Charles Egbert Craddock

“ She noted how the future of men like these is not with the future of the country. They were not to participate in the prosperity which their presence here might foster. While all the others looked forward they looked backward, or perhaps aside, as at a separate life. Such is the part a garrison must always play. She doubted if many felt it. With Mrs. Halsing, she, too, marveled if Captain Stuart felt the need of aught.
But Demeré, looking into the past as the tide of reminiscence rose, said to a sympathetic heart a thousand things of home. ”

“ So far-famed had he become among them, so high did they esteem his military rank, so autocratic seemed his power in the great stronghold of Fort Loudon, with his red-coated soldiers about him, obeying his words, even saluting his casual presence, that it afforded the most æsthetic zest of revenge, the most acute realization of triumph, to contemplate him as he stood bound, bloody, bareheaded in the sun, while the very meanest of the lowest grade of the tribesmen were free to gather round him with gibes and menacing taunts and buffets of derision. ”

“ MacLeod, restricted to the French language and his bit of Cherokee, feared that his interest might lead him beyond the bounds of the simulation their safety required; Hamish was silent, too, partly tamed by the halt which they now and then made on rising ground, when the chief would turn his keen, high-nosed profile, distinct upon the faint tints of the blue mountains beyond, his eagle feathers on his scalp-lock blowing back against the sky, and cast a sharp-eyed glance over the landscape to discern if perchance the search party, from which they had separated, was now coming to rejoin them. ”

“ She looked around at it, still leading the sleepy Fifine by one hand and only half hearing Hamish's enthusiastic sketches of the boys and girls in the settlement, with whom he had made fast friends. The snow was heavy on the roofs of the two log cabins and the shanty of poles that served as a barn, and lay in fluffy masses between the sharp points of the palisades and on the bare boughs of sundry great trees that Odalie had insisted should not be cut away with the rest in the enclosure or "girdled" like those outside in the field. ”

“ Idle savages lay sprawling about over the ground, sleeping in the shade. In the block-houses and towers and along the parade, where other braves shouldered the firelocks, the surrendered spare arms, mimicking the drill of the soldiers with derisive cries of "Plesent Ahms!" "Shouldie Fa'lock!" "Ground Fa'lock!" only such injury as bootless folly might compass was to be deplored, but upon the terrepleine in the northeast bastion several Cherokees were working at one of the great cannons, among whom was no less a personage than Oconostota himself, striving to master the secrets of its service. ”

“ Fort Loudon, hard by, maintained quiet and keen watch and strict discipline. The drums beat, the bugles sounded for the measured routine. The flag waved in the sunshine, slipping up to meet the dawn, fluttering down as the last segment of the vermilion disk slipped behind the dark, level, rampart-like summit of the distant Cumberland range, and the sunset-gun boomed till the echoes blared faintly even about the council-chamber at Choté, [213] where the warriors were gathered in state. ”

“ And while the flames still flared on the hearth, and the thumping of the batten and the creak of the treadle resounded most of the day from the little shed-room where Odalie worked at her loom, and the musical whir of her spinning-wheel enlivened all the fire-lit evenings as she sat in the chimney corner, the thaws came on, and brought the mountain snows down the Tennessee River with a great rushing turbulence, and it lifted a wild, imperious, chanting voice into the primeval stillness. ”

“ He walked to the loop-hole and looked far down from the projecting wall and along the parapet of the curtain and the scarp to the opposite bastion with its tower-like block-house.
Nothing—all quiet as the grave or the desert. He could hear the river sing; he could see in the light of the stars, and a mere flinder of a moon, [86] the clods of earth on the ground below,—naught else. For the douce mignonne, with her back all handsomely humped, had suddenly sprung aside and fled down the interior slope of the rampart into the parade and over to the cook's quarters neighboring the kitchen. ”

“ Oconostota broke in upon his speechless agitation in a smooth, soothing voice to remind him of the clemency he enjoyed in that his life had been spared, and only yesterday, even at the supreme moment of the discovery of the treachery of his garrison in the concealment of the powder. They had not acquainted Willinawaugh with their designs, for Oconostota himself would lead the expedition. (Stuart as a military man realized a necessity, that sometimes supervenes in more sophisticated organizations, which they felt of curbing the power of a possibly too successful and a too aspiring subordinate.) ”

“ The march was far swifter now than the rate that the settlers had maintained before the Indians had joined the party, and the little girl was added to the burden of one of the packhorses, but Odalie, light, active, with her native energy tense in every nerve, and with every pulse fired by the thought that each moment carried her nearer to the cannon of Fort Loudon and safety, kept step valiantly with the pedestrians. ”

“ O'Flynn leveled another, both men being of course invisible from without; as the young sentinel obeyed the order to openly lounge in the window and look toward Choo-qualee-qualoo he could see within the parapet that the gunners of the battery were standing to their shotted pieces, Captain Demeré, himself, in command. With this provision against capture, or for revenge, one might fear, rather than protection, Odalie took her way down the steep slope amongst the impeding stakes of the fraises, thickly sown, and looking, it might seem, like dragons' teeth in process of sprouting. ”

“ The choice of these two men was evidently specially judicious, and after the mysterious disappearance of each, being smuggled out of the fort in dead silence and the darkest hour of the deep night, the garrison settled down to a regular routine, to wear away the time till they might wake some morning to hear the crack of Montgomery's musketry on the horizon, or the hissing of his grenades burning out their fuses and bursting among the dense jungles, where the Cherokees lay in ambush and blockaded Fort Loudon. ”

“ In the days when Moy Toy sent his delegation to London, of which he and Atta-Kulla-Kulla were members, to visit King George, they had seen the myriads of people and had heard many great guns fired in salute to the princely guests, and had assisted at the review of thousands and thousands of soldiers.
And with the reminder of all these overpowering military splendors of his great enemy, Oconostota began to feel that he would be glad to secure possession of these few of King George's great guns uninjured, fit to bark, and, if occasion should offer, to bite. ”

“ She returned with a severe glance the laughing grimace of the boy, with which, despite his own fear but a moment ago, he had, in the mobility of the moods of youth, decorated his countenance.
"If it were not for you, Hamish," she said to him, "I should not be so terrified. I have seen Indians many a time,—yes,—and when they were [8] on the war-path, too. But to add to their fury by an act of defiance on our part! It is fatal—they have only to overtake us."
"What was I to do, Odalie?" said Hamish MacLeod, suddenly grave, and excitedly justifying himself. ”

“ As they fared thus along, Odalie noted the inflowing of that tributary, the Tellico River—how solitary, [67] how remote, how possible its loneliness had rendered the scheme of Willinawaugh. Some distance beyond appeared a settler's cabin in an oasis of cultivated land in the midst of the dense cane-brake; then others, now dull and dusky in the blue twilight, with the afterglow of the sunset redly aflare above in the amber sky and below in the gray and glimmering water ”

“ So Willinawaugh had set her to weave her toils about the young soldier and discover the truth from him, as he walked the officer's fine horse up and down, and the tall English Captain and the great warrior, Oconostota, smoked their pipes in the council chamber. Thus it had chanced that the unsuspicious orderly, free with his tongue, as a young man is apt to be in the presence of a pretty girl, told all that Choo-qualee-qualoo asked to know, as far as he knew it himself, and sooth to say, a trifle further. ”

“ Cherokee king's aspersions on Montgomery, Stuart's ever quick eye noted an expression on the man's face, habitually so blank and wooden,—he remembered it afterward,—an expression almost applausive. Then his attention was concentrated on the circumlocutions of Oconostota, who, in winding phrase almost affectionate, intimated the tender truth that, without waiting for these reënforcements, the enfeebled garrison could be overpowered now and destroyed to the last man by a brisk onslaught, the Cherokees taking the place by storm. ”

“ A huge Yule log, such as could not be discredited by any that had ever sent up sparks and flame at this sacred season, made the great chimney place one vast scarlet glow; the door of necessity stood open, although the snow was on the ground, and the dark, bare branches of the rows of trees left in military alignment, down the centre of the parade, whitely glimmered with frost and ice akin to the chilly glitter of the wintry stars which they seemed to touch with their topmost boughs. ”

“ The ball, for the cannon had been improperly pointed by some mischance, struck the side of the nearest block-house, and as its projectile force was partly spent by the explosion, the tough wood turned it; it ricochetted across the whole expanse of the enclosure, striking and killing an Indian lying asleep on the opposite rampart. A vast uproar ensued, and Stuart could have laughed aloud in bitter mirth to see Oconostota almost stunned alike by the surprise and the force of the concussion, timorously and dubiously eying the wreck. ”

“ Hamish gave but one sigh, bursting from an overcharged heart; then he was away at full speed in the darkness that was good to him, and the only friend he had in the world with the power to help him and his.
Captain Demeré that night was more truly cheerful than he had been for a long time, despite his usual port of serene, although somewhat austere, dignity.
"The boy has all the homing qualities you desired in an express," he said to Stuart. "He will come back to his brother's family as certainly as a man with wife and children, and yet in quitting them he leaves no duty to devolve on others." ”

“ How to accomplish this mission became a problem of an essential solution, and on the instant. Not a figure stirred of the distant Cherokee braves; not one man would openly advance within range of the great guns that carried such terror to the Indian heart. Stuart stood in momentary indecision, his head thrown back, his chin up, his keen, far-seeing gray-blue eyes fixed on the motionless Indian line. ”

“ One of the Indian women smiled in return, a bright-eyed demonstration, and suddenly Odalie remembered the young Cherokee beauty she had noted at the sally-port, watching the parade, the day after her arrival at Fort Loudon. The other, encouraged, began to speak, and to speak in French—a curious, dislocated patter. Asking how she had acquired the language, Odalie was informed that this was the squaw of Savanukah, and that he had journeyed as guide and hunted much with a French trader who had formerly dwelt at Choté, and hearing them talk the squaw, too, had learned. ”

“ A delicate vernal [190] haze began to pervade the air, and a sweet placidity, as if all nature were in a dream, not dead,—an expectant moment, the crisis of development. Now and again Odalie and Fifine would come to the door, summoned by a loud crackling sound, as of a terrible potency, and watch wincingly the pervasive flare of the great elastic yellow and vermilion flames springing into the air from the bonfires of the piles of cane as the cleared land was transformed from the cane-brake into fields. ”

“ Nature was in such blessed harmony, full of graceful analogy; a bird would wing his way aloft, his shadow careering through the sun-painted woods below; a canoe with its swift duplication in the water would fly with its paddles like unfeathered wings down the currents of the river; those exquisite traceries of the wintry woods, the shadows of the leafless trees, would lie on a sandy stretch like some keen etching, as if to illustrate the perfection of the lovely dendroidal design and proportion of the growth it imaged ”

“ He had not now the solace of solitude in which he might have rallied his faculties. On the buffalo rug on the floor Atta-Kulla-Kulla reclined and smoked his long-stemmed pipe and watched him with impenetrable eyes. Once he spoke to him of the preparations making without, selecting the men for the gunners of the expedition. Stuart lifted his head abruptly.
"I will not go!" he cried in sudden passion. "So help me, God! I will die first!—a thousand deaths. So help me, God!" ”

“ And indeed there was a sharp, wild squealing upon the air, and Stuart hoped that the beat of the dancing feet might be supposed to be of their making and the sound of the music for their behoof—for the dance of the Indians often heralds war and is not for sheer joy. "The parents bring them here and share their mirth. For this is the festival of the Child. Now your warriors are brave and splendid and terrible to look upon. If they go through the gates, the little children would be smitten with fear; the heart of a little child is like a leaf in the wind—so moved by fear. ”

“ The Indians, always gathering from their towns up the river to revel in this feast of color and spectacle of military pomp, so calculated to impress them with the superior capacity and knowledge of the arts of warfare possessed by the white race, had mustered in stronger numbers than usual and stood in rows about the walls of the block-houses or along the interior slopes of the rampart. ”

“ He caught upon his white wing and tail-feathers, as he flirted them, the clear radiance of the moon,—not a great orb, but sending forth a light fair enough to be felt in all that sidereal glitter of the cloudless sky, to show the faces of Odalie and Belinda and others less comely, as the ladies sat in chairs under the line of trees on one side of the parade with a group of officers near them, and the [263] soldiers and "single men" and children of the settlers filling the benches of the post which were brought out for the occasion. ”

“ But somehow the trivial personal belongings so bespoke the vanished presence that he yearned for Demeré in his happy release; the shaken nerves could respond to the echo of a voice forever silenced; he could look into vacancy upon a face he was destined to see never again. His jaded faculties, instead of reaching forward to the terrible future, began to turn back vaguely to the details of their long service together; as a reflex of the agitation he had endured he could not, in the surcease of turmoil, compass a quiet mind ”