Chapter III (3)

The whole affair seemed to the mess serious enough. For the Chickasaws, baffled and furious, had threatened his life on their return, reinforced by a dozen excited, elated, expectant tribesmen, laden with light wood and a chain, to find their prisoner gone. But after the first wild outburst of rage and despair Choolah, although evidently strongly tempted to force the Highlander to the fate from which he had rescued the French officer, resolved to preserve the integrity of his nation’s pledge of amity with the British, and restrained his men from offering injury. This was rendered the more acceptable to him, as with his alert craft he perceived a keen retribution for Ronald MacDonnell in the displeasure of his commanding officer, for the Chickasaws well understood the discipline of the army, which they chose to disregard. To better enlist the prejudice of Colonel Grant, Choolah was preparing himself to distort the facts. He upbraided Ronald MacDonnell with causelessly liberating a prisoner, a Frenchman and an officer, taken by the wily exploit of another. As to the dry wood, he said, the Chickasaws had merely brought some drift, long stranded in a cave by the waterside, to replenish the fire, kindled with how great difficulty in the soaking condition of the forests the Lieutenant well knew.

“Hout!--just now when we are about to cross the river?” cried Ronald, unmasking the subterfuge. “And for what then that stout chain?”

The chain, Choolah protested, was but part of the equipment of one of the pack animals that had broken away and had been plundered by the Cherokees. Did the Lieutenant Plaidman think he wanted to chain the prisoner to the stake to burn? He had had no dream of such a thing! It was not the custom of the Chickasaws to waste so much time on a prisoner. It was sufficient to cut him up in quarters; that usually killed him dead,--quite dead enough! But if the Lieutenant had had a chain, since he knew so well the use of one, doubtless he himself would have joyed to burn the prisoner, provided it had been his own exploit that had taken him,--for did not the Carolinians of the provincial regiment say that when the Tartan men were at home they were as wild and as uncivilized as the wildest Cherokee savage!

“_Holauba! Holauba! Feenah!_” (It is a lie. It is a lie, undoubtedly), cried the phlegmatic MacDonnell, excited to a frenzy. He spoke in the Chickasaw language, that the insult might be understood as offered with full intention.

But Choolah did not thus receive it. In the simplicity of savage life lies are admittedly the natural incidents of conversation. He addressed himself anew to argument. At home the Tartan men lived in mountains,--just like the Cherokees,--and no wonder they were undismayed by the war whoops--they had heard the like before! Savages themselves! They had a language, too, that the Carolinians could not speak; he himself had heard it among the Highlanders of Grant’s camp--doubtless it was the Cherokee tongue, for they were mere Cherokees!

“_Holauba! Holauba! Feenah!_” No denial could be more definite than the tone and the words embodied.

The wily Choolah, maliciously delighted with his power to pierce the heart of the proud Scotchman thus, turned the knife anew. Did not the provincials declare that the Highlanders at home were always beaten in war, as they would be here but for the help of the Carolinians?

“_Holauba! Holauba! Feenah!_” protested Ronald resolutely, thinking of Preston Pans and Falkirk.

For the usual emulous bickering between regulars and provincials, which seems concomitant with every war, had appeared in full force in this expedition, the provincials afterward claiming that but for them and their Indian allies no remnant of the British force would have returned alive; and the regulars declaring that the Carolinians knew nothing, and could learn nothing of discipline and method in warfare, laying great stress on the fact that this was the second campaign to which the British soldiers had been summoned for the protection of the province, which could not without them defend itself against the Cherokees, and assuming the entire credit of the subjugation of that warlike tribe that had for nearly a century past desolated at intervals the Carolina borders.

Although it had been Choolah’s hope that, by means of provoking against the Lieutenant the displeasure of his superior officer, he might revenge himself upon MacDonnell, for snatching from the Chickasaws the peculiar racial delight of torturing the French prisoner, the Indians had no anticipation of the gravity of the crisis when they came to the camp with the details of the occurrence, which, to Colonel Grant’s annoyance, tallied with MacDonnell’s own report of himself.

For there was a question in Colonel Grant’s mind whether the prisoner were not the redoubtable Louis Latinac, who had been so incredibly efficient in the French interest in this region, and who had done more to excite the enmity of the Cherokees against their quondam allies, the British, and harass his Majesty’s troops than a regiment of other men could accomplish. When Grant tended to this opinion, a court-martial seemed impending over the head of the young officer.

“What was your reason for this extraordinary course?” Colonel Grant asked.

And Ronald MacDonnell answered that he had granted to his prisoner exactly what he had intended to demand of his captor had the situation been reversed--to adjure him by their fellow feeling as soldiers, by the customs of civilized warfare, by the bond of a common religion, to save him from torture by savages.

“Can a gentleman give less than he would ask?” he demanded.

And when Colonel Grant would urge that he should have trusted to his authority to protect the prisoner, Ronald would meet the argument with the counter-argument that the Indians respected no authority, and in cases of fire it would not do to take chances.

“Why did you not at least exact a parole?”

“Lord, sir, we couldn’t talk at all!” said Ronald, conclusively. “In common humanity, I was obliged to release him or shoot him, and I could not shoot an unarmed prisoner to save my life--not if I were to be shot for it myself.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Grant’s heart was well known to be soft in spots. He has put it upon record in the previous campaign against the Cherokees that he could not help pitying them a little in the destruction of their homes,--it is said, however, that after this later expedition his name was incorporated in the Cherokee language as a synonym of devastation and a cry of warning. He was overcome by the considerations urged upon him by the Lieutenant until once more the possibility loomed upon the horizon that it was Louis Latinac who had escaped him, when he would feel that nothing but Ronald MacDonnell’s best heart’s blood could atone for the release. To set this much vexed question at rest the young officer was repeatedly required to describe the personal appearance of the stranger, and thus it was that poor Ronald’s verbal limitations were brought so conspicuously forward. “A fine man,” he would say one day, and in giving the details of that sensitive emotional countenance which had so engaged his interest that momentous night--its force, its suggestiveness, its bright, alert young eyes, would intimate that he had indeed held the motive power of the Cherokee war in his hand, and had heedlessly loosed it as a child might release a butterfly. The next day “a braw callant” was about the sum of his conclusions, and Colonel Grant would be certain that the incident represented no greater matter than the escape of a brisk subaltern, like Ronald himself. In the course of Colonel Grant’s anxious vacillations of opinion, the young Highlander was given to understand that he would be instantly placed under arrest, but for the fact that every officer of experience was urgently needed. And indeed Colonel Grant presently had his hands quite full, fighting a furious battle only the ensuing day with the entire Cherokee nation.

The Indians attacked his outposts at eight o’clock in the morning, and with their full strength engaged the main body, fighting in their individual, skulking, masked manner, but with fierce persistency for three hours; then the heat of the conflict began to gradually wane, although they did not finally draw off till two o’clock in the afternoon. It was the last struggle of the Cherokee war. Helpless or desperate, the Indians watched without so much as a shot from ambush the desolation of their country. For thirty days Colonel Grant’s forces remained among the fastnesses of the Great Smoky Mountains, devastating those beautiful valleys, burning “the astonishing magazines of corn,” and the towns, which Grant states, were so “agreeably situated, the houses neatly built.” Often the troops were constrained to march under the beetling heights of those stupendous ranges, whence one might imagine a sharp musketry fire would have destroyed the dense columns, almost to the last man. Perhaps the inability of the French to furnish the Cherokees with the requisite ammunition for this campaign may explain the abandonment of a region so calculated for effective defense.

Aside from the losses in slain and wounded in the engagement, the expeditionary force suffered much, for the hardships of the campaign were extreme. Having extended the frontier westward by seventy miles, and withdrawing slowly, in view of the gradual exhaustion of his supplies, Colonel Grant found the feet of his infantry so mangled by the long and continuous marches in the rugged country west of the Great Smoky Mountains that he was forced to go into permanent camp on returning to Fort Prince George, to permit the rest and recovery of the soldiers, who in fact could march no further, as well as to await some action on the part of the Cherokee rulers looking to the conclusion of a peace.

A delegation of chiefs presently sought audience of him here and agreed to all the stipulations of the treaty formulated in behalf of the province except one, viz., that four Cherokees should be delivered up to be put to death in the presence of Colonel Grant’s army, or that four green scalps should be brought to him within the space of twelve nights. With this article the chiefs declared they had neither the will nor the power to comply,--and very queerly indeed, it reads at this late day!

Colonel Grant, perhaps willing to elude the enforcement of so unpleasant a requisition, conceived that it lay within his duty to forward the delegation, under escort, to Charlestown to seek to induce Governor Bull to mitigate its rigor.

It was in this connection that he alluded again to the release of the prisoner, captured in the exploit of Choolah, the Chickasaw, although in conversation with his officers he seemed to Ronald MacDonnell to be speaking only of the impracticable stipulation of the treaty, and his certainty that compliance would not be required of the Cherokees by the Governor--and in fact the terms finally signed at Charlestown, on the 10th of December of that year, were thus moderated, leaving the compact practically the same as in the previous treaty of 1759.

“I could agree to no such stipulation if the case were mine,” Colonel Grant declared, “that four of my soldiers, as a mere matter of intimidation, should be surrendered to be executed in the presence of the enemy! Certainly, as a gentleman and a soldier, a man cannot require of an enemy more than he himself would be justified in yielding if the circumstances were reversed, or grant to an enemy less favor than he himself could rightfully ask at his hands.”

Ronald MacDonnell had forgotten his own expression of this sentiment. It appealed freshly to him, and he thought it decidedly fine. He did not recognize a flag of truce except as a veritable visible white rag, and from time to time he experienced much surprise that Colonel Grant did not order him under arrest as a preliminary to a court martial.

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