Part 29

WHEN very quietly in the sombre depths of the midnight Callum MacIlvesty, according to orders communicated abruptly to him by the commandant, groped down to the river bank, the vague current barely glimpsed by the scintillation of some star in the ripples soon obscured by the scudding clouds, he took his seat in a boat with only two dark figures, motionless, unknown, invisible, for traveling companions. The river under the shadow of the banks was as black as Styx, and as silent as Charon was the boat’s crew. On the opposite side, the Indian town of Keowee lay hushed and absolutely still. Once a dog barked, apprised in some subtle manner of the enterprise going forward, for there was no noise of movement, no word spoken. At the fort only the window of the guardroom was alight, and one listening might hear or fancy the vague footfall of the sentry walking his limited beat. The gleam from the window was but a twinkle in the gloom, and only now and again a star shone out responsive from the clouds. The muffled oars did not rattle in the locks; there was hardly a perceptible impact as the blades were immersed in the water. The vague sense of gliding in the darkness away, swiftly away, from all the familiar world, from all that represented his experience hitherto and civilized life, whither he hardly knew, with whom he could not imagine, impressed Callum MacIlvesty’s mind with a very definite repugnance for his errand, and for all the secrecy and mystery with which it had been invested. He wondered, as the sense of distance increased, as the shadow that marked the site of the town merged indistinguishably into the darkness, as the twinkle that indicated the fort glimmered afar off, then was extinguished utterly, whether his invisible and silent companions knew more of him than he of their identity.

“Captain Howard needna hae feared I’d set mysel’ a-talkin’,” he said to himself, realizing that the party had been thus unexpectedly and silently hustled off in order that naught might transpire of their mission, nay, that their absence might not even be noticed at the fort, till the scheme was well on its way to execution. “I’m nane o’ the sort to be given to idle clavers.”

His companions might have this failing, however, he reflected, and thus he drew his plaid about him and wrapped himself in silent cogitation as in the garment.

Each of the party was himself too surly, or perhaps too proud, or it may be too doubtful of the others to express curiosity. Without a whisper, hearing each other breathe, now and again touching one another, a knee, an elbow, in moving in the strait quarters, they slipped like a phantom craft, a crew of shadows, past the wharf and the trading-house, past the group of canoes and pettiaugres anchored or beached there, past a great Indian camp of the peltry hunters, down and down the river, the current aiding the regular strokes of the oars and bearing them swiftly on.

Naught was roused along the banks except an owl, that hooting after them sent a gibing echo full of quaint vocables far along the reaches of the darkling river; and once a great splash in the water close at hand startled the oarsman, and the craft shot further out toward the centre of the stream. It was a wolf marauding in the woods and springing into the water’s edge, but although he howled for a space naught seemed to hear save the solitary night and the stars now venturing forth and now lost in the tumult of the unquiet clouds. The dank wind grew chillier; the darkness more dense; then came a semblance of vision in which one realized rather than saw great gusty bursts of rain and erratic flaws of wind striking across the surface of the river.

At length two vague pallid strata of dull clear sky revealed to Callum an old cornfield, a vast plain whose evidence of agriculture was but a memento of the past; a charred skeleton of a burnt Indian town, now without a tenant, a relic of the Cherokee War; the brown rain-soaked forests beyond with voluminous clouds bulging down among the treetops; the steely expanse of the river swirling under the fall of the torrents and the rush of the wind; and opposite to him, crouching in the bottom of the boat, Mingo Push-koosh!

The Choctaw, too, had been keenly watching for the earliest glimmer of dawn that should discover to him the faces of his silent comrades, and Callum, although knowing naught of the name or rank or nature of the man, recoiled from the look in the Indian’s eye. Push-koosh stared angrily yet maliciously at his changing expression, then daunted a trifle by the arsenal of arms which the Highlanders of that day bore, dirk, claymore, pistols, musket and bayonet, marking the stalwart strength evinced by the soldier’s attitude as he lay at his ease in the bow, the Mingo smoothed his ruffled crest, as if he would treacherously bide his time.

“Does Captain Howard count me no human that he suld send me campaigning wi’ a panther?” Callum asked himself in amazement.

“The big Capteny thinks the two white men will make short work of poor Prince Baby,” Push-koosh reflected, and when he addressed himself to rearranging his arms, as he shortly did on the pretext of protecting them from the weather, he reloaded his pistols with balls previously dipped in poison and thus rendered deadlier than before, by reason of the extraordinary aptitude which the Indians possessed in toxicology.

Only one other was of the party,--the English soldier floutingly called, from his oft-told experiences in Spain, the Señor,--“Sinner” Kenney. To him the Highlander seemed hardly less savage than the Choctaw. The vast wilderness, in this strange and solitary duty, impressed him as appalling; the character of the hardships and dangers to be encountered was not what he had expected; his spirits had sunk immeasurably low.

All day long they held their course in the chill invisibilities of the mist and rain, two now rowing continually, with the third to lighten the labor by alternating regularly with the others. The night passed in the same dreary fashion, each sleeping by turns, that the craft might make all the speed possible. Little good-fellowship prevailed. The Choctaw hated them both alike with the rancor of his race and his prejudice against aught that was British, which he had acquired from his service with the French; and yet they were formidable soldiers, and their prowess awed him. “The Sinner” scorned the Choctaw as altogether beneath his notice, although he repented swiftly any word or act that might be accounted overt aggression, for the Indian was obviously dangerous. Connected conversation was practicable only between the two white men; but “Sinner” Kenney resented the Highlander’s repute of superiority to his station, and was by turns flippantly offensive in manner or surlily rude. There being no solid substratum of good-heartedness and comradeship in him, Callum felt that there was no pulse in common between them that might atone for the English soldier’s boorishness and coarse manners, repugnant to a man of refined breeding. MacIlvesty therefore had little or nothing to say except as regarded the expediting of their progress, and “the Sinner’s” alternating jocularities and impertinences failed for the most part to take effect by reason of the impassiveness of the Highlander and the lack of comprehension on the part of the Choctaw.

After they had entered the Savannah River “the Sinner” began to flatter himself with the prospect of meeting other river craft--this broad stream being a highway of trade--and of seeing denizens of the world hailing from the region below; but his hopes of social interest and cheery converse were dashed by the rain and the mist which closed down impenetrably. More than one settlement they passed wrapped in invisibility in the cloud, as if they themselves were some undiscriminated element of the atmosphere. When at last the vapors began to shift and the sun to shine with a warmth all at variance with the calendar, as it was interpreted at Fort Prince George, where November, chill and drear, had worn away, they were once more in the density of the wilderness; and suddenly one day, Push-koosh, who was steering, gave the boat a deft turn, sent it swiftly shooting in to the bank, letting it run up a little inlet. Then he sprang out; and as it was lightened of the weight of Callum, who had stepped on shore, the Choctaw pulled the craft up on land with the amazed “Sinner” sitting in it.

He protested. “_Diablo!_ Are we to leave the boat here?” he cried aghast, looking about him at the pathless subtropical wilderness.

“This gude man kens the way,” said Callum with frigid staidness. “Here is the captain’s chart he gied me his nainsel’.”

The round head of the experienced English foot-soldier bent over the paper. There was no mistaking the place. The inflowing of a little tributary on the Carolina side, the proximity of a ridge hard by, a series of prehistoric tumuli at no great distance, all sufficiently identified the locality. And what was that indicated toward the southwest, across the breadth of what is now the State of Georgia--a path marked out in red ink? But there was no corresponding suggestion on the face of the tangled wooded country.

“_Voto á Dios!_ I wish his ‘nainsel’ was in perdition! An’ this is the ‘gude man’ who knows the way! He looks ‘gude’ enough to guide us to hell! _Dios mio!_” suddenly catching himself, “the Injun doesn’t understand the lingo, does he? _Cielos!_ he is a fearsome beast!”

Callum imperiously cut short his complaints by striking off through the swamp. Push-koosh, whose outlook at life had brightened since discovering that his comrades were each as obnoxious to the other as to him, and that all three were of a mind only in antagonism to the personnel of the expedition, did not hesitate to imitate the example. With the peculiar easy gait of the Choctaw he set out at a speed that bade fair to try the mettle of the tall Highlander.

“Sinner” Kenney lingered. He looked up the broad, sunny expanse of the brimming river, then over to the Carolina side, noting the bright, soft aspect of the wintry world that would fain emulate the tender, restful peace of early spring. The flowers were not dead, it seemed to say, only asleep, and this bland zephyr might well rouse them with its sweet blandishments. The ripples played within an oar’s length of the boat. He could with his single strength slide it down into the water and in five minutes be rowing briskly on his return trip to Fort Prince George. He would doubtless be able to devise some plausible explanation that would pass muster; for instance, that he had been accidentally separated from his companions; that the Highlander carried the chart and compass; that thus lost in the trackless wilderness his only possibility of extrication had been to take the boat and forthwith return up the river to Fort Prince George.

And indeed as he gazed adown the shadowy region of the swamp on the Georgia side, he thought it looked much like a country in which a man might easily disappear never to return. Albeit heavily wooded, it was in great part submerged with water of varying depth. At the nearest verge he marked a long loglike protuberance, which he realized was an alligator half sunken in mud and ooze. A white heron gleamed amidst the dusky aisles, standing motionless among those curious roots of the cypress called “knees,” which projected high above the dim surface of the black water wherein they grew. The long stately stems of the tall trees themselves were reflected, pallid and columnar, by myriads from the glimmering dark expanse of the swamp, thus duplicating the densities of the half submerged forests, funereally draped with hanging gray moss in endless festoons. It seemed to stretch out illimitably, this nondescript world that was neither navigable nor yet practicable as dry land. And what might be the result of a failure to compass a fair passage?--and what were the conditions of the region on the other side? All were dependent upon the accuracy of Captain Howard’s chart of this untried, unknown world, and the good faith and fair dealing of Mingo Push-koosh! And still gazing, motionless, intent, “the Sinner” hesitated.

Down the vistas of the forest the soldier’s eye was suddenly caught by the vanishing figures of the Highlander and the Choctaw, and the extraordinary speed and ease of their gait struck his attention and roused his emulation.

“Do they think they can beat me on a forced march--that Sawney, stepping like a crane, and the Choctaw with his little bandy dogtrot?”

He critically appraised their powers. His professional pride was enlisted. He suddenly set his hands one on each side of his trig little body, and like machinery fell the sure even lengths of the military double-quick; and so, speedily overhauling his companions, he went with them down into the depths of the dank forests.

The sun rose high above the river and gilded the tip of every lustrous dark wavelet and illumined the live oaks with an emerald splendor. In the shadowy swamp where the “snowy” heron stood among the cypress knees, the hanging wealth of gray moss caught the enriching beams and glistered, fibrous and silver, from the branches of the tall white marble-like pillars of the trees. The little boat still lay empty, motionless, within an oar’s length of the dancing water.

“Sinner” Kenney thought of the craft many times afterward, and sighed for its relinquishment as for a folly; for the dreary, mutinous, fatiguing experience set at naught all the numerous previous hardships of his chequered career. The physical stress in itself was great. The Choctaw, who set the pace, could keep the same gait all day and cover the same great distance day after day, a task under which the two white men languished and flagged and almost succumbed. It would have been impossible to support the contempt of Mingo Push-koosh in their failure, and his triumph in his own superiority, had it not been for the counter-opportunity to jeer in turn, which was afforded them by the oft recurrence of the watercourses in the Creek country; for Push-koosh could not swim. Sometimes an opportune tree uprooted by a storm afforded a footbridge for crossing a stream. More frequently the rivers were of a breadth that rendered this impossible, especially since the autumn floods from the mountains had swollen them beyond all precedent. Push-koosh must have drowned or turned back but for the assistance of his comrades, unwillingly given, by no means a friendly service, and only in the interests of the expedition.

With a hand on the shoulder of each stalwart swimmer, Push-koosh, limp with terror and horror, was propelled through the water. He was spared much, however, in that he could speculate only vaguely on the meaning of “the Sinner’s” fleer while in transit, half intended to frighten the Choctaw and half from natural and involuntary malice. “_Vamos poco á poco, amigo!_ Let’s drop him now, Sawney! Here is a deep hole! _Porqué no?_”

They suffered much from the weight of their arms and provisions, for Captain Howard had wisely decreed that each should be his own commissariat and none the burden bearer of the others, and when the Highlander lost his salt in the river neither of the other two would give him of their store, and the food of Callum MacIlvesty was bitter for a more æsthetic reason, as he ate it unsalted beside the fire at night, each man cooking for himself. They wrangled much, despite their lack of verbal facilities; they quarrelled over their chart, their compass, the possibilities of shortening the way by deviating from their instructions and essaying a more direct route, and sometimes their relations during the day would become so strained that as they lay down by the camp-fire at night, they were fairly afraid of one another, lest malice develop into menace. The Scotchman had his national quarrel with the Englishman, and called him “pock pudding,” and threatened to “knock his harns out.” The Englishman derided the poverty of the Scots, and told gleeful tales of the lack of sophistication of “Highland recruities” in his experience, in comparison with whom, he declared, Push-koosh, the Choctaw, was a man of the world. Push-koosh laughed alike at the Highlander’s kilt and the English soldier’s scarlet breeches. “The Sinner” twitted the Choctaw for his artificially flattened head; and they all would decline to mend the camp-fire to keep off the wolves until green eyes would be glistening close at hand in the underbrush, and the growl that heralds the pouncing spring would sound threateningly on the chill night air. But the preëminent triumph of Push-koosh came when they encountered more savage denizens of the woods than wolves. His was the craft to detect the approach of other Indians; to avoid rencontre; to erase all trace of their passage through the woods; to slip like a ghost, invisible as it were, between camps under cover of darkness; to skirt with infinite skill the verges of Indian towns. Once they were followed by a dog, baying discovery at every step, at last coming so close that only the discharge of an arrow stilled his telltale cry. Once, strangely enough, a little child tottered along the deer path after them, with some vague mistake of identity in its infantile brain, and Push-koosh, being minded to thus effectively stop its approach,--“’Tis but a Muscogee,” he said,--Callum placed his pistol at the Mingo’s temple, and even “the Sinner” threatened reprisal. In the midst of the wrangle some aboriginal instinct of danger stirred in the adventurous three-year-old, and after one long dismayed, open-eyed, and open-mouthed stare, it turned about on its fat legs and took its tottering flight homeward, too young to recount what it had seen or to understand what it feared.

As they neared the southern confines of the Muscogee country the Indian towns became more frequent, and detection by bands of Creeks coming and going through was imminent. This was the extreme crisis of peril, for naught could save the lives of the two British soldiers and their Choctaw guide if captured in this expedition through the country of the inimical Muscogees, who now were impatiently awaiting the signal of their French liberator to rise with all the united Indian tribes against the English rule.

Now it was that the individual traits of each of the party were asserted in such wise as to demonstrate the wisdom of the commandant’s choice of the personnel of the expedition,--the long-headed Callum’s cool and adroit adaptation of even disasters to the common advantage, and his steady endurance in the face of dangers; the resources of the pluck and experience of the English soldier; the woodcraft, the knowledge of Indian wiles and Indian counterwiles of the Mingo. The hardy, invincible courage of all three animated them like a common pulse, and they clung together now with a unanimity of sentiment that might hardly have been expected from their earlier lack of all the sterling qualities that make up good comradeship. Howard had expected only one of the two white men to endure to the end, to survive the hardships of the march, the inimical chances of environment, or internecine strife amongst the three; but the trio were still together one afternoon when they emerged from the woods on a bluff overhanging the Flint River on the east, and there lay prone upon the ground, silent, not so much as moving a muscle, invisible, save to the floating American vulture circling high in the air in the majestic curves of its strong flight. The opposite banks were low and fringed with woods, and beyond and above, the red sunset of the lonely aboriginal days deployed through the sky like a pageant. Naught broke the infinite stretch of the wilderness, no shadow of cloud impinged on the glister of the river. That the foot of man had ever touched these deep reclusive solitudes only a great mound, artificially constructed, silent, imposing, surmounted with forest growths nurtured by the summers of a thousand years, attested his presence, his hopes, his griefs, and the futility of all. Somehow its outline, imposed with such significance against the range of purple hills in the distance, stretching afar off under the red and amber sky, added a melancholy to the languorous burnished haze, the slow down-dropping of the royal sun, so splendidly vermilion, and bespoke a mysterious past and a future to come as unrevealed.

The air was bland with all the suavity of a southern winter. The foliage had changed as the successive stages of their journey had led them on, as though they bore with them some benignant, embellishing secret that blessed the world as they advanced. No more the ice-girt bare bough, the sere leaf flying before the blast. The live oak, the magnolia, the laurel, lifted splendid redundant foliage to glitter glossy in the sun’s last rays, and the flutter of the paroquets made the pecans merry. At a distance a palmetto tree stood out against the sky, all solitary, as if some invisible sandy beach stretched below. The subtle, alluring fragrance of the anise-tree was filling the air, and the mocking-bird sang in the eternal spring, elated, even though the night was coming on apace.

The woods had grown a gray purple; the river chanted a sylvan rune; a star came out in the vermilion sky and shone aloft with a clear white glister; and suddenly in the red and gray and green crystal lines of the stream an alien sound was borne.

A sound it was as of paddles, rythmically striking the water. As it grew nearer, louder, a deer that had led her fawn down to drink on the opposite shore lifted her head, snuffed the air, stamped with her feet all together, and with a bound was off, her fawn beside her, a mile away, while still the concentric circles that her muzzle had stirred in the water widened to larger circumference, while still the echo of the fawn’s vague bleat of alarm and surprise floated softly to the bluff on the summit of which the three emissaries lay silent.

And at last, rounding a point, came a fleet of canoes, gaudily decorated, an incident of vivid color beneath the flaring sunset, and as vividly reflected in the smooth water, tinged with all the secondary splendors of the evening glow. Beneath an umbrella-shaped fan of eagle feathers artificially mottled with crimson reclined the French officer Laroche, recognizable by his keen Gallic features, his arrogant military alertness of pose, albeit painted and arrayed with all the aboriginal splendor appertaining to his adoptive state as a great “beloved man” of the Cherokee nation. His weapons were a silver-mounted dirk and ivory-handled pistols, while fully armed stalwart Cherokees officiated as bodyguard and paddled the boat. The fleet shot so swiftly along that three cautious heads, craftily lifted, with cautious eyes keenly peering, could with difficulty distinguish the fact that the other canoes were manned by Muscogees; the song that they half chanted, half recited, was a pæan of greeting to the beloved officer of the great French king and compared him with favor to sundry celebrities of much note and value of their own tribe.