Chapter III: Part 3

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.

So overwhelmed had been the wary Moy Toy’s brain by the surprise, the fury, the grief attending the catastrophe of the massacre of his young tribesmen, that these considerations were not even dimly presented to his alert perceptions till the moment that Laroche dashed down the stairs of the mound and impetuously flung himself into his host’s arms with his delirious babble of military works and munitions of war. It was at first but a vague impression, a doubtful suggestion. The crafty Indian mind dwelt upon it in the days that came and went. Time seemed to embellish, to perfect it. And now it had become the dearest boon of fate, and the Indian could not, would not forego it. For this man could design and build a fort that could withstand a British assault! He could so dispose the Indian facilities as to enable them to defend it. He could by reason of his connection with the French government secure such munitions of war as would complete its armament. An impregnable stronghold in the wilderness, with scientifically handled artillery, could set at naught British aggression and hold the country.

Turned in whatever light, the idea presented a perfect symmetry. It was like a many faceted gem. And thus the two magicians, men of herbs and simples, found their equanimity shaken and their capacities seriously hampered by the continual presentation of Moy Toy’s imperious countenance at the door of the stranger-house, and the sight of his agitation and anger that the cheerataghe had failed to exorcise the demon of fever and work a cure. Therefore they besought him to leave the sufferer to their ministrations; for his angry countenance caused their hearts to weigh very heavy within them, and his sharp speeches gave great offense to the demon of fever, who had never within all their experience conducted himself in the wayward, troublous manner of his present manifestations.

“But the man will die!” said Moy Toy, looking down in angry despair at the wasted face and form, as the restless head of the patient turned from side to side, always weary, vainly seeking rest.

“Is he the first?” asked one of the cheerataghe. For like a physician of civilization, he by no means guaranteed the continuance of life by virtue of his science.

It was very honestly and earnestly exerted, and both he and his colleague felt all the virtuous rage of sustaining a grievous injustice when Moy Toy said, with a rancor that surprised them (for quarrels and unkindness to one another were almost unknown in the tribe, the utmost placidity of temper and mutual forbearance being _de rigueur_), “You promised rain,--and behold at this season of the year a drought lasting six weeks, and the planting of corn delayed till a famine threatens, and not a drop till to-day.”

“A visitation! a visitation! because of the sins of the people and their hardness of heart!” cried the two magi in a breath.

Wherein they improved an advantage over the faculty of to-day.

Moy Toy silently gazed down at the rolling head and the fixed, absorbed eyes bent steadily on some phantasmagoria of the fever. He noted the weakness of the once clear, strong voice,--the definite, trained enunciation had sunk to a husky mutter. Still Laroche babbled of military operations, for now and again Moy Toy caught the phrases “quatre mortiers--Coehorn--champ de bataille--barils de poudre,” although the rest was unintelligible, for now he spoke continuously in French.

“He must live! He must live for the Cherokee nation!” exclaimed the chief, with the insistence of hoping against hope.

One of the cheerataghe had a fine, steady, acute eye, a hideously painted face, with the aspect of a bedlamite, arrayed as he was with buffalo horns and tail, and with his body stuck over with wings of owls, the calves of his legs hung with a dozen garters of rattling bell buttons, and a long-handled gourd filled with pebbles in his hands, which were covered with bear’s paws. Perhaps the patient’s delirium could present nothing more grotesquely, absurdly frightful.

“You, Moy Toy,” he said, in his grave, sonorous, sane voice, “you have given offense to the demon of fever. For when the sun is rising the man revives; he will take drink, although he cannot eat; he will speak Cherokee, softly, softly; he will close his eyes and sleep. And then come you!--with a troubled face, and a harsh voice, and an eager step, and a fierce hurry! And the demon of fever is angered, and the fever grows quicker, and more eager, and harsh, and angrier than you! And it rises and rises till the man will not drink and cannot see, and has no speech but a shred of French and screams for dreams that are without sleep!”

He looked to his colleague, who gravely nodded his fantastic head in corroboration.

Moy Toy silently studied the face first of one of the magicians, then of the other. Although immeasurably superstitious and credulous, he was yet grounded in craft and suspicion. And, in truth, perhaps he was not without justification; the cheerataghe, like more modern disciples of Æsculapius, doubtless often attributed to other causes disasters consequent upon a lack of skill or its misdirection. In this instance, however, the value of the stake at hazard, the imputation of the malign personal influence of his presence, a vague indignation that he should be esteemed obnoxious to any being--even a demon of fever--rendered Moy Toy peculiarly alert, watchful, disposed to exact to the extremity of the possibilities.

The two cheerataghe, as his glance once more sought the pallid face, the ever-turning head on the pillow, looked anxiously at each other. For the face seemed death-stricken. The next moment they took sudden hope. A change, a vague, indefinable change, quivered over it. The jumble of French words faltered on Laroche’s feeble tongue. With unexampled resolution, he pressed firmly his silent lips together. And in that silence the wary Indians heard what had come first to his ears. Even in the dullness of fever and the frenzy of delirium, he had interpreted its significance, so momentous it was to him. A voice it was in the broad spaces of the “beloved square” without, a bold, hearty, roaring voice, speaking the English language with a blatant Scotch accent.

The three Cherokees gazed at one another in tumultuous and contending emotions. They experienced much gratitude that the spark of perception intimated they might still hope. They could hardly repress their admiration of the finesse, the courage, the mental balance, that enabled Laroche to perceive the crisis, interpret its meaning, and meet it with a sane judgment,--his self-control, which even in the thrall of fever could curb the infirmities of that weakly, babbling tongue, and silence the self-betrayal of the French speech upon it. All their excitement, however, was subordinated to the triumph in his craft that stimulated their own emulous resources. He was indeed in great danger. Emissaries of the French among the Indians, having done so much to instigate and maintain the late Cherokee War, were peculiarly obnoxious to the British authorities. In fact, rewards had been offered for their scalps, and by the late treaty the Cherokees themselves were pledged to arrest and surrender these enemies of the English. Moy Toy, making a gesture imposing secrecy, stepped out of the door to meet the visitor, who was clamoring as loudly and boldly in the “beloved square” as if he were in his own byre.

“Hegh, Moy Toy!” he cried bluffly, breaking away from the “second men,” as the subordinate authorities of the town were called, “how’s a’ wi’ ye, man?”

He was a tall, heavy, awkward fellow, with a boisterous, assured address, a broad, red face, light almost flaxen hair, plaited and tied with a leather thong in a queue, arrayed in buckskins but with long cowhide boots, and enveloped in a great match-coat, for it had been raining heavily, and the drops still clung upon the tufts and fibres of the cloth. His cap of coonskin, with the tail as a pendant, was pushed back from his brow, revealing remarkably straight, regular, and well-formed features and shrewd, blue eyes. He held under his arm a stout horsewhip as a companion rather than a weapon, for his pistols were in the holsters on the saddle of his nag, which, drenched to the skin, hung down its head where it stood unceremoniously hitched to a stake whereto was sometimes bound a victim for the torture. The guest made no pretense of adapting to the Indian ceremonials the manners in which he had been bred, as was the custom of strangers and traders generally, or of recognizing any princely arrogations on the part of Moy Toy. He advanced with great, muscular strides toward his averse host,--who visibly winced from the overpowering redundancy, as it were, of his presence,--seized upon the limp hand of the Indian, and crushed it in his cordial grasp as if Moy Toy had been also a bold Briton.

“How’s a’ wi’ ye?--an’ what d’ ye hear frae Charlestoun?”

There was scarce similarity between this hearty, warm-blooded entity and a snake, but Moy Toy, of his own volition, would have touched neither except upon necessity or in the way of business. The fibres of his hand tingled with the consciousness of the detested impact long after the trader’s unwelcome grasp had relaxed and his manual energy was expending itself in aimlessly cracking his whip at the sand of the smooth spaces of the “beloved square.” There was a spark of smouldering fire in the eyes of the Indian, a tense restraint in the muscles of his shoulders and his straight back, as if he would fain hold himself under strong control. Albeit his interlocutor spoke English he understood Cherokee, and Moy Toy replied in his native tongue; thus each talked without solicitude, for each was comprehensible to the other. The Indian said that he had no news from Carolina and inquired in turn, but with scant show of interest, “as to the Muscogee?”

“I begin to think a’ thae carles are dead!” exclaimed Jock Lesly, with a vigorous snap of the whip. “They were looked for to join the Chickasaw and the English agen the French away yon to the south. But deil ane o’ them hae minted a word yet!”

The Cherokee’s stately dignity, his cautious, reserved speech, contrasted strongly with the Scotchman’s unsuspicious plainness, as he waited with an air of expectation. If the Indian had had news, he would not have bartered it with the trader, nor indeed had the trader repaired hither for what he could hear. This mutual realization embarrassed the pause, yet Jock Lesly still sharply cracked his whip at the sand and hesitated as to what he should say.

With all the thrifty instincts of the canny Scotch pioneer of that day, with all the bold, bluff courage of his vigorous personality, Jock Lesly had been the first, and as yet the only trader to venture back within the remote mountain region, whence the fury of the terrible Cherokee War had driven all mercantile enterprise. Indeed, the treaty was hardly signed before he was again in the place that had known him of yore, his trading-house rebuilt, depending for his safety partly on the treaty and partly on his utility to the savages, his popularity among them, and his conscience void of offense against them.

“I hae had as muckle o’ the rack an’ rief o’ the war as ye,” he was wont to say, “an’ the Lard kens I wad wuss to be canty and quiet enow.”

As he stood looking aimlessly about, he noted that the ranges were all full of mist between the domes, and from the soft densities of its white, fluffy masses those eminences rose in sombre, purple hues and massive effects against a pale gray sky, along which lay horizontal clouds, of a darker, denser gray. The river, with lace-like films of mist hanging in the budding green willows and pawpaws of its banks, had the tint of burnished copper. The great trees of the limitless forests, and those gigantic growths around the town, dripped with moisture as they hung down their sodden branches about the newly washed boles, the bark so dense of color as to suggest the effect of being freshly painted. A dull day it was, and the atmosphere, devoid of all elasticity, seemed almost too lifeless to breathe. He broke at last from his dubitation and began in his neighborly wise:--

“A-weel, a-weel, Moy Toy, there hae been a wheen idle, feckless loons frae your toun o’ Tellico down to Ioco Town aboot my trading-house. An’ there they lifted a few trifles frae the stock,--but I’se no grudge that,--a few bit duds. But then they slartered a couple o’ sheep,--an auld yowe and a yearlin’.”

Moy Toy’s face grew dark with anger, and yet almost kind with concern.

The good-natured Scotchman hastened to qualify. “They never carried aff the meat nor yet the pelts,--they scalpit the twa puir beastises first, an’ then cut their throats. I’m no the waur for the lack o’ mutton, but”--

Moy Toy’s countenance of amazed disfavor, astounded at the account of this curious emprise, coerced sudden intelligibility.

“Jus’ a wheen feckless laddies aping their elders,” explained Jock Lesly, doubtfully. Then with an uneasy laugh he added, “An’ the bairns cam hame wearin’ the scalps at their belts. I chased them a’ the way with the powney.”

Moy Toy did not laugh. Indian children play as do children of other nations, reducing to the circuit of their narrow round--a juvenile microcosm--all the methods and events of the elder world. But this exploit transcended the limit of verisimilitude and entered on the realms of the verities. The small banditti unchecked would soon venture further and bring upon their elders anger, retaliation, embroilment, with the trader, and premature fracture of the treaty.

“They shall be dry-scratched,” said Moy Toy promptly.

“Oh, wow, man!” exclaimed Jock Lesly sharply, as if he had been suddenly pinched. “Na,--na,--not dry-scratched! Odd! I could na sleep in my bed if the hempies were dry-scratched for me!--they ran sae supple--the knaves! It is an unchancy, ugly thing, that dry-scratching! Cuff the bairns weel--or gie them a flogging they’ll remember. Man alive! flogging is healthy for boy or beast! I’ve had it a thousand times frae my auld daddy, God bless him! Flogging is what’s made the British nation what it is,--but dry-scratching,--I’d die of it mysel’, now. Oh, man,--oh, man,--flog ’em a little,--but dry-scratched--oh, wow, wow!”

He caught at the arm of the august Moy Toy, who was more accustomed to order the torture and burning of Christian captives than the punishment of a few children who had offended against the municipal law. He made no sign and stood as adamant, but other Cherokees, who had joined them, were smiling and looking at each other with the softened countenances that express a gentle ridicule. Despite their friendly scorn, the kindly trader’s deprecation of the punishment of the children and his wild and earnest plea in their behalf could not fail to commend him to their tolerance, and went far to explain a sort of popularity that he had enjoyed among them. They knew that the little drama of the storming of the sheep-fold and massacre of its inmates was too significant to pass without notice, and for this very significance the punishment decreed was to be immediate and sharp, to teach the youngsters where fun ends and serious fact begins. Indeed Moy Toy himself saw to the preparations for the capture and condign penance of the miscreants, who, having returned from the war-path scathless, were now in full swing of a mimic celebration of victory, the triumphant scalps in evidence, and all the wide-eyed children of the town in joyful participation.

“Deil hae ye, then, for a fause-hearted, unceevilized tyke as ever lived!” exclaimed Lesly, as the chief drew off from his grasp. “Egad! I can ne’er abide to hear ’em skreigh like that,--wow,--wow!” And clapping his hands to his ears, the Scotch trader fairly ran off as the first shrill plaint of protest rose upon the air.

Now it was a point of juvenile honor to bear this kind of punishment as stoically as might be, and a severe dry-scratching, always carefully adapted in ferocity to the age of the delinquent and his capacity to support pain, usually drew forth a tear or two and sometimes only murmuring sighs. The habitual gentleness of the savages with their children doubtless convinced the rising generation that the punishment was only intended for their benefit and no whit administered in anger or tyranny. Therefore in submitting with a good grace they were contributing so far as in them lay to their own moral culture, and were ambitious of the stoical poise, perhaps to make the penalty as salutary as possible and go as far in reform as it would.

The two little Indians were easily stripped of such semblance of garments as they wore, and as they were being bound to the stake they craftily set up a wild and poignant shriek upon seeing the Scotchman in full flight across the “beloved square,” being apprised by the comments of the laughing bystanders of his intercession in their behalf and his aversion to the sight and sound of their woe. This had considerable justification, for thus bound and helpless they were sharply scratched from head to foot repeatedly with an instrument formed of snake’s teeth fastened in the end of a stick.

Because of the unusual commotion with which the affair had been invested, no one noticed that the refuge to which the Scotchman, familiar enough with the place, bent his steps was the stranger-house. He burst in, and started back astounded at the figures of the cheerataghe arrayed to frighten the fever in such manner as might have frightened the devil. Then the trader’s eyes fell upon the white man lying helpless on the brink of the grave, as it were, the victim of the fever.

“Lord save us!” exclaimed Lesly, with a sudden change of countenance, “wha hae we here?”

The two cheerataghe, unaware of the very disconcerting effect of their own professional appearance, themselves showed every sign of fear, incongruous enough with their terrifying aspect. In fact they could scarcely have been more alarmed had Satan himself appeared, for they were unacquainted with him and his reputation, while quite well aware who and what was Jock Lesly. The presence of the French emissary here was a breach of the treaty lately renewed, under which the Cherokee tribe traded with the British, and a menace to the privileges promised to the Indians under its stipulations. They hardly knew how to reply, and the abrupt entrance of Moy Toy was like a rescue from mortal peril. The chief had bethought himself suddenly of the possible suspicion of the stranger’s presence here that might be casually conveyed to Jock Lesly’s perceptions, while free in the town unguarded and unwatched. Anything so complete, so inexplicable, so irrefutable as his intrusion and the evidence of his own eyes the chief had not anticipated for a moment, and his ready resources of subterfuge failed him for the nonce.

“Puir chield! I doubt na he is in the dead thraw!” the trader muttered, his compassionate instincts uppermost. Then impressed by something unfamiliar in the cast of the features, he asked doubtfully, “Is he frae the colonies,--or overseas?”

Laroche had been divested of his fine French uniform when he had been brought here ill; it had been carefully put away in view of its future use by his captors, being an official garb, for the crafty Moy Toy fancied some occasion might arise when it would serve a diplomatic turn. Moreover the gold lace and fine cloth were much too dazzling, considered merely as booty, to be spared to the prisoner as habiliments in which to be ill or tortured or buried. In the varied experiments of the cheerataghe, contending with the rigors of the chill following the fever, Laroche had been clad in buckskins, supplemented now and then in the convulsions of the shudders and shivers by one of those feather-wrought mantles that attracted so much attention from the early travelers in this region, the effect of which was pronounced “extraordinary charming.” There was naught to indicate his nationality or his estate as captive. Every evidence of care and solicitude environed the patient, and Moy Toy’s explanation seemed obviously genuine.

The sick man had come to Great Tellico, the chief said, with some of the Cherokee tribesmen who had been up to Virginia, and being taken ill they had left him to recover while they went their various ways homeward. He did not ask the man’s name of them, thinking to learn it from himself. He had been only a little ailing at first, but now one hardly knew what to make of him.

Jock Lesly seated on one side of the cabin on the divan, with his hands on his ponderous knees, his head bent a trifle forward, gazed thoughtfully across the room at the fevered patient, as not so long ago the Choctaw Mingo had sat and glowered at the recumbent frame then sunken in sleep.

“He is gaun to dee!” the trader remarked dolorously, at length, and the words, bespeaking his own fear, fell with a crushing force on the hopes of Moy Toy.

Jock Lesly drew a long and labored sigh. If the sorrows of the little dry-scratched Indians--wicked varlets--could take such hold upon the sympathies of that frank, compassionate heart of his, how the sight of this tragedy racked him,--this valuable life going out in exile, among savages, with not one intelligent, civilized effort made to save it.

“Gin I had him ance at hame!” he cried, in futile aspiration, “I doubt but what Jeemes’s powder might wark a cure!”

“Carry him there! The demon of the fever may not dare to cross a stranger’s threshold!” cried Moy Toy, with a sudden inspiration. He was thinking very rapidly. If some untoward chance should reveal the secret of the nationality of the man, which even in delirium he instinctively guarded, why Jock Lesly and his household were practically alone here, hundreds of miles from any English settlements, and accidents were lamentably common in the distracted Cherokee country at present,--so frequent, indeed, that the discovery might go no farther! “The Cherokees will aid their guest. The brothers of the tribe will rejoice to bear the burden of a litter,” he continued. “The demon of the fever maybe does not know the way to Ioco Town and cannot follow!”

Jock Lesly, heeding little of these hopeful schemes for confounding the demon of the fever, sat doubtful nevertheless and dumfounded. A vague sentiment of suspicion had been lurking in his mind,--first, that the Indians had not expected him to discover so unusual an inmate of their stranger-house as this white man, and that he and his status were not as represented. Then as Moy Toy so freely and instantly relinquished his custody, the trader experienced as vague a doubt if the patient had had fair play among them, since they were eager to get rid of him and of such responsibility as his care imposed.

“The puir Injun!” Jock Lesly said to himself reproachfully, “if I’ll suspicion him o’ ane thing I’ll e’en doubt him o’ the contrary.”

The man lay as in a “dwam,” to use Lesly’s expression. The trader crossed the room, felt the temperature of the forehead, noted the dull, opaque eyes, and laid his hand almost paternally upon the light brown hair of a fine, silky quality, dense and curling.

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?”