Chapter IV: Part 4

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.

“Wow, man,--what fearsome looking worriecows be thae medicine-men,--thae cheerataghe! But Moy Toy was kind and helpful, though fine he liked to get rid of ye! That was what made me jaloose that mebbe you were meddlin’ wi’ the trade.” Lesly recurred to the subject.

“How do thae Injuns come by sic prodigious fine horses?” demanded Callum MacIlvesty, effecting a diversion with more delicate tact than might have been anticipated from his lowly station and coarse garb as a common soldier. Laroche began to understand that the Highlander, despite his position and rude dialect, was of a higher social grade in his own country than these compatriots of his, and that their “far awa” connection with his family was a source of pride to them, albeit the relation of wooer and wooed had compassed a certain reversal of the natural order of precedence. It occurred to his quick mind immediately that one of the many individual disasters involved in the national calamities of the Scotch rebellions of 1715 and 1745 was represented in the impoverishment and exile of this scion of a family of degree, perhaps even of high birth, for the young man used their vernacular evidently by reason of association and lack of education rather than station. He had sundry unmistakable marks of a highly bred gentleman, despite his evident poverty. Laroche knew that certain such, serving as soldiers of fortune, held commissions in the foreign armies of Europe, while a few others, more destitute of money and influence, could be found as “private men” in those Highland regiments recruited by the British government for service in America against the French and Indians, and officered in several instances, strangely enough, by men who had recently themselves been arrayed in arms against the dynasty they now supported.

“Their horses come frae the Spanish barbs that De Soty an’ his men left amang them--an’ I wuss we had naething waur frae the dooms meddlin’ Spanish than their cattle. Lord, sir, the lies they tell the puir Injuns!--that the British are determinate to sweep them aff the face o’ the warld!”

“The Spaniards are na sae kittle as the French,” said Callum MacIlvesty.

“The French,” rejoined Jock Lesly, bringing his clenched fist down on the table,--“the French are the deevil! Did ye notice, lad, how mony o’ the Cherokees can speak a little French,--nae mair than a ‘polly voo’ or sic like,--but sae mony!”

Laroche was conscious and out of countenance. So weak he was he could ill resist the strain of anxiety. “I did not notice--I was there at Tellico so short a time--what am I saying?--I do not know how long I was there nor how you happened to find me!” But he could not divert his host from the subject.

“As sure as you are an unsanctified sinner thae gabbling, blackguard French bodies hae been again meddlin’ wi’ the Cherokees an’ their trade,” declared Lesly solemnly. “Moy Toy was too polite by half,--onything to be rid o’ me,--dry-scratchin’ the weans that kilt my sheep till their screechings wad hae melted a heart o’ stane! An’ when I begged him to let me ha’ the loan o’ ye for a while, he happed ye in a’ his fine furs. I had to be gey carefu’ in returnin’ them a’.”

So they were within reach of Moy Toy and the town of Great Tellico by an hour’s travel, perhaps, or two. Laroche felt his heart sink. He had not counted on this possibility nor on the capacity of the Indians to keep his secret. Nay, so capricious was the temper of the Cherokees that he could not be sure of their will to conceal the fact of his nationality and his connection with the Franco-Choctaw embassy. Even his own mission, the confidential and private assurances of the French government which he had conveyed to Great Tellico, might now be maliciously divulged as a means of currying favor with the British,--since the utility of the promises he had made seemed a thing of the past and the prospect which they had presented had faded like a mirage into thin air. His face, with these thoughts in his mind, showed so sharp a change that Lilias, alarmed, rose with a protest. Even Jock Lesly permitted himself to be convinced that the session of breakfast should not be unduly prolonged, and Callum MacIlvesty shook up the pillows and drew the curtains, and the Frenchman sank down in silence--not to sleep, he stipulated within himself, but to ponder, to devise, to plot.

He slept unaware, unadvisedly, peacefully as a three years’ child. And he dreamed placidly and in satisfaction. Moy Toy came and drew the curtains, he thought, and looked at him with keen and friendly eyes, and with a significant finger on his lips. When he woke at length, so far had the bodily man got the better of the intellectual entity which led together a dual existence that he felt scant care for aught,--his detention, the French interest, Moy Toy’s possible disclosures,--if but he had a sup of that mutton broth, the enticing odors of which permeated the whole house. As he himself, with his thin hand, pulled aside the curtain that he might call to Callum MacIlvesty to beseech a share in that delectable burden of the family board, he burnt his wasted fingers against the hot bowl which Lilias was in the act of bringing to the bedside, and he hardly could wait to join in the laugh which the two Scotchmen set up in triumph on the recovery of his appetite.

If it could make them happy to see another man eat, he ministered lavishly to their felicity in the days that ensued.

At first he was unsteady enough on his feet when he was permitted to quit the haven of the bed. He could only make short voyages, as it were, from one chair to another, catching at everything that came in his way for support. But although of no great strength or stature he was of a good, compact physique, and once “on the mend,” as Jock Lesly expressed it, he progressed rapidly. He developed to his surprise a sort of luxurious inertia; he would fall asleep after dinner on the shady porch, his head against the doorpost. Naught in Ioco Town was so lazy save an old collie sleeping at his feet in the sun. His inaction extended to his mental processes,--he revolted from thought. He would not address himself to consider his plight, his jeopardy, the future of his mission. In fact all his faculties were instinctively quiescent, facilitating recovery. He felt even that he had joyfully dispensed with his old troublous identity. As Tam Wilson he was a new man, with no plans, no past, no obligations, no imperative military duty. The pioneer garb of buckskin, with its many fringes and leather belt and coonskin cap, that he was constrained to wear aided his release from himself. It was like being in some new world, this freedom of the ways of the household, this transition into the identity of a man who had no past, no secrets, no duties, no future. A joyous, kindly fellow he was, too, and all who looked on him liked him.

“This is what I should have been, uninfluenced, unhindered; Tam Wilson is really I,--unhampered by circumstance,” he said to himself.

His haunts were chiefly about the dwelling, which was situated near the trading-house and in the very centre of the Indian town. The traders--of whom there had been but very few in the whole region, each always in great isolation, none of whom had now returned except Jock Lesly--were allowed by the Indian municipal authorities, so to speak, the “second men,” the choice of erecting dwellings at a little distance from the towns or in their midst, if this were deemed to conduce to the greater safety of the white inmates of the house, thus under the immediate protection of the headmen of the village, for whose behoof the trader was licensed. The Indians being often at war with other tribes, especially the northern savages, this method of hovering under the wing of the Cherokee strength, both civil and martial, commended itself to the prudence of the trading folk. But the aspect of the little Scotch home, with all its suggestions of exile, devoid of a loophole within or a palisade outside, with no defense save the uncertain faith of the red savages who swarmed through the surrounding village, was pathetic in its isolation, its unique dissimilarity, its effect of captivity.

A vine, only a trumpet vine, hung luxuriant over the eaves and sent tendrils astir above the lintels of doors and windows. Shining pans were suspended to take the air and the sun against the posts of the porch. Piggins, crocks--blue, brown, and yellow--ranged themselves in vaunting cleanliness on a window shelf outside the sill. Motherly hens pecked about the steps, and a coop of slats, built in the form of a peak, restrained the activities of one who might have led too far a brood of the newly hatched, mere balls of fluffy brown and yellow down, endowed with motion, that flickered in and out of the crevices. Often in her gray-green dress the golden haired Lilias sat here at her homely flax wheel, while in the “beloved square” a company of braves were marshaling for a northern expedition against the Shawnees, singing their war-songs, painted for the war-path, the fullest expression of the terrible upon which the eye might rest. Sometimes there would be races or exhibitions of strength in the game of “ball play,” when hundreds would assemble from other towns to witness these diversions. The visitors, lured by the report of something uncommon at the trader’s dwelling, would come after the more exciting events of the day and stand outside and gaze upon her with insatiable curiosity. They would watch the revolutions of the whirling wheel and the flying thread. Her deft white hand, her unfamiliar, smiling face, her strange, golden hair were all points of interest. They would listen to the whir of the spinning and the vague sound of her voice, as she hummed low a weird old song which she often sang about a “gyre-carline” and her witchlike doings of “lang syne.” The men expressed no surprise, it being a point of honor with the Indians to have known all things always. They would invariably turn away without a word or a sign. Not so the women! The fashion of attire it was that served in an instant to denationalize them. From silent amazement they passed to whispered comments as they stood in buzzing groups; then to open questions; to shrill exclamations; to an unmannerly yet kindly frenzy of inquisitiveness. Sometimes a girl would step gingerly forward, touch the slipper and the stocking on the slender foot,--then fall back with a hysterical twitter of mingled delight and ridicule. The vagaries of the mode, as it was understood in Charlestown, the fashion of the white kerchief about the shoulders of Lilias, the pleated folds of her dress, were of endless interest to the young Cherokee coquettes, and kept them grouped long about the porch, and Lilias’s pink and white dimples continually playing in her cheek.

Somehow this curiosity concerning her was displeasing to Laroche. He wished Lilias were at home in Carolina. This was no place for the rooftree and the ingleside. He always distrusted the savages’ protestations of peace and professions of friendship. He was happier when they were all gone and the little spinning wheel with its tuft of flax stood close by the window in the “spence,” as the Scotch household called the living-room. There the puncheon benches and the “creepies,” as the stools of blocks of wood were dignified, had a gossiping way of clustering around the hearth of flagstones, where an ember was always kept alive in the great chimney place, being renewed night and morning, as a fire was deemed salutary for the invalid. Its glamour held gay Tam Wilson loitering there as long as the little wheel whirled and the green shadows of the newly leaved trees without flickered across the sunshine of her hair. Sometimes her knitting needles clicked and shimmered in the firelight. Sometimes she compounded and stirred with a long spoon and a burning red cheek the contents of saucepans for his behoof, then laughed with frolicsome scoffings at the celerity with which he disposed of them. He and the two Scotchmen exchanged experiences and argued on political or religious themes, and throughout Tam Wilson supported his character with a verisimilitude that would have won him credit in the histrionic profession, and like the others took in good part the trenchant remarks having a personal application with which she saw fit to comment. He fell into the habit of holding the skeins of yarn while she wound the thread for her knitting. So adroit and persistent was he in thrusting himself forward for this duty that he almost supplanted the young Highlander whose coveted boon it had been. Indeed Callum MacIlvesty openly sulked, taking no blame that he was the slower or the more inexpert swain of the two in the proffer of assistance. And so far had the identity of Tam Wilson submerged that of the diplomat, the soldier, the ambassador, that he felt a great and irrelevant joy in the sight of the young Highlander, thrown back on the opposite settle, each arm extended at full length along its back, his eyes fixed dully, blankly, on the rafters, that he might meet no glance of Lilias to win him from his just displeasure, his long, muscular legs stretched out to the fire, his plaid, his sporran, his belt, his kilt,--mentally designated “ses jupons” by Laroche,--all in unpicturesque and careless disarray. So painful to Callum was the spectacle of the dual industry that one day, unable to endure it longer, he sprang up to leave the house, encountering Jock Lesly at the door, where his horse stood saddled.

“Are ye gaen aff enow?” he interrogated Callum. “I am na willin’ to leave the house wi’ Lilias.”

“Oh, Tam is there,” replied Callum impatiently. “An’ I am na goin’ further than the spring,”--which was scarcely ten steps from the door.

“Sae lang as there’s twa men about,” said her father, and he rode off on his errand.

But Lilias had overheard Callum’s first phrase and no more, and Tam Wilson’s quick ears were hardly less alert. Her face turned crimson. The young Scotchman had won much sincere gratitude and a very tender appreciation of his interest in her by his instant expedition to join her in her journey hither to her father’s rescue from the smallpox, a disease then so dreaded, his adequate, thoughtful measures for her safety and protection, and yet the swift forwarding of the succor she brought. Odd that a thoughtless phrase could work such wreck! It was but a fancy, a freak that had taken him, she said to herself. She had thought too much of it, rated its significance too high. As for the distance, the danger, the fatigue--were the men not all and always louping hither and thither through this wild country, like the ranting, gangrel chiels they were, where five hundred miles seemed a less journey to them than fifty at hame in the gude po’ shay. He came wi’ her because he maun aye be ganging--and now he was content to commend her to the protection o’ Tam Wilson. She wad na gainsay him. She was not seeking Callum MacIlvesty or his help, good sooth! Tam Wilson was a welcome substitute for his presence and guard.

She held her head high and proud on her delicate, white neck. Her eyes, half cast down on the skeins as she disentangled the thread, glowed and flashed, and Tam Wilson, the personification of demure mischief, gazed discerningly at close quarters at them. Her sensitiveness was the keener for the fact that Callum on his father’s side, the MacIlvestys, was kin to “gret folk,” and the relationship of Jock Lesly and his daughter to the young Highlander’s mother was so distant as to baffle any ordinary computation, despite their pride in the fact and its frequent mention. At that time in the colonies women were few and much in the ascendant, and Lilias Lesly felt all the importance of her position and the strength of her power to make Callum rue the slight if he really cared aught for her, and to show him her own indifference if he cared naught.

Tam Wilson, in his idleness, his enforced inactivity, had developed a domestic proclivity. He was seldom out of the house, and as the days wore on the desire to go vanished. He was promoted to many domestic duties. He was permitted to stem the wild strawberries that graced the evening meal, and felt a stealthy joy to be berated that he should be so slow, and to be accused of taking toll of the fruit too heartily to solace his labor. It was he who went back and forth in pride to the spring with the pail, who was set to guard the bannocks that they did not burn, and when all was done who lounged on the settle and idly watched her smilingly lay the cloth that he might dine. It was he who beguiled the tedium of the sudden storms in the spring evenings when the clouds shut out the stars and the door shut out the mists and the roof rang with the marshaling of the hosts of the rain and the wind sang like a trump. Then Tam Wilson would stir the fire and tell wonderful stories and sing songs--military songs, gay clashes of the cannikin, and stories of the camp and the field, showing a knowledge so intimate as to cause the lowering Highlander to ask suddenly one night,--

“Ye hae seen service, sir?”

“Aye, sir,” answered Tam Wilson, instantly on his guard. “Foreign service, sir, some years ago. I was at Hastenbeck in ’57, sir, fighting with the Duke of Cumberland.”

Which was true, but as one of the victorious French, and not, as the phrase implied, among the defeated allied forces of the famous English commander.

“And two years later,” Tam Wilson continued with less animation, “I was at the battle of Minden. I have participated in several campaigns.”

Having thus unwittingly enhanced his rival’s consequence, the young Highlander asked no more, but fell back to lower savagely and bite his lips, as perhaps an outward figure of how he was eating his own heart within.

But it was the glamour of the clear vernal moon that bewitched the unstable Tam Wilson, himself with as many phases. He would fall suddenly silent, as under a spell, when its rays aslant, just discerned, would drop down through the window from the west, where it hung little more than a crescent in a pink haze, and draw the outline of a leaf of a chestnut oak, an acorn half developed, and a bare twig upon the rugged puncheon floor of the spence. The girl’s fair face would be vague, ethereal; her hair dimly a-glimmer; her white homespun dress of linen a poetic suggestion in the gloom; her rich voice full of undreamed-of vibrations that he could study with a quickened perception lacking in the bold light of day. The ember faded to ashes; the candles, with the canny Scotch thrift, were not lighted, since the moon lent a torch; the sense of home, of simple, domestic habitudes, was in abeyance with the eclipse of the visible exponents. With its sights and sounds annulled, the abstract interpretations prevailed. The mind rose to loftier conceits. One felt the forces of life--not merely living; the endowment of absolute entity--not sheer individuality, with its limitations, its crippled past, its doubtful, hampered, anxious future. The wind stirred the foliage without and reminded one of the wilderness, the vastness of the world that was made for man; the spring floods of the Tennessee River lifted a voice into the air and thundered primeval truths.

Through this window they could see the mountains--far, near, always in massive majesty. Now a pearly, opalescent mist would glimmer among the domes with the witchery of the moon, and again after it had sunk the skies would be clear and densely instarred. Once a planet, so brilliant as to annul all lesser glories, showed through a great chasm, whose rugged, craggy slopes seemed illuminated in the surrounding gloom with a weird, unaccustomed luster, so different from the familiar light of the moon was the quality of the radiance shed by a star alone. Poetry was in the night--no lyric, no vague, murmurous rune, but with a splendid majesty of rhythm, with an epic grandeur and a meaning of awe that might be felt by the pulses of the heart and suggested to the brain--baffling language, never to be set forth in the paltry medium of mere words.

In differing degrees they all felt its influence, perhaps. Jock Lesly, smoking his pipe with an assiduity which he had learned from the Indians, talked, it is true, but casually, fragmentarily; and Callum heeded enough to respond in kind, with sedulous care for the respect he always maintained toward his host and far awa’ kinsman, but often the matter and manner of his replies showed that thought and heart were not in them. For the others they were silent, save now and again at long intervals a murmur of assent or negation,--a dangerous silence, instinct with a meaning no words might adequately interpret. As one night succeeded another and the moon waxed to fuller splendors and all the woods without were pervaded with that magic sheen which showed such silvery vistas in the dark umbrageous forest, which idealized the aboriginal architecture of Ioco, which made the feathered head and straight form of an Indian passing now and again adown the bosky ways of the woodland town so meet, so apt an incident of the picture, even the Europeans felt an irking in walls and restraint and longed for the freer air, a moonlight stroll, to stand unbonneted beneath the zenith.

“Eh--the wearying wa’s!” exclaimed Lilias one evening, her elbow on the sill of the window and the moonlight in her upturned eyes, with all the wistfulness of a prisoner in their sweet longing. “How thae flowers scent the air!”

“Whist--whist--bairn; oh fie! Ye maun bide here,” said her father in gentle reproof. “The moon will last our time. They’ll hae the moon yet in the lift at Charlestoun, an’ gowans to pu’, I’se warrant, by the time we get there.”

What was this pang in Tam Wilson’s unmannerly heart! He dared not, even in his most remote consciousness, attribute its pain to the French officer, the Sieur de Laroche. And even as the Virginia drover and herdsman he affected to be, did he expect Jock Lesly to keep his daughter here indefinitely? He was almost stunned by the discovery of the sentimental anguish occasioned him by the mere idea of her withdrawal from his sight. He wondered now, however, since his mind was drawn to the subject, that as the object of her wild-goose chase--her father’s supposed illness--was removed she had not already returned. So vital an interest he felt that he was moved to steady his voice, which--oh, how preposterously--trembled in the first words, to ask of her father a definite question concerning her departure, albeit his inquisitiveness in his host’s family affairs ill accorded with his position as a guest laden with many favors. And in fact the query gave rise to some embarrassment.

“The lassie might hae gane back at once,” Jock Lesly said, “but”--taking his pipe out of his mouth and glancing cautiously over his shoulder at the dusky room, still in the brown shadow, although the light of the moon lay in a broad silver square on the floor, so high had it climbed into the sky--“but”--evidently he hardly dared to put his prudence into words; only fragmentarily he explained that Callum and he had agreed that it would be injudicious to suggest the idea of fear or flight by leaving Ioco earlier than was the custom every spring. The Indians--“thae dour deevils”--so delighted in the terror they inspired that they could scarcely refrain from the exercise of its power. The little guard could be easily taken, overcome; and mischievous malice, originating perhaps with the mere intention of giving them a fright, might with the realization culminate in a massacre. The journey was fraught with much peril at best. The Indians always requited every grudge with the utmost rigor, and certainly to pass by those blackened charred skeletons of towns in the ashes of Grant’s fires, still tenantless for the lack of hands to rebuild them, would be a pertinent reminder. The bones of cattle and horses were bleaching along the watercourses. Other and human bones were even yet being slowly gathered from the débris of the battlefields, or on the site of remote hand-to-hand conflicts, and identified and conveyed to the town of their nativity, till one was forever in danger of stumbling on communities in all the gloom of funeral ceremonies when no death was recent--oh, there were grudges on every hand to claim requital, and the Cherokees never considered the identity of the individual who had wrought disaster.

Whereas, Jock Lesly reasoned, if Lilias remained here until the usual time of his semiannual pilgrimage to Charlestown, with all his force of packmen and pack-horses, laden with buckskins for the exchange of British goods, any demonstration on the pack-train would be associated with injury to the trade, the interests of which the Cherokees were always solicitous to conserve; hence it was hardly to be anticipated. The murder of an unofficial party, so to speak, would create scant stir; but an assault upon the pack-train of a licensed trader in his semiannual passage through the country would paralyze the trade for years to come, and necessitate investigation and retribution at the hands of the government.

And this result, the paralysis of the trade and the disaffection of the Cherokees, was precisely what that scheming Laroche had come to the town of Great Tellico on the Tennessee River in the earnest hope of compassing for the French interest. Had he been as true to it as he was accounted, he said to himself, he might have found means to promote this emprise of pursuit and capture and massacre. But it was with the sentiments that properly appertained to Tam Wilson that he perceived the wisdom and applauded the prudence of the proposed course. He resented that Callum MacIlvesty should have aught of weight in these councils, and began to grudge him, with all a lover’s niggardliness, the poor boon of having been her escort hither, and the torment of anxiety Callum must have experienced in his prayerful care in planning for her safety, and his generous courage, prepared to spill the last drop of his blood in her defense.

“That’s why we no keep the door open after dark,” Callum briskly explained. “The Injuns are used to seeing the door closed in winter, an’ they’ll no wonder we hae only the window open now, an’ dinna gae abroad.”

“An’ that’s why lassie Lilias hings here at the window sill, as wishfu’ as ony hempie ahint the bars at a tolbooth,” her father said, reaching out his hand and passing it over the sheen of her golden hair. “I’m thinking, Callum lad, its thae lint-white locks--the bairn’s tow head--that aye gars the Injuns stare. Mind how auld Moy Toy stretched his big black een?”

“Moy Toy?” said Laroche, with a sudden wrench at his heart. He felt as one might, long ago sold to the devil, at the abrupt reappearance of the fiend. “When was he here?”

“When ye were ailin’, lad. And now I come to think of it, the devil’s no sae black as he’s painted, an’ forbye, no sae red.”

He chuckled as he placed the long stem of his pipe in his mouth and talked on languidly as he drew at it. “The creatur seemed kindly, an’ wearyin’ to see you.”

Tam Wilson could have fallen from the settle.

“An’ when we wad na let him at ye on no account to speak till ye, he begged he might hae ae look at ye, an’ when he drew the bed curtains and he had just a gliff, he was satisfied, an’ went awa cannily enough.”

So it was no vision that Laroche had remembered amidst the disjointed phantasmagoria of his delirium. In terrible reality this red savage, with whom he shared the hidden, subtle scheme of the French government against the Carolina colonies and trading interests, had come to his bedside and sought through the mists of his wandering perceptions to sign to him, to promise silence, to counsel secrecy. More distinct than aught else of the images of his fevered brain had been the presentment of that feathered head, that many-lined, keen-featured face, the white curtain in the firm grasp, the intent, warning eye, the finger, mysterious, menacing, laid upon the long, flat, compressed lips. More distinct--since it was real.

Alack! of what avail the gay snatches of a soldier’s song; the tales of the tented field; the kind, sweet, homely present of this simple cotter life; the uplifting awe of nature that must needs follow that fine sweeping of the horizon line of mountain crest against the blue; the breath of the aromatic woodland; the mystery, the magic of the moon; the sheen of the girl’s golden hair--Laroche could not escape his doom. The past laid imperative hands upon the future. The reminder of Moy Toy left him the realization that there was no choice. Moy Toy had come--he would come again, bringing cogent influences of the Franco-Cherokee scheme, the political promises, the actuality of identity, and all a subordinate’s thraldom to the will of an official superior.

V

MOY TOY came indeed the next day and laden thus. In fact it was he who had first thought of the design of falling on the trader’s pack-train on their return trip to Charlestown and cutting them all off. Thus, he argued, the country would be rid at one blow of the trade,--for the others, here, there, everywhere, would never return,--and it was the trade, the paltry bauble, that had bought the Cherokees, scot and lot, alienated them from their own best interest, threatened them with vassalage to the British, and with national annihilation. The vengeance of the Carolina authorities would scarcely discriminate, scarcely even seek out so elusive a prey as the immediate offenders; frantic and furious it would alight like a bolt from heaven on whatever lay within its orbit. Thus it would serve to unite the upper Cherokees, the Ottare district, and the Ayrate towns in their own defense--the doubting must needs be steadfast, the weak-hearted confident and strong, the politic might scheme only from ambush, and Atta-Kulla-Kulla postpone his strategic talks of statecraft till the council once more should have time to heed his plotting and counterplotting. Then the way of the French would be open. Then might its skilled officer bring the great guns and build the forts and drive forever from the Cherokee borders this perfidious foe who sought to enslave a free people by goods and rum, at ruinous great prices and tolls of trade.

Despite Laroche’s experience of the inconsistencies and contradictory traits of the Indian character, this precipitancy surprised him. He began to see that the patience with which the savages were credited, their long waiting and scheming for revenge, the illimitable distances they traversed in war, the innumerable shifts and devices they practiced, of almost inconceivable ingenuity, to attain their object--all were exerted only when it lay beyond their immediate reach. Once within the possibilities, and the leap to seize upon it was like a panther’s, as swift, as bloodthirsty, and as unreckoning. For the Indians’ policy of doubting and debating was only when impotence held their revenge in bounds. Thus it was that their hasty, unguarded, impulsive seizing upon an opportunity of massacre and robbery so often recoiled upon the body politic, which suffered as a whole in the vengeance of the colony, the withdrawal of the trade, and the cutting off of supplies and ammunition, for the murderous enterprise of some small band. More than once Moy Toy himself, both earlier and later, headed a party of these independent warriors, for whose deeds the Cherokee nation at large paid the reckoning.

It was well that Laroche had the futility of such raids in mind to point the moral of the value of delay, of preparation, of acting with due caution for the attaining of permanent effect. Press the British back for a moment--that full-armed, embittered, more powerful still, they might again overrun the Cherokee country! And thus bring to naught the plans of the great French father to aid and abet the throwing off of this heavy yoke--all these plans as yet in abeyance,--not a cargo of ammunition _en route_.

“I care naught for the desertion of the base Mingo Push-koosh; it is to me but the freak of a peevish child, as his very name implies,” Laroche declared. “The Choctaws are ever loyal to the French; the Muscogees, and their subordinate tribes, all are in amity, all preparing for the great decisive blow, the simultaneous attack that shall some day drive the English colonists east and south into the Atlantic ocean and the Mexico gulf. But the moment must be propitious--the occasion ripe. Time, Moy Toy, time is the great warrior. Time always wins the long fight.”

He had walked out with the Indian, who had declined Jock Lesly’s invitation to light his pipe at the hearth in the spence, this being unsanctified fire, kindled by no cheerataghe, and had repaired to the fire always alight in the centre of the “beloved square,” annually kindled by the men of the divine fire, distributed amongst the dwellings, and never suffered to die out till the last day of the old year. The necessity had occurred to neither of the two men as a subterfuge, but both eagerly embraced the opportunity that they might speak apart--Moy Toy to communicate his scheme, and Laroche to contend with it.

The spot was solitary at the moment. Rain was threatening; a great slate-tinted cloud hung above the darkly green mountains in tantalizing suspension, seeming weighted and surcharged with water above the drought-smitten cornfields. Day after day they waved with the delicate, newly sprouting blades, rustling and lisping in the capricious breaths of the wind, but showing a far-spread yellow tint beneath murky, purple glooms. Day after day the impending storm passed; the lightning that had rent the heavens with a stroke like a flashing blade, and a thunderous crash as of the rivings of a world asunder, subsided to an aimless flicker with a vague and distant rumble. The purple-black clouds of weighted portent would grow of lilac hue, and presently one might see the tint of the blue sky through the fleecy dispersal of their folds. The wind rushed down from the mountains; the sun shone out; the cornfields lay parched and sere; and the heart of a farmer of that day and generation differed in nowise from one of the present, albeit more than a century apart in time and of an alien race. Fortunately the laws now are kinder, and the weather prophets are fended from the wrath of him who plants and does not gather, who sows and does not reap, because of the rain that is vainly promised and the thunderhead that deludes and deceives. The cheerataghe of Ioco Town were playing in very hard luck. The luring of that particular storm down upon these fertile fields along the Tennessee River devolved immediately upon them, and although the tribesmen were assured that the failure was to be attributed to the wickedness of their own hearts and their frequent misdoings, a farmer at odds with the weather is the least amiable of the brute creation, and there was an unmistakable tendency to retort the fault upon the lack of skill of the cheerataghe.

Moy Toy cast a glance of indifferent interest at the group at the further side of the square (recent rains had fallen at Tellico, long, soft, satisfying--what is now known as a “season”), where the cheerataghe of Ioco were plying their invocations and spells, surrounded by a number of the agricultural sufferers and several of the second men; their plumed heads and scantily covered, copper-tinted bodies were all distinct in the weird, dun light under the purple cloud, and against the white and gray fleckings of the tortuous river, and the pallid expanse of the wilting corn. No one was alert to listen to what might pass between Moy Toy and the foreign white man. What would a drought-harassed farmer of that region to-day care for issues of diplomacy if he fancied he had a chance of working a charm on the weather!

“Will there be enough of the powder?” Moy Toy asked tentatively. His experience was limited, but he knew enough of the world to be aware of the folly of exchanging a small certainty for a large possibility--a small massacre for a large war of doubtful outcome.

“Powder!” exclaimed the soldier with a scornful laugh. “I can teach you to make powder! The country is full of the materials for its manufacture.”

With the keen observation of the scientist and the alertness of a schemer to turn every incident to account, he had taken note in his short stay of the nitrous caves of the country, of its resources for sulphur, of the infinite growths of dogwood and of willows along the streams to furnish the requisite grade of charcoal. In later wars these yielded their benefits to discerning labor, but even so early Laroche fully appreciated these opportunities and projected thus using them.

Moy Toy, standing on the opposite side of the sacred fire, gazed at him for one moment in blank wonderment, the curiously wrought stone pipe in his hand, slipping through his nerveless fingers, shattered unheeded on one of the steatite rocks that supported the fire. And he--Moy Toy, the fool, the madman, but for an accident, a mere trifle--would have laid in ashes this fine brain with its curious workings, its many shifts, its convolutions of knowledge that exceeded the wisdom of all the men he had ever known from far or near,--all would now be a mere cinder, the sport of the wind, all lost to the Cherokee nation and the aggrandizement of the great chief, Moy Toy! With the recollection he became anxiously apprehensive. That night--that night of woe, while the slaughtered braves were laid in their hasty graves, and the prisoner awaited their fair passage to a world beyond in a bitter suspense that was to inaugurate and augment his destined tortures--would the memory of those anguished hours, guarded on the summit of the high mound, move this Frenchman to withhold aught of this vital, this all-important, this intensely coveted knowledge from the Indian warriors? Moy Toy’s mental attitude, wistful, repentant, propitiatory, was distinctly meek, as intently listening he stared at Laroche, who was a trifle surprised at his agitation.

“Being a warrior, a soldier, I have learned many things, Moy Toy, that you would like to know, during my service as an officer of engineers and artillery,--and that would be of help to you against the English.”

One could hardly say how many months of work had gone into the fashioning and polishing of that pipe, a fine bit of carved stone, a unique specimen of aboriginal art, shattered on the ground, but Moy Toy’s fingers were unconscious that it had escaped them.

He essayed some anxious phrases of apology.

They hardly knew what they did that night--surely they were sorely tried--an embassy received in peace and honor, and ending in a murder of unsuspecting and generous hosts--he feared Laroche had been inconsiderately treated, but prayed he would forgive the ignorance of the poor Cherokees, and help them against their foe.

The subtle Frenchman now stared hard at the subtle Indian.

“Oh,” Laroche said at last, airily, yet still at a loss, “you did the best you could, no doubt, in turning me over to the care of these white people who treated my ills in a way to which I and they are accustomed. No, no; although they are British the quarrel would have been had you persisted in keeping me at Tellico.”

Moy Toy shut his mouth so suddenly that his tongue was in some sharp danger from his teeth. Evidently by reason of his delirium Laroche had forgotten the aggressions upon his liberty, the length and torment of his captivity, the preparations for his torture and death in satisfaction of the crimes of his Choctaw colleague. The happy fantasy! The blessed fever!

“There is one boon I shall exact for the service I have already rendered you,” Laroche continued, seriously, weightily. “It is my pleasure to ask it, yet it is also your interest to grant it, and as a pledge of the future. I jeopardized my interest and promotion, I braved the wrath of Mingo Push-koosh, that a woman’s life--your sister’s life--should not be placed in peril. Much evil came of this,--but _I_ risked most.”

Moy Toy, gazing fixedly at him, thought he little knew how much he had risked.

“And now,” continued Laroche, “I ask in return a safe conduct for another woman--the daughter of the Scotch trader.”

He paused with some sudden impediment of speech, his eyes seeming lighter, clearer than their wont, cast upward at the lowering storm cloud.

“This British family have saved my life by their care, and I owe them their lives in recompense. They must go in safety, but--I promise you”--once more that sudden hiatus in his fluency--“they shall not return.”

He was not as observant as usual, or he must have discerned some extreme and secret joy beneath Moy Toy’s calm exterior. That unique and quaint phenomenon of knowledge so delighted the crafty Indian!--that he should hold the key of incidents of great import in the experience of this man who was himself unconscious of them! And in the excess of his relief that Laroche remembered naught of his cruel perils, averted by a mere accident, the chief could have cried out in sheer, inarticulate joy. But he said, quite simply, that Laroche was his best beloved friend, whose injunctions should be obeyed, that he loved every hair on his head, that he should never forget the rescue of his sister, which, indeed, he felt he should have remembered earlier, for it was his nephew who should be his heir and hold the sway of Great Tellico.

“The life of the trader’s daughter, her safety, and the safety of all the trader’s household I demand for that service,” Laroche repeated solemnly. “And as it is assured to them so will I requite you. I will promise you then all the aid that mind and heart and hand can give you hereafter. I swear it.”

Moy Toy renewed his protestations of friendship and reiterated his apologies. The tone and tenor of his remarks implied acquiescence, and Laroche felt no lack. But Moy Toy looked after him cynically as he took his way back toward the dwelling of the trader, for the first large drops of the impending storm were falling slowly through the air. A breathless cry, like a gasp, went up from the rain enchanters at the other side of the square; then ensued silence, tense, expectant, painful. The farmer, poor sport of the skies, was aware that this limited manifestation of the obedience of the powers of the air rescued the reputation of the cheerataghe, since rain had fallen at their bidding, yet did not save the crop, and, reduced to the position of the only sufferer in the event, hung in desperate suspense upon the developments of the next few moments.

The trading-house, with its door broadly aflare, giving a glimpse of an orderly assortment of merchandise within, had on the roofless porch or platform a group of the young packmen who had accompanied Callum MacIlvesty from Charlestown. They were wearying for their return thither, since so many restrictions had been laid on their conduct and language, lest they give offense to the Indians and bring down reprisal while they had in their keeping the precious charge of the young lady, “little lassie Lilias,” as auld Jock loved to call her. This restraint greatly irked them, for they were accustomed to giving and receiving hard knocks, speaking their minds without fear or favor and with a very rough edge to their tongues. One, fallen a trifle ill, declared that he would be well in a trice if he were not “just dying of all these manners!” Sodden themselves in a thousand superstitions, they had taken a keen interest in the weather bewitchments, in which, from these motives, they had been forbidden to mingle. They had neither the time nor the inclination to notice the invalid hastening away out of the rain to shelter, but his disordered step, his pallid countenance, his agitated mien did not fail altogether of observation. The door of the dwelling opened as he approached it, and there stood Lilias holding it against the wind. So incongruous seemed her fair face and golden hair and whitely glimmering attire with the sullen aspect of the approaching storm, the gloom-darkened woods on every hand, that she suggested an affinity with a sunlit scene that glimmered along the far perspective of the ranges where a rift in the cloud admitted a suffusion of ethereal golden light, in which the mountains were azure, the woods of a fine, intense jade hue, the flash of a cataract like molten silver,--the very apotheosis of scenery, some transient glimpse of the fair land of Canaan.

Laroche’s lip trembled as he looked at her--so beautiful, so good, so cruelly endangered.

She noticed his pained expression, but misunderstood its meaning. With the constant household anxiety as to his health--“Ye hae been lang awa wi’ that dour carle, Moy Toy, an’ ye look pale. Set ye down by the fire, an’ I’ll gie ye a posset, before the others get here to beg for tae half o’ it.”

He loved to do her bidding, even if it were not blended with many odd “sups an’ bites,” of a quality peculiarly acceptable to an invalid’s capricious appetite. He would have drunk poison as readily for her sake, he said to himself, and added with a grim smile that he might do that yet. For he had come to a full realization of late. He consciously recoiled from all his loyal plans, his secret orders, his duties, his pride of intellect, of achievement, his past, his profession, his future. He said to himself that he would have liked the life of a poppet--he could have felt if he had been made of wood or wax--to be placed thus in a corner; to gaze at her with unwinking eyes; to be given a bowl of drink, withdrawn in a minute, as she must needs test with her own lips whether it were not too hot. He sought with sedulous care the section of the rim her lips had touched. Poison! but the cup of the present held nectar! He would have been satisfied--would have kissed the hand of fate had he been only her pet dog.

A great collie, old, cosmopolitan,--he had come across on the ship with her father in the days “lang syne,” and exceedingly surprising did he find the experience of a collie of degree on the ocean,--had deserted the trading-house, since her arrival, repudiated his master, forgotten his friends, the packmen, cut his Indian acquaintance dead, to lie by her hearth, to follow her footsteps, to feed from her hand, to sit with his head against her knee and his listless body, dislocated, weighing against her, to whine in jealous disfavor and an effort to attract her attention had she more than a sentence or two to exchange with any interlocutor save him.

“Whist, whist, hinny,”--she would gently smite his lolling head--“ye’ll talk soon, and then I’ll ken ye’re no canny!”

For this, even so little as this, Laroche felt at times that he would barter his learning, his prospects, his identity, his duty. Sometimes he sought to justify his long, unnecessary lingering here, despite his consciousness of the fact that his very individuality was a dangerous secret. Were it known or suspected that he was employed in the French interest, he could not hope to escape arrest, and thereby injury to the cause he represented. Whatever might be the will of personal friends, should he retain them in the stress of these disclosures, hard usage would he encounter at the hands of the British colonial authorities--perhaps even death; nay, had there not been a reward offered for the scalp of every Frenchman busy among the Indians? And certainly in such an adverse development he could not count on the adhesion of the fickle Cherokees, especially to their detriment! But for this one rift in his loyalty, he was wholly devoted to the Louisiana interests which he had so zealously sought to advance. This--this was his own personal beguilement. He would have known how to resist his wonted allurements,--the pride of intellect, the pampered independence and security of life, the world, the flesh, and the devil. He was full armed against them; the attack would have been met by hardy resistance along those lines. But to divert him from his duty, his loyalty to his political trust, his obedience to his officers by means of a virtuous attachment to a being so gentle, so fair, so good that “no man could think on evil seeing her”--this seemed a device worthy of the devil, and very like him; for this attachment would have done him honor in any station of life save this, harbored deep, deep in the subtle, deceitful heart of an enemy in the guise of a friend, a spy upon his benefactor, the destroyer of their simple and limited and humble prosperity.