Part 7

The trader was an unsophisticated man, unlearned and of a scanty experience of the world, his life having been spent for the last ten years in the treadmill round of a British factory in the Cherokee country. He realized his responsibility and he shrank from it. He looked at the impassive cheerataghe and received no light upon his course. He glanced out of the door.

A change had come over the landscape. The wind was astir,--the clouds were flying before it. Between their dense white masses the sky showed intensely blue, inconceivably high. The sun shone with a vernal brilliance,--it would not be unduly chilly by noon. Fragrance was in the air, so fine, so fresh, so illusive. One might say that it was the scent of the budding wild cherry; or, no,--the early blooming grape; or, stay,--the delicate aroma of the bark of a tree, touched to this distillation of incense by some happy combination of sun and wind and rain. The whole scene beckoned, lured, besought.

“An’ what for no?” cried Jock Lesly, his resolution taken at last. “As weel dee under the canopy o’ heaven as in an Injun’s cabin!”

Every precaution that could be devised was taken. The litter, fashioned under his directions, was furnished by Moy Toy munificently, freely, with the softest skins for mattress, with fine fur mantles for covering that were impervious to water in view of sudden rain, and with others, feather-wrought, light, and warm, to fend off all deleterious effects of exposure. A dozen tribesmen bore it, stepping lightly, easily, on their springy feet, unshod save for the elastic moccasins, and a dozen more mounted men accompanied it to act as relays, and, thus relieving one another, suffer no fatigue to retard their progress.

“A body wad think the creature was a Christian instead of a doited heathen!” Lesly said to himself, impressed by Moy Toy’s liberality and anxiety in this work of mercy.

For Moy Toy had despaired of the efforts of the cheerataghe to exorcise the demon of fever and save this life to the utilities of the Cherokee nation.

“It is some devil of the paleface that has taken hold of him,” the chief said sagely to the cheerataghe. “Let him have the white man’s charm worked on him!”

For if the French officer should die on the way to Ioco Town, would he not also have died at Tellico?

IV

THE moment that Laroche was recalled to life was never very accurately defined in his mind, so gradually did a full consciousness return. Nor was he sure how entirely delirium had held him in its delusions. His speculations were of a metaphysical tendency when he afterward dwelt, with a microscopic scrutiny, upon those phenomena of involved cerebral processes manifested in the sudden silencing of the French words upon his dreaming tongue, as it vaguely shaped the confused thoughts of a stupefied brain,--all upon one coherent impulse, on the sound of an English phrase spoken in an English voice!

That salutary monition abode with him, whether he slept, whether he waked, whether he lay in that dim border world of swoons between sleeping and waking. He was stricken dumb, although he could hardly be said to have heard, for he consciously heard naught. And if, he argued, these perceptions could have been so alert to the mere vocal vibrations of the air, the instinct of danger so keenly receptive, the will so strangely responsive to the demands of those supersubtle, unclassified faculties, although every voluntary function of the muscles lay prostrate, and every recognized process of the brain was paralyzed, did not this imply some curious duality of identity, an absolute independence of the intellectual life, unrelated to the bodily functions, since so complete a solution of continuity had supervened? It might have been that, though he accounted himself a mere blunt soldier and upbraided his mismanagement that had jeopardized the interests of the French mission, he was so complete a diplomat at heart that he could withhold with a nerveless hand, hear with a deaf ear, plot albeit with a swooning brain, and hush the babblings of delirium to keep a secret, of which at the moment he had no consciousness!

Thus, although his pulses ran riot, he continued to maintain a tense silence. When the tumultuous phantasmagoria of frenzy gave place to visions as vain but calmer, he found himself still mute, quiet, orderly, exact, mentally verifying with mathematical accuracy the relative measurements of a line of field fortifications, so designed that an attacking column might be enfiladed thence. “For nothing,” he said to himself again and again, “can stop an attacking column that is not enfiladed.” Later, he was considering the possibility of defending effectively a certain salient angle of an imaginary redoubt.

To prevent the enemy from carrying the redoubt by storming this too acute angle he began to mount a battery _en barbette_ in the dead salient. The doubt that now and again seized him as to the necessity of these labors was dispelled by the actual sight of the canvas walls of his tent about him, and therefore he would busily absorb himself once more in these duties, and actively prepared to defend the ditch of the redoubt by constructing there a solid _caponnière_.

The placid peace of the man who is consciously doing his best in his chosen vocation pervaded his whole system, mental, moral, and physical, and brought refreshing, curative sleep to his pillow. So definite a hold had this impression taken upon his mind, sleeping and waking, that one morning he lifted his head with a start of alarm. There upon the sloping canvas walls was a yellow streak, all the more vivid for the white glare of the cloth in the rising sun,--and how had he not heard the reveille? The echo of the bugle was in his ears, the molten, golden notes of the old French call.

A strong tremor ran through the elbow on which he had supported his head. Alack! no stirring, martial strain had summoned him. He lay back on his pillow, realizing in dismay and yet in surprise that the walls of the tent of his fancy were the dimity curtains of a bed, and he began to remember vaguely the chances that had befallen him and to seek the grace to be thankful.

“I will wait and see what cause for gratitude I may have,” said the unsubdued inner man, while his lips framed the verbal show of a thanksgiving. His state of mind might have furnished still more suggestive details of the possibility of a dual life in one identity.

Nevertheless he recognized the fact that as far as the bodily entity was concerned it was distinctly comfortable. Now and again he dropped off into short, luxurious naps, even between the stages of his investigation of his surroundings. In one waking interval he took account of the furnishings of the bed: it bore sheets, a rarity of the place and time so unexpected, so inexplicable, that it roused new doubts and anxieties as to where he was, what had befallen him, and what might yet betide. Still he could but finger them in pleasure and with a childish relish of luxury;--snow-white they were, of a heavy, fine linen smoothly woven, with the fragrance of the wood violets of the bleaching ground, and the freshness of the wind yet in their folds, as it seemed,--and once more he closed his eyes.

When he wakened again he had so far accustomed himself to the homely opulence of blankets and bedding that he was prepared in a measure for the night-rail in which he found himself clad, but not for its size. As he stretched out the voluminous length of its great sleeve and took account of its breadth of shoulder, “A big man in good earnest this was made for,--I shall take care to be friends with the monster!” he said.

He bethought himself suddenly of the English words that he had heard,--a mere sound and locution,--yet this was the only definite recollection that had stayed in his mind since the moment he had beheld the flying figures of the Choctaws speeding across the “beloved square” to the pettiaugre. He must bear a caution,--a Frenchman, and possibly liable to be accused as a spy! He lifted his wasted hands to his head: it was enveloped in a red nightcap, with a gay tassel swaying on its fez-like peak; and much he needed it, for the whole head had been shaved, sometime since evidently, for delicate tendrils of a new growth were starting there and he felt fibres moist and soft about his forehead.

A step sounded suddenly outside, heavy but cautious; a stealthy hand was laid upon the curtain; and as it was drawn aside the red face of a man of middle age, tall, powerful, flaxen-haired, with high cheek bones, a man whom Laroche had never before seen, looked in upon him. Grave, astonished, delighted, the stranger seemed,--with a sudden twinkle of comprehension in his blue eyes and an outburst of joy in his big voice that made the bedstead tremble on the uneven puncheons of the floor.

“Hegh, callant!” he cried, as their eyes met, “but this dings a’! Lilias! Callum!” he began to call over his shoulder to other inmates of the house in so stalwart a roar that it might have been heard half a mile. It easily penetrated the flimsy partitions of the primitive building, and the feet of those summoned were audible rapidly approaching. “Here’s the callant!” he exclaimed, as the door opened. “Here he is,--a’ himsel’ again!”

He had the manner of announcing the arrival of a guest, and Laroche easily divined, from the hiatus in his recollections, that he could hardly have been considered present hitherto, although visible in the flesh.

A young man, with less enthusiasm, but still an air of proper pleasure, partly induced by genuine gratulation upon so happy an augury of the termination of a serious illness, and partly in propitiation of the elder, whom it was evident he would have crossed upon no slight occasion, advanced to the bedside and declared that he was glad to see that the patient had recovered his consciousness and doubted not that he would soon be on his feet. This young man wore the Highland garb, from which Laroche inferred, somewhat quakingly, that he was of the British soldiery who had been active in this region during the previous two years, in the campaigns conducted by Montgomerie and afterward by Grant against the Cherokees, in which the Montgomerie Highlanders (the Seventy-Seventh Regiment) and others had participated, for at this time the national dress was proscribed except for those enlisted in British regiments. A barbarous garb the Frenchman considered it, hardly a whit in advance of the savage decorations he had been called upon to note at Tellico Great,--so strong were the international prejudices of those days. For in truth it was a manly and graceful figure appropriately bedight,--with swaying kilt, the short coat, the blue bonnet, with its bit of bearskin decoration. The young Highlander’s fair hair hung down thick and half curling from beneath this blue bonnet and lay in an effectively contrasting tint upon the collar of the red jacket, which constituted at that time part of the dress of the Forty-Second Regiment, and was worn with a red waistcoat. The latter, we are informed, was made over, in the governmental thriftiness, from the red coat after a year’s wear, while the plaid, furnished biennially, subsequently did duty cut down and frugally reconstructed into the filibeg. But if the wildernesses of the Great Smoky of that day at all resembled the tangled forest densities which still remain, the military tailor who refashioned any garments whatever from the gear that survived the marches through those brambly mountain jungles deserved immortalizing above all other knights of the shears.

The dark blues and greens of the sombre “Black Watch” tartan in Callum’s plaid and kilt afforded an added fairness to his locks. His florid complexion showed a fluctuating red and white. His blue eyes were large and well set, with lashes and eyebrows much darker than the shade of his hair. He had high cheek bones and an expressive mouth, with finely cut lips, red and mobile, often parted in the blithest laughter for very slight cause, and exhibiting two unbroken rows of strong, white teeth. His smiling face was as frank and honest as the sun.

Laroche’s sudden dislike of this young stranger surprised himself and dismayed him as well. For would he have experienced this emotion were the third member of the little group that stood by the bed different from what she was? Her likeness to her father might have served as an illustration of the apotheosis of humanity in a spiritual miracle. Jock Lesly’s flaxen hair, half gray, half tow, was golden in the glistening soft skeins of silk that swept upward from her brow in heavy undulations. The blue veins that showed so definitely in the temples could not have vaunted their delicate tracery through a skin less fine and fair. Here and there was a freckle, but a faint blush-rose bloomed over the whole cheek as if it sweetened the air. Her figure, draped in a sober, gray gown, was tall and strong, but a trifle angular, denoting more bone and muscle than exuberance of flesh. In fact she was frankly thin, although her face was so delicately rounded. No small rosebud mouth, but shapely, dainty, red lips, the upper deeply indented in the centre like the curve of a bow, opened over white, regularly formed teeth,--a mouth of beauty but of character also, whence might proceed sage household counsels, and words full of judgment, just reproof, and deserved applause. She was the ideal of a helpmeet. She seemed to Laroche the thought God had in mind when He made woman, before she so whimsically refashioned herself after her own feminine ideal. And if any man deemed that he needed help it was Callum MacIlvesty, and that the woman to assist him on the path of life was Lilias Lesly.

If aught of the cynical reflections that this discernment of the persons and predilections of the group afforded Laroche appeared in his worn and wasted countenance it went undiscovered, so great was their pleasure in the success of their ministrations and his happy prospect of a speedy recovery. They were all aimlessly laughing from sheer triumph; only there was a suggestion of moisture in the eyes of Lilias,--or were they always so liquid, so luminous, so deeply blue, so heavily lashed with those long, dark fringes.

“And ye’ll breakfast enow!” roared Jock Lesly heartily. “Lay the cloth here, Lilias. We’se all take potluck wi’ him!”

The young Highlander pleasantly seconded the hospitable motion, and the objection advanced by Lilias that the invalid was not equal to entertaining so much company was drowned and overborne in her father’s imperative orders.

“Aye, lass, ye ken how to care for a sick man, but this fallow is weel now an’ a proper lad, strong enough. D’ye think ye’ll hae him doun on spoon meat an’ gruel an’ sic like fripperies a’ his days! That’s aye the trouble wi’ the wimmin. They want to master ye! If ye are weel, they drive ye! An’ if ye are ill, they own ye! Na,--na,--lay the cloth,--an’ we’ll hear him tell his name an’ business.”

This suggestion placed Laroche upon his guard, but being of a quick and keen imagination and having a good sense of verisimilitude, he had his account of himself ready long before he was called upon to render it. In fact Jock Lesly was graciously disposed to be autobiographical himself, and in the course of his prelection was explained the unusual presence of a white woman in these regions at present; for the Scotch or English traders did not risk their families here, but left them far away in the safe precincts of the small white settlements or the coast towns. His daughter, Jock Lesly said, had heard,--and who could not hear anything “in sic a wild, ambiguous country” (to use his own expression), “where the news is carried by wild Injuns, wha lie, it seems, for the sheer purpose of provin’ themsel’s the children o’ the deil, wha is the father o’ lies an’ liars,--an’ a monstrous progeny he hae, to be sure!--a-weel, the lassie heard that her father--an’ that’s mysel’ an’ not the deil--had been ta’en doun wi’ the smallpox, an’ the bairn was worrited out o’ her life, mair especially as sae mony people--thae wild Injuns in particular--were deein’ wi’ the distemper, havin’ nae proper sense how it suld be treated. An’ sae the lassie started out for Ioco Town,--not that I hae forgiven Lilias for puttin’ hersel’ in sic a danger, forbye makin’ a fule o’ me, as weel as of Callum MacIlvesty also,--though _that’s_ a smaller matter. A-weel--Callum heard o’ her intention an’ hired a wheen o’ young packmen in Charlestoun--they being mostly idle at this season,--_he_ ca’s ’em ‘gillies,’--an’ started out with her, havin’ leave o’ absence to veesit his ’Merican relations, Callum bein’ a far awa’ cousin,--my mither was sibb to his mither,--an’ he overtook Lilias as she was about to come alane frae Charlestoun wi’ the under-trader an’ a packman or twa, an’ a lot o’ dour red deils of Injuns that could hae scalpit the haill party, gin the mind had ta’en them. An’ I as hearty an’ thrivin’ as e’er I was in a’ my life!”

He paused to emphasize the incongruity.

“But, lad,” resumed the joyous host, “a’ the bairn’s preparations for the sick that she fetched wi’ her on the pack-horse were na wasted at last,--for the Jeemes’s powder an’ the pills an’ the lotions an’ a’ thae dinged things she meant for me hae a’ gane into your inside, man, an’ the sheets an’ the curtains an’ sic-like were nae sooner unpacked than we clappit ye intill ’em!”

“An’ now will ye no tak a dish o’ your ain chocolate?” said Lilias, with a smile curving her red lips, “that we fetched a’ the way frae Charlestoun for ye, expressly, Mr.--”

Her father remarked her hesitation.

“Aye,” he exclaimed, with his mouth full of bread and meat. “Gie us your name, sir,--Maister--what?”

“Wilson,--Thomas Wilson,” replied Laroche, relying on the perfection of his English. But albeit an excellent linguist, he rejoiced in the discovery of their nationality as an additional pledge of safety, realizing that his English would better pass muster since they themselves spoke the language so ill.

“A proper name,--Tam Wilson,--I hae known a score of ’em,” said Jock Lesly, setting down the glass in which, following the old fashion, he drank something far stronger for breakfast than tea. He interpolated at this crisis a remonstrance with his daughter against the chocolate as a foreign kickshaw, protesting it “ower flimsy for a gude British stamach;” but the foreigner was secretly truly grateful for her persistence, for with the rising yet squeamish appetite of a convalescent, he doubted his capacity, even in the interests of his disguise, to forego the chocolate in favor of the ale and brandy with which the two Scotchmen moistened the meal.

“An’ whaur do ye hail frae?” Jock Lesly asked.

The question was sufficiently difficult of reply. Louisiana or the Illinois, in the French occupation, was obviously out of the question. Yet should the guest say Georgia or South Carolina, he might be exposed to conversation touching localities familiar to them which he did not know: people--citizens, as well as officials--with whom he must needs seem acquainted as were they; the names of ships or rivers or towns, all necessarily household words to one of the more southern provinces, yet of which he was densely ignorant.

“Virginia,” he said at a venture, “about Williamsburg.”

To his consternation Jock Lesly laid down his knife and fork, and he knew instinctively it was no slight matter that could check their activity. But for the fictitious glow that the hot chocolate had set up in his veins he might have succumbed to a rigor that had no relation to the vicissitudes of his disease.

“Now I hope ye are nane o’ thae Firginians[7] that latterly hae been tampering wi’ our Injuns, an’ invitin’ ’em to come for their goods to Firginia, an’ seekin’ to coup our trade out o’ our ain hands. Hae ye seen Governor Bull’s letter--Lieutenant-Governor Bull o’ South Carolina--Governor Bull’s ain letter to the governor o’ Firginia, man?”

It was well for Laroche that his cadaverous aspect, as he lay in bed, propped by pillows into a half sitting posture, his face almost as ghastly white as the voluminous folds of the night-rail--the scarlet flannel nightcap, with its gay and flaunting tassel accentuating his pallor--was ascribed altogether to the effects of illness. Much of it was doubtless due to his perturbation of mind and the conscious jeopardy of his position, although he managed to hold with a steady hand the cup containing his chocolate and to maintain a quiet, interrogative gaze as his eyes met the Scotchman’s eager blue orbs, and he replied succinctly, but definitely, in the negative.

“A-weel, man,” said Jock Lesly, the importance of the subject precluding the resumption of his knife and fork, “Governor Bull did set forth and make known unto his Excellency of Firginia that we of the king’s province o’ South Carolina had suffered much in the auld Proprietary days with thae bloody loons o’ Injuns, an’ had warked wi’ ’em an’ wrastled sair wi’ ’em, an’ had made unco gude friends wi’ several strong tribes on our borders,--Creeks, Chickasaws, an’ mair especially the Cherokees, till this late war,--all through the privileeges o’ the trade we had wi’ them an’ the restrictions an’ facilities of the licensed traders the government establishes an’ mainteens amang them, to furnish them wi’ a’ their needcessities, an’ powder an’ lead--a deal mair than is gude for them! An’ if Firginia draws aff this trade frae these distant tribes, for the sake o’ the bit profit to be had frae it, Georgia an’ South Carolina hae nae means o’ keepin’ thae blackguards o’ Injuns in order close on our settlements, whilk will be left to their mercies. Thae provinces would like be destroyed.”

He paused with earnest, convincing eyes, while the guest held his cup motionless and listened.

“Cain in the old days jaloosed his brother an’ for rivalry killed him, but I’se warrant even he wad na hae sold him fur a shillin’. It’s later times hae taught us better--or waur!”

“My dear sir,” exclaimed Tam Wilson, “you may rest assured that I am seeking no Indian trade for Virginia.”

Jock Lesly drew a long breath of relief.

“A-weel,” he said, easily placated, “his Excellency of Firginia answered and promised to let the Injun trade be as it was built. He had na seen the matter in sic a serious light, he said. No man could speak fairer. But I thought--I dooted--leastwise--hegh, man, what errand did bring you then to Great Tellico?”

“A matter of business,” said the French officer quickly. “Some of the Cherokees sold a lot of horses to our neighborhood near a year ago, and this spring most of them disappeared. It is said always that horses bred in the Indian country go back yearly to their old grass.”

Jock Lesly nodded his head in confirmation, his mouth again full, knife and fork plying.

“Is it true?--I doubted it. But I came with some neighbors as far as Tellico. I fell ill at Tellico,--and I remember no more.”

“They went off and left you!” exclaimed the young Highlander, with a touch of indignation.