Part 5

He held up the gauzy red scarf and with sundry swift passes of a scalp knife severed the fabric into dozens of shreds, sent lightly flying about the state-house like a flock of redbirds. Then whirling on his heel, he quitted the council-chamber and followed by all his tribesmen ran across the “beloved square” to the river bank, where the pettiaugre lay defenseless at his mercy. All the kegs of the precious powder were emptied into the stream before his design was dreamed of, and still he deemed he had sufficient margin for a running start from the pursuit he expected, for he paused in the woods to hang up the “war-brand.” This being, however, in a secluded place, it was not early discovered, and the first intimation that the Cherokees received of the depth of his resentment was the massacre almost to a man of a peaceful party of their tribesmen, offering no resistance, taken wholly by surprise, owing to the pacific character of the Franco-Choctaw mission to Great Tellico. This exploit achieved, Mingo Push-koosh and his escort, adorned with scalps and singing war-songs, made good their escape, with the wonderful Choctaw speed in marching, leaving the deserted Laroche alone and at the mercy of the frantic and infuriated Cherokees.

III

LAROCHE, abandoned thus among the Cherokees, was in the extremity of peril. Apart from their spirit of tribal cohesion, the strongest of national sentiments, all those more intimate ties of family affection, of municipal unity, and of neighborly custom, in which they were peculiarly bound, were insistently asserted in the calamity, as the massacred braves were all of Tellico Great. When the gory figures of the unarmed, unpainted youths, still limp and warm, not yet stiffened into the starkness of death, were borne into the precincts of the town, the wailing of the women and children, and the hoarse cries of fury and despair and grief of the men, filled all the bland, sunlit spaces of the morning, and were a heavy burden to the air.

It was with no definite sense of the wisest course that Laroche had not moved from the portal of the great state-house whence he had beheld Mingo Push-koosh, followed by all his braves, rush across the “beloved square” to the pettiaugre and accomplish the destruction of the powder. He was stunned, bewildered, as by the fall of a thunderbolt. Only afterward he realized that he had no choice. The craft still lay at her moorings, but his single strength could not have sufficed to float her, even if in the confusion he had escaped. He had a shrewd surmise of the secret source of the wrath of the Mingo, and he doubted if the jealousy of the Choctaw, once unleashed and dipped in blood, were less formidable than the wild frenzy of the Cherokees. Moreover, at their freest pace, speeding for their lives, he knew that he could never have sustained the gait of the marching Choctaws, and must eventually have fallen by the wayside or lagged to certain capture.

He began to appreciate, as he stood, an aspect in the accident of his posture which his craft recognized as savoring of more wisdom than he could have attained by his own mental processes. His isolation implied that he was no accessory to the crimes in which the mission had terminated. The desertion of him by the Choctaws augured scant value of his functions in the embassy, and still less friendship for him personally,--his safety, indeed, they disregarded. He began to hope preposterously, as his heart swung into more normal palpitations, that his nationality, his secret mission within the Franco-Choctaw mission, his obvious freedom from any conspiracy with the Indian ambassador who had so conspicuously abused his trust, might serve to protect him.

Then he perceived suddenly that he was arguing from the probabilities on a civilized system of ratiocination. For himself, he did not love the spectacle of suffering nor the smell of blood, albeit so skilled in the designing of lines of _tenailles_ and _en crémaillère_, in which men were to lay down their lives in much agony. His own development of barbarity was on a different basis and had a vocabulary quite distinct and scientific, his jargon of _trou-de-loup_ and _cheval-de-frise_ and _chausse-trappe_; and he watched with a very definite sentiment of reprehension and mental disapproval, as well as a deep and numb despair, the approach of a half dozen fierce, lowering-eyed braves, full-armed, who stood for a moment looking up at him and then seated themselves, obviously to remain, at the base of the mound, assuming the functions of a permanent guard.

In fact, Laroche had been unobserved at first in the clamors and confusion of the disaster, the departure of the horsemen on the heels of the flying Choctaw pedestrians, the ghastly return of the young Indians of the massacre, who had gone forth with all the imponderable lightness of life and joy in the morning and now were brought back in weight with death and woe. The first vague suggestion of the alleviation of the public calamity came with the stern thought of vengeance and its opportunity. In that moment the eye of one of the headmen chanced to be lifted to Laroche. The guard was dispatched in an instant, and whatever might have been the issue of an effort to escape, the possibility was now gone forever. He began to perceive that they would take no thought of an absence of conspiracy. He was one of the embassy--its accredited interpreter; he was also a Frenchman, and the Cherokees were still in open alliance with the British. Moreover, he was in their power, and _blood for blood_ was ever the Cherokee rule.

For a time he made no effort to appeal to his guards, even by a glance or a gesture. Hour after hour passed away. He heard the vague sounds, in the distance, of the chanting of the funeral songs; he perceived, undistinguished, colorless, meaningless, like shadows through a dark glass, the passing of the funeral processions here and there around the houses of the dead. Again and again there smote on the air wild outbursts of the protesting woe of the mourning, the note of incredulity, the appeal against injustice, and that pathetic plaint of a heart all bruised and tender--and yet in a sense he heard naught. He was conscious of a degree of quietude when the actual details of the interment were in progress within the houses, for with the Cherokees the dead were always buried deep, deep under the floor of their own homes, and a sense of extreme fatigue ached in his muscles. He realized how long he had maintained a standing posture there without a motion--a sentinel who habitually mounted guard his eight hours out of the twenty-four would hardly have been capable of such resolution. As his eye met that of one of the guards, he saw in the inexpressive face of the Indian a sort of appreciation of his strength of will that coerced the endurance of the flesh, and at last he spoke:--

“Moy Toy cannot think me to blame--why does he guard me here?”

They all gazed at him with a sort of concentrated fury. The racial hatred against the white man--ineradicable, unappeasable, now and again only pretermitted for a time in favor of some special individual--showed in their strongly marked, savage features, with the primitive passions of the rule of force and the thirst for revenge painted upon them in a breadth of expression that pigments could not emulate.

“Blood for blood,” one of them said, and spat upon the ground.

“If I were one of the Choctaws--yes! But I am French. I have done naught. They have deserted me. I am entrapped here. It would please them that you should shed my blood.”

There was a momentary silence under this logic. Then another of the Indians, always of a far greater intellectual pride than might be readily imagined, and keen and quick in argument, came to the spokesman’s rescue. He was the man whose eyes had applauded the prisoner’s endurance--a mere tribesman, of the rank and file only; he had a broad, animated countenance, a high, aquiline nose, a long, upper lip, and a distinct accentuation of the lines of his features. He wore the scanty raiment of the lower grades of the Indian, but the careful and elaborate tattooing of blue, red, and green indelible paints disposed about his limbs, in which he must have spent much arduous labor, had almost the effect of long and elaborately embroidered hose and gloves. He had a shirt of buckskin, devoid of beads or ornaments, save a fringe about its edge, but which seemed remarkably plain in contrast with the decorations of his arms and legs. He leaned upon a gun of very doubtful intentions, unlike the smart, British “Brown Bess,” with which the tribe, however, was generally armed. With a vivacious air, he demanded of the Frenchman if he had forgotten “Ablaham” so soon.

“Abraham?” said Laroche vaguely.

“The white man’s poor memory! It was his treaty he forgot, usually, but now he had forgotten too his religion. He had forgot Ablaham--the great white chief whom he was telling Moy Toy about yesterday!”

Laroche remembered, with a pang as for a folly, an effort at the conversion of the ignorant savage. Yesterday--only yesterday!--he had sought to explain to Moy Toy the plan of salvation and to enlist his interest. He laughed aloud in bitter mirth--a short, hollow note, and then must come contrition and a mutter of prayer. Abraham and Isaac--how far away they seemed!

“But, my friend,” he said, “the injunction to shed innocent blood was for a purpose--to test the faith of the great chief; and the blood of the innocent was not exacted. I have done nothing. I only am deserted, caught here as in a trap.”

“Likewise was the ram whose blood was shed,” declared the specious Indian, his eyes flashing fire,--“caught as in a trap by the horns in a thicket. And the ram had done nothing.”

The Frenchman was fairly silenced; the others, hardly comprehending the discourse, not having burdened their minds with Abraham and his experiences, conceiving him to be an Indian agent, or in some other position near the governor of Louisiana, Georgia, or South Carolina, only discerned from the facial expression of the two men that the Cherokee’s keen wits had come off victorious in the encounter, and despite their gloom, they made shift to smile at each other in ostentatious amusement, and in derision of the purblind white man.

Laroche’s anxiety and apprehension were hardly assuaged by the recollection of the blood-offerings among the religious observances of the Cherokees, intimately connected with their system of government and warfare, which had recalled strongly to his mind associations with the Mosaic dispensation. Many minute requirements and ceremonies savored of the Hebraic ritual, and in their distortions had impressed him as survivals of actual customs, and were thus more significant than the legends found among the tribes betokening Scriptural suggestions and supposed to be the result, _disjecta membra_, of the teachings and traditions of Catholic truths which Cabeza de Vaca left among the Southern Indians.

Laroche sought to compose his mind. He was a soldier, and would muster all a soldier’s courage,--a Christian, whose hope was in no help of man. He would calm himself and await the worst or the best, as God should choose to send it, with the serenity of one whose life is, after all, not his own. As he stood there in the wide glare of the sun, it seemed to have grown speedily and strangely very hot. His eyes were on the mountains far away, that through the silvery, vernal mists, forever shifting, belied their stanch and massive solidities by a shimmer like some wavering, blue sea; not a breath of air was in the deep, green shadows of the darkling ranges close at hand; the river, a wide blade of steel without flaw, bore the polish of a mirror and a blinding glitter. Suddenly a cold chill struck through him. At first it crept along his spinal column, slight, insidious, vaguely shivering; then in its icy thrall he shuddered again and again; the drops that fell from his brow upon his hands were ice cold, and as he looked down, wondering, at his long, thin fingers he saw that they were blue under the nails to the first joint. Some change in his face had attracted the attention of the Indians. They were all gazing up at him in surprise, as shudder after shudder went over his features, pallid even to blueness. He instinctively put up his hand to his brow, and he found that even to his cold fingers its touch was like marble. He was obviously very near death, done with the world and with worldly pride, but he was still a soldier, and his pulses beat to a martial point of honor. He could have died with shame, albeit the spectators were but savages; for he thought this manifestation purported the subjection of fear, and that thus the staring Indians recognized it.

Averse as they were, they accounted him no coward. In truth, his stanch, compact physique and his bold spirit promised good sport at the torture, and they had discussed with one another from time to time the various details of the anguish which his strength and courage would enable him to sustain, and which sometimes weaker and fainter hearted men eluded and despoiled by dying prematurely. They could hardly explain the change in his complexion and expression of countenance, and only wondered while they looked, and presently it passed away, leaving the flesh of a ghastly, uniform pallor, flabby and listless.

But Laroche had hardly recovered his normal temperature. He was suddenly weak and tremulous. He could no longer sustain the standing posture. In another moment he would have fallen. With his winning affability and gay grace, that became his ghastly, stricken face as a wreath of flowers might a death’s head, he remarked that since they were all sitting he would take the liberty of sitting too, and ran down two or three of the grassy steps of the mound and there dropped upon the turf, half reclining, one elbow on the step above him, supporting his head in his hand, and with his limbs stretched out at length across the stairs below. The Indian guard at the foot of the mound did not stir, save that the acquaintance of “Ablaham” placed a finger ostentatiously on the trigger of his loaded gun. Laroche looked at him with a laughing sneer that taunted him to do his worst. The slug of the charge would have been too merciful.[6] There was no intention in the threat, and the Indian laughed like a roguish child detected in a bit of mischief.

The sky was reddening at last and Laroche, looking over to the far west, felt as if that incarnadined glow in the heavens was rising in his veins as the sun went down. It was not the red reflection on his face, but the blood mustering close under the skin when he again changed color. He felt it racing and rushing through his veins, ever quickening, ever wilder.

His mood changed. He had been saying to himself that it was no matter when or how painfully he died. He wished that he might see a priest--the good Père François; he caught himself hastily, remembering that piteous death of the father. Alas, when and how painfully have died many, many of the Order of Jesus, here, there, in every clime! He said to himself that he should be proud that it fell to his lot to emulate the mortuary example of those undying missionaries, that yet in the flesh died so hardily.

“_Quibus dignus non erat mundus_!” he declared in swelling phrase, _ore rotundo_.

But with the sudden surging of his fevered blood he protested. They,--God knew he wished to detract no whit from their credit,--but they were spiritual-minded men, many convent-bred, ascetic, he had almost said superstitious, solicitous for the martyr’s crown, with a talent for dying, and a positive genius for remitting to everlasting opprobrium throughout all the ages their misguided murderers.

He broke off from these reflections with a sudden, loud, hilarious laugh that echoed far through the quiet town on whose death-stricken ways the dusk was gradually descending, and brought his Indian guard to their feet with an abrupt spring, staring at him with vague wonder through the gloom.

His eyes, meeting theirs, were large, dilated, curiously bright. There seemed no recognition in them. He did not answer when they spoke, but shifting his posture slightly went on muttering to himself; his mind thus beyond the control of his will, he formulated more candor than his disciplined judgment was wont to recognize. They were spiritual-minded men, he reiterated, the Jesuit martyrs. For himself,--he was a soldier, not a martyr. Dying was the last thing a soldier should do,--and once more his foolish, frivolous laugh rang through the melancholy glooms of the bereaved town. He was not fitted to die thus,--the prey of unreasoning devils called by complaisance savages, to whom he had been sent on a mission of importance to French politics. His grave, his honorable grave, awaited him on some stricken field of battle. He had thought a hundred times how it might come,--in the rebuilding of some destroyed bridge which the enemy--_peste_! he always destroys the good bridges!--or perhaps in pushing a parallel closer and closer to the lines of the doomed defenses,--a ball from the _chemin convert_ of the fort might find a vital spot. Would he shun it?--fear death?--“_Je te fais mes compliments_!” He stood suddenly erect and saluted. Then he collapsed upon the ground. A soldier’s hasty grave on the field of battle,--he coveted it. For shrift,--the pressure of a good comrade’s hand might bid him Godspeed. A soldier has few sins to confess. Little is required of him--he is merely a soldier--all body and heart--a mere bit of a soul! But these priests--these spiritual men--they who can profess so much, why should they fail?

A light was presently glimmering in the dusk,--clear, luminous, a pyramidal flare approaching rapidly, then pausing as in uncertainty, flickering through the blue darkness, and once more drawing near.

“The lanthorns of the burial parties,” he said, contemplating with a gentle melancholy the battlefield of his fancy. “Many a fine fellow coming to-day that must be carried to-morrow.”

Then swiftly repeating a series of measurements and mathematical calculations, he rose as the light paused at the foot of the mound and the flare of the torch fell upon the face of Moy Toy, summoned hither by the weird sound of that strange, hilarious laughter, and minded to advance the hour for the prisoner’s torture and death, since he must needs be so obtrusively merry in the face of their distresses and disasters.

Laroche recognized him vaguely, but naught of the circumstances which environed him. He lifted his voice as he pursued his train of remarks, expressing the jumble of his ideas.

“Un bastion, Moy Toy, avec un ravelin,--et une fraise d’épine ne serait pas inutile!--là,--là,--sur le bord de la rivière,--quatre-vingts toises de distance,--pour enfiler les colonnes,--la fosse,--à la portée du canon,--donnez dix-huit pieds de large au parapet,--et puis,--et puis,”--

He ran down the steps and laid his hot hand upon the arm of the Cherokee chief, who stared aghast at this manifestation of a strange distemper.

It was well for Laroche that the Cherokees did not feel it incumbent upon them to preserve the grace of consistency. If he had continued in health, he would assuredly have been put to death with tortures, in satisfaction of the iniquities of the embassy of which he was a member, but his wandering mind, his evident delirium, precluded his knowledge of his own fate, and thus robbed the torture of its choicest delight, the fear and mental misery of the victim, as well as his bodily agony. A postponement of the sentence was hastily agreed upon, and the patient, still declaiming upon the advantage of one system of fortification and contemptuously disparaging others, was gently conveyed, for he could no longer walk, to the stranger-house which he and Push-koosh had occupied, put to bed on the elastic cane-wrought mattress, and the medicine-men were summoned to exorcise this strange demon of fever which had possessed the guest.

The skill of these primitive people in the art of healing was said to be very considerable. But in this instance the Cherokee physicians found themselves at a loss. Laroche had duly absorbed the atmospheric miasma of the swampy country near Mobile and New Orleans, which, had he remained there, might have occasioned no trouble. But upon his sudden removal it instantly manifested itself in a virulent type of malarial fever, all its poison elicited by the pure, clear air of this mountain region. Hence this salubrious clime has been called “the unhealthiest country in the world” by suffering subtropical wights who would not be at rest at home and could not be well elsewhere. This theory, exploited long since those times, was not familiar to the two cheerataghe, who rattled their calabashes at the fever demon with hearty good will. They administered the varied decoctions of herbs famous as febrifuges. They repeated aloud their ancient incantations, both mandatory and contemptuous, bidding the malign spirit depart. They arrayed and painted themselves in frightful guise to terrify the fever demon, and decorated with buffalo horns and buffalo tails, they rushed roaring from right to left in front of the bed, and when this proved futile, from left to right. They subjected the patient to sudden immersion in hot water, and then in cold, and again to a steaming process, placing him in an oven-like structure of heated rocks, over which water was poured,--all without avail. The Cherokee magicians began to look very grave and ill at ease, for a dark cloud was ominously gathering on the brow of Moy Toy. All at once Moy Toy had come to covet the life of this man. It must be captured from death. He must be snatched from the already open grave. Not for the satisfaction of exacting that terrible penalty, as one of the treacherous Choctaw embassy; not for the keen delight of the spectacle of his death by torture. Any unlucky French wight captured from the Illinois country; or some helpless English body, unknown or of scant note, wandering away from a kindly colonial settlement and heard of never again; or even a stanch Indian of one of the inimical tribes,--Muscogee, Tuscarora, Seneca,--any mere man, in short, who had blood to spill, and bones to break, and nerves to writhe might furnish this sport. With this man’s death more was lost,--a subtle, keen brain, technical military knowledge, practical military experience, a tongue of wondrous craft trained in various speech, a secret cogent influence with the French authorities at New Orleans,--all calculated to subserve the Cherokees, and this a trifling kindliness would reinforce by the claims of gratitude, a claim paramount in the Indian scheme of ethics.