how the error had occurred, and the exact points of difference, and all the bewigged heads leaned together to hear, to compare, to comment, to condole, Everard, on the pretext of visiting the guards, which he did himself at close intervals, quitted the group. He looked back at them once as they sat around the flare in the darkness, oblivous for the time of danger, regardless of night, impervious to cold, eager, agitated, curious, utterly absorbed; and yet the point of interest, as well as he could make out, was that Mr. Taviston had actually said by strange inadvertence _filiform_ instead of _filamentose_.

“But,” he commented to himself, “if a gang of Cherokees should tomahawk that party, strange as it may seem, brains would be spilt as well as blood!”

Among those denizens of the nation who took ceremonious farewell of the commissioners’ expedition was gay Tam Wilson, arrayed still in white dressed deerskin with its flaring fringes, wrought with scarlet feathers, all floating to the breeze, gallantly mounted, fully armed, and with a crest of scarlet feathers on his curling light brown hair. This demonstration impressed Everard as only another intimation that Tam Wilson was naught but what he seemed,--some colonial wight who had rather idle and hunt and play among the Indians than work at a more suitable vocation at home. Callum, however, accounted it the height of insolent bravado. Albeit his conviction was not susceptible of proof, he had no doubt that this was the long-sought French emissary who fomented the discontents of the Cherokees. He was sure that trouble indeed would soon be brewing along the frontier.

Laroche had perceived at a glance that the situation was a revelation to Callum MacIlvesty, who had no thought to find Tam Wilson a French emissary. Lilias had indeed kept her promise. It was not she who had betrayed his secret, but only through his own inadvertence had the Highlander been permitted to discover it.

He read in Callum’s face the proud indignation that he felt in the knowledge that for this man, this arch-deceiver, his love had been scorned, his loyal heart cast aside,--this man, who had accepted their tendance which brought him back from the verge of the grave, and who yet burned, by the hand of his myrmidons, the kindly roof that had sheltered him,--this man, who won a woman’s love under a false name, a false semblance, a false nationality, a false tongue, idly, purposelessly, to beguile the tedium of convalescence, slipping cannily back to his old life again and leaving her to pine,--this man, their old familiar Tam Wilson, the French emissary who with wily and wicked instigations spirited up the mischievous Cherokees against the British colonists.

The change in his position here, his acceptance of the customs of barbarism, his amity with the Indians, his adoption into the tribe, his assumption of the Cherokee garb, had always impressed Laroche as a military necessity, but he winced as he fancied how the grave, deliberative, listening face of Lilias would relax to scornful laughter and contemptuous pity when Callum MacIlvesty should detail to her these grotesque details in the discovery of Tam Wilson’s identity with the malignant destroyer of the peace with the Indian tribes. He had never been so conscious of the tawdry savage foolery of beads and feathers and paint as when the party were all climbing a steep ascent afoot to rest the hard-traveled horses, and chance brought him near to Callum MacIlvesty. Yet it was in bravado, as he strode along with the reins of his steed thrown over his arm, that he greeted the Highlander.

“Barley! Barley!” he quoted, smiling. “A truce, lad! Be sure that you remember, when you tell Miss Lilias of how you found me here still, the same yet not the same, and of my high place in the esteem of the imperial Moy Toy, and of my suspected efforts to shake the footstool of the British throne, to tell her also that but for me you and your blundering braggadocio of a lieutenant would never have got home alive. So between us it is even--a life for a life!”

“Maister Wilson,--though that is not your name,--you may e’en find some other to bear your messages. I shall tell that young leddy naething; and but for that you do bestir yoursel’ to save the lives of the commissioners, I wad strike ye on the mouth for so much as calling her name!”

Laroche winced as from a veritable blow; then, with one of his sudden, mercurial reactions, he cried impulsively, “Tell her all, Callum! Let her know how it stands now! It will make it the better for you! For myself, I never hope to see her again!”

The Highlander doggedly trudged along the verge of the steeps, his shadow gigantic in the leafy valley below, his picturesque figure with kilt and plaid and bonnet and long firelock imposed on the varying azure of the ranges of mountains that she had so loved. He had been gazing at them all day and for many a day past with that thought in his mind,--that she had loved them!

“I sall tell her naething!” he said implacably. “If it makes it better for me that another man isna what he seemed she is no for me.”

And then he closed his lips fast.

In Laroche’s heart blossomed forth suddenly a deep secret joy to know that in all this time the young lovers were not reconciled. His vanity plumed itself in the thought. No transient fancy it was that he had inspired. And this proud fool!--he could have laughed aloud to see the Highlander, solemnly stalking among his bitter memories and her “sweet mountains,” resolved to hold his peace and eat out his heart because he would not deign to profit by the fact that the lady of his love had cared for a man who proved unworthy, thus liberating her preference, to be captured anew by himself, catching her heart in the rebound.

“Choose, you proud peat!” Laroche said to himself, repeating a gibe that he had often heard at Jock Lesly’s fireside. And when he mounted anew he rode away right merrily.

XV

THE method in which Lieutenant Everard had compassed his retreat from the Cherokee country gave rise to much discussion in that day, especially among military and _quasi_ military men. Particularly was this of interest at those remote and feeble posts at which small detachments were stationed on the verge of the Indian country and among conditions likely at any time to duplicate his dilemma. It was variously contended that he should have stood his ground even had his heart been cut out still pulsating, and _per contra_ that his course was amply justified,--nay, that the obligation to save the civilian commissioners as well as the men of his command was imperative, and that it would have been criminal folly to fail to take advantage of the opportunity to make off thus with something less than the full honors of war, more especially as the expedition was not of a strictly military character.

The licensed British traders, plying their vocation among the Catawbas, Creeks, and Chickasaws, entertained the high and sanguinary view of Lieutenant Everard’s duty in the premises, seeming to think that blood spilled in their interest was well spent, and to resent any precautionary measures that tended to hoard it. Whereas the officers of the little flimsy forts believed the effort to protect the mercantile monopoly of the Indian trade by the British government was not worth the sacrifice of life and the effusion of blood when it came to the hopeless odds of a thousand to some threescore.

The discomfiture of the British embassy to Great Tellico and the inglorious return of Lieutenant Everard, failing to compass the arrest he demanded, seemed to have imparted a certain assurance to Indian prestige. A new and subtle arrogance of mind, covert and yet perceptible, distinguished the attitude of the warriors toward the British traders who had the opportunity to observe them. This did not characterize individuals only, but appertained to a generally diffused spirit among the tribes. It was peculiarly marked among the few Cherokees seen in these days beyond their own boundaries, but extended to the Muscogees and their sub-tribes, also the Choctaws, the Choccomaws, and went even so far as to touch their inimical kindred the Chickasaws,--always hitherto friendly to the British and averse to the French. It suggested some treasured consciousness of latent strength. As a portent of the quiet biding of an ultimate time of reckoning, instances of patience and lenience on the part of Indians under provocation became more menacing than open protest or violent wrath. A subtle lurking triumph could be discerned, nevertheless, in their manner,--the proud glance, the arrogant carriage, the crafty turn of a phrase, charged with a double meaning. Especially prominent and perceptible were these _indicia_ when many of various nationalities, some of the tribes now extinct, chanced to be congregated together at a trading-station such as the one beginning to be organized anew under the guns of Fort Prince George.

As yet public confidence in the restoration of peace in the Cherokee country had not been reëstablished. An outbreak seemed imminent at any moment, albeit indeterminate, vaguely in the air. Constant rumors of the machinations of French emissaries, especially the two officers Latinac and Laroche, deterred capital, always conservative, and the hideous character of Indian vengeance daunted the hardiest British trader from essaying a premature effort. Up to this time, therefore, no trading licenses had been applied for or issued for the towns of the upper country since the burning of Jock Lesly’s trading-house on the Tennessee River. In the neighborhood of Fort Prince George, however, a degree of reassurance was felt since a military defense was possible and a refuge at hand. Moreover, in case the fort itself should be besieged, as it lay on the southeastern confines of the Cherokee country, relief could be sent out from Carolina before famine would compel a capitulation. It is true that in the war just concluded the blow fell here first of all, fourteen white men being suddenly murdered within a mile of the fort. However, the advantages of trade were now peculiarly great by reason of this absence of marts in the upper region, and for a season or so the Cherokee village of Keowee, within gunshot of the fort, attracted a great concourse of Indian hunters bent on the barter of deerskins, furs, and pearls.

Jock Lesly, one of the most experienced of the early traders, had foreseen and seized this advantage, and albeit he still ostentatiously sighed for his old home on the Tennessee River and fondled his sorrow as an exile, and was wont in financial pride and vainglory to recount the value of his stock and “gude will,” on the last of which he laid particular stress, being so well acquainted with the country,--to use his phrase, “wi’ baith man an’ beast, wi’ ilka buck on twa legs or four that roamit the woods,”--he had ample opportunity in the lack of competition to recoup himself for the losses that he had sustained. Moreover, he had the trade of the officers and men at the fort, for those days in no wise differed from these in the necessities suddenly developed as soon as one is out of reach of the usual sources of supply.

The trader was cheerful in these fair prospects, rosy and jocund, and in this connection said “oh fie” many times to call his daughter’s attention to the fact how “fat and well-liking he was,” needing none of her care, and to urge her return to the colonies.

“I’ll e’en bide here,” she averred firmly. “There’s but the twa o’ us. I maun hae my hame where ye be, for ye are gettin’ auld; your pow is fu’ gray!”

“Ye are a graceless bairn to say as muckle!--oh fie!--I was born wi’ a tow head!” exclaimed Jock Lesly, who although flattered by her filial affection felt that she would be safer in Charlestown. “I to be ca’d gray an’ auld!--when I hae ne’er been sae weel-favored,--comelier, I trow, than ony o’ thae young lads at the fort, though a’ dressed out in their flim-giskies.”

He sometimes wondered vaguely if any of them could be the attraction that held her here, and then reflected sagely that there were more lads still in Charlestown. He had experienced a vague regret to notice--and he had often tried to recall when it had first arrested his attention--that there had been a gradual averse change in her manner toward MacIlvesty and a certain glum dourness in his reception of it.

“That’s no the way to win a high-sperited lass like Lilias,” he reflected impatiently. “I wonder that the callant has na mair sense. He suld be sonsy an’ gay, an’ mak a braw show wi’ his Hieland coats an’ kilts that he thinks sae fine, an’ that set off sae weel his buirdly round handsome legs. Sic a spindle-shanks as that chiel Tam Wilson now wad aye be glad o’ the fringed leggings.”

And then he paused again. For why must he be always thinking of Tam Wilson presently when his mind was busy with the subject of the differences which he vaguely perceived had arisen between Callum and Lilias? He frowned heavily to note anew the connection of ideas. Surely, surely, the Highlander could not think that she preferred this man,--this stranger, of whom they knew naught save that his name was Tam Wilson, and that he hailed from some far-away region of Virginia.