Chapter XIII: Part 13

An exile thus, Mingo Push-koosh affected the English settlements, an avowed deserter to the British interest, protesting that his eyes were opened to the French wiles and that the French spoke with the tongue of a snake _seente soolish_, the mere sound of which made his heart weigh very heavy within him. These statements were received with a certain indifference, for by reason of his exile he could not bring any great personal following to the English flag; in fact, but for the hope that his presence might decoy others of his tribe to imitate his example, Mingo Push-koosh[11] would scarcely have been regarded at all. Proud and ambitious, he realized the necessity of pressing more efficaciously his own cause, and would have embraced the opportunity of any military service--but how? and whither?

Poor Push-koosh! Disregarded by the English, and in actual danger from the French, the pompous Prince Baby had now naught in hand of more import than the mercantile venture of selling a dozen or so fine horses, which he had caused to be driven from his old home at Yowanne, through the southern country, to Jock Lesly, who desired them for use in his pack-trains to Charlestown in the spring, laden with the skins from this winter’s hunt. The sale accomplished to-day, Mingo Push-koosh strolled about, forlorn, friendless, among the boxes and bales on the platform of Jock Lesly’s trading-house at Keowee Town. His thick long hair floated in the breeze; his silver arm-plates and headband were as bright as of yore, but a deep dejection showed in his large surly eyes, and he had the effect of a drooping crest, albeit the flamingo feathers still flaunted high.

“_Ish la chu, angona?_” (Are you come, friend?) A Chickasaw who passed offered the conventional salutation, knowing of the Choctaw’s defection from the French interest, for the sub-tribes (including the Choccomaw) of the ancient Chicimecas have almost a common language.

“_Arahre-O angona!_” (I am come indeed, friend!) Push-koosh replied, although he could hardly refrain from springing upon the Chickasaw as he passed and tearing the scalp from his head with his teeth, if need were.

The incident concluded, he continued to idle about the trading-house, standing on the platform and gazing at the gray river under a gray sky. The water was dark--all the light in the landscape seemed concentrated in the icy flicker in the leafless forests near the Indian town of Keowee which lay on both banks. Then he shifted his position and stood on the other end of the platform and gazed silently at the bastions of the fort. Whenever he saw the British flag he could not refrain from spitting his disdain openly, obviously, on the ground. Fearing lest this demonstration be observed, as the flag flaunted from the fort, he once more turned impatiently and changed his position to the other end of the platform, as before. He was absorbed in the reflection that the great coalition of Indian tribes would at last become a triumphant fact and that he would have no share in it. This fair prospect he had forfeited, with the favor of the French; as for the English, they would have none of him, would trust him with no opportunity of value.

So long he stood there that the under-trader grew a trifle solicitous as to his designs. The degenerate among the Indians had become most expert thieves, and it is recorded that while engaged in conversation with the merchant they could abstract what articles they would from under his eyes. Alas, poor Push-koosh--whose thoughts were of empire!

Dougal Micklin, the under-trader, a pursy, unimaginative man, all of whose mental processes could be discerned in his round face and his merry dark eyes, with his round, burly body encased in buckskins and wearing a coonskin cap set rather far back from his placid brow, was loath to take his eyes from the Choctaw, visible through the wide barn-like door, and therefore mentioned his identity to Captain Howard, the commandant of the fort, who chanced to be in the house purchasing some buttons for his own personal use.

“Aye, sir, three and sax the dozen, sir,” Dougal Micklin said, as he glanced again out of the door; then, as if to excuse his evidently wandering attention, he continued, “That Choctaw buck is an unco gret prince, Captain,” his red lips curling with good-natured sarcasm at the idea. “He used to be in high favor wi’ the French, but he fell out wi’ the mounseers at Tellico Gret, and now seems to have his finger in his mouth.”

Captain Howard turned suddenly and surveyed the figure of the Indian, as Push-koosh, unconscious of this keen scrutiny, stood sullen and dreary on the platform. The fringes of his saffron-hued buckskin shirt and leggings were all borne backward in the breeze, his stiff scarlet flamingo feathers and his long black hair were aslant also without other stir, as if he might have been pictured thus on a canvas. His heavily embroidered belt, shot pouch, and tobacco bag, his silver headband and bracelets, his necklace of pearls and many strings of “roanoke,” the fine silver-mounted pistols at his side, all seemed to confirm the truth of the trader’s representations as to his high rank.

“’Tis Mingo Push-koosh!” the trader added.

“Call him in,” said Captain Howard. Then with an afterthought, “No, I’ll speak to him myself!”

The officer striding out confronted the Choctaw just as again, catching a glimpse of the British flag, Mingo Push-koosh was about to spit his disaffection upon the ground.

“How?” said Captain Howard, smiling agreeably.

Push-koosh was visibly surprised, but looked inconceivably haughty.

“How?” he returned with half covert, scornful disapprobation, and waited in doubt.

Now Captain Howard’s education was lamentably defective as far as the Choctaw, practically the Chickasaw language was concerned, although the latter Indians were those with whom he had had most dealings, as they had repeatedly served in the campaigns in this region with the British troops. Nevertheless, in the delicate and tentative bit of business which he had in contemplation, he did not desire the offices of an interpreter lest a bird of the air carry the matter.

Lending himself to the effort to compass speech as it were without words, he smiled again blandly with a distinctly mollifying effect.

“Big Mingo!” he said, waving his hand with a free gesture to impart added grace to his compliment.

He was a tall, bony, angular man of forty-five, and the demonstration ill suited the stiff military dignity of his habitual carriage and the impressive effect of his scarlet uniform.

“_Capteny Humma Echeto!_” (Great red captain!) responded the Mingo, complimentary in turn.

Then they both paused and stared hard at each other.

“Mingo love British?” demanded the captain at length.

Nothing could have been more sardonic than the languishing smile with which Push-koosh laid his hand upon his true heart.

“Mingo hate French?” the political catechism proceeded.

The face of Push-koosh suddenly darkened. He spat his contempt on the ground.

“_Hottuk ookproose!_” (The accursed people!)

“Why hate French?” the inquisitor proceeded.

The heart of Push-koosh swelled. His eyes burned hot in their sockets. The veins of his throat were distended and tense as cords. He could hardly speak even fragmentarily, and but for the straining of every sense to hear, to distinguish, to interpret, Captain Howard might have made but little of the jargon of broken English that the Choctaw hissed out in the intervals between his gasps of rage.

The ugly French “beloved man” had betrayed him, had ruined his prospects! He had slandered him to the headmen of Great Tellico! And because he had quitted the Cherokee country on account of their ill usage, and left the French ugly “beloved man” there,--who had sustained no harm whatever!--the indescribably ugly French governor in New Orleans was angry.

Captain Howard had caught so eagerly at the words “Great Tellico” that although his ears were not of such a conformation and flexibility that they could be described as “pricked up,” his countenance had that vivid accession of intelligence that seems concomitant.

“Mingo go Tellico?”

Push-koosh’s face, gradually brightening in the expectation of a commission of some important sort, fell suddenly. He remembered that fierce onset upon the unoffending Cherokee tribesmen, that bloody massacre! No, not to Tellico, as he valued his life! Never again to Tellico, never again!

“Capteny much wants Mingo go Tellico!” urged Captain Howard persuasively.

The passionate mobile countenance of Push-koosh, with naught firm in its lines save the determination to go no more to Tellico, was turned toward the river, the wind blowing backward his long loose hair, so odd of effect here among the Cherokees, whose heads were all polled, his great eyes absent and anxious, his earnest hope of employment in the British interest slipping beyond his reach. But not to Tellico--never again!

“Capteny much wants French ‘beloved man’!” Captain Howard murmured plaintively.

Push-koosh brought his small even teeth together with so sudden a snap and gasp that the officer instinctively drew back a step.

“Does the beast bite?” he said to himself.

“Fort Prince George? Bring ‘beloved man’? Capteny wants?” Push-koosh asked, the words coming one after another, one upon another, in the joyous turbulence of sudden comprehension.

Push-koosh could do this for the _Capteny Humma Echeto_ without the necessity to repair to Great Tellico. In that secret knowledge of the scheme of the now almost united tribes, many details, seeming of but scant significance, were obvious to those who had with them but little concern. For instance, the gossip brought by the tribesmen who had driven hither his horses had not till now seemed of moment to Push-koosh. A conference was in contemplation, to be held at _O-tel-who-yau-nau_ (Hurricane Town), in the country of the Lower Muscogees, and several noted chiefs were to be present, especially certain disaffected spirits who desired to lay their views before the French governor through the medium of his “beloved man,” Lieutenant de Laroche, who with an escort of Cherokees was to come down expressly from Great Tellico. The choice of Hurricane Town had been in honor and placation of Padgee (the Pigeon), its mico, for he was well known to have hesitated and to be grievously ill at ease at the renunciation of British favor and British trade. The journey of the “beloved man” Laroche would lie, it is true, through a country especially friendly to him and his plans, but Push-koosh knew when the fleet of canoes and pettiaugres would be expected on Flint River, and it might be--lurking near--some opportunity--

His deft fingers trembled upon the trigger of his fine pistol.

Captain Howard touched his arm.

“No!” the officer said with the ringing tones of authority. “Alive!”

“Alive?--the French ‘beloved man’?” Push-koosh faltered.

Captain Howard was thinking very fast. In those days when rewards were offered for the scalps of various nationalities of Indians and white men one could hardly be more certain of the genuineness of a head of hair than if it were a wig. Captain Howard had some knowledge of a flaxen scalp riven from the head of an unoffending German colonist and of the effort to make it pass current for a Spaniard’s jetty hair by an Indian more disingenuous than discerning. The astute Push-koosh would never so far disregard the probabilities, but Captain Howard wanted no cheap English auburn locks from the nearest convenient British station. He must needs be sure of that subtle brain beneath the thatch. The man in person--naught else would satisfy him. “Alive--well--the ‘beloved man’ all in one piece!” he declared slowly, definitely.

He took his netted silk purse from his pocket and began to significantly count the golden guineas from one hand to the other. Push-koosh seemed scarcely to notice. For a moment he was as if in a daze. The breath came quick from between his parted lips; his teeth showed slightly, giving him a strange savagery of aspect; his eyes glanced hither, thither restlessly, as if he were seeking to gauge the various points of difficulty in the undertaking. He had not moved, but the wind still fluttered in the fringes of his saffron buckskin suit and in the crest of scarlet flamingo feathers, and the light of the dull day gleamed with a white metallic glister upon the silver headband above his dark flat forehead.

His eyes seemed suddenly afire when Captain Howard, eager that there should be no mistake in identity, asked abruptly, “Are you sure that you would know this French ‘beloved man’ of Tellico if you should see him again?”

Push-koosh stared for a moment motionless. Then he bent himself suddenly backward as if struck by a flaw of wind. He caught both hands to his lips as if to intercept the cry that escaped,--a fierce, shrill, tremendous note expanding through all the heavy silence of the gray day, and seeming to strike with the clamors of its savage joy against the gates of heaven.

XVIII

WHEN very quietly in the sombre depths of the midnight Callum MacIlvesty, according to orders communicated abruptly to him by the commandant, groped down to the river bank, the vague current barely glimpsed by the scintillation of some star in the ripples soon obscured by the scudding clouds, he took his seat in a boat with only two dark figures, motionless, unknown, invisible, for traveling companions. The river under the shadow of the banks was as black as Styx, and as silent as Charon was the boat’s crew. On the opposite side, the Indian town of Keowee lay hushed and absolutely still. Once a dog barked, apprised in some subtle manner of the enterprise going forward, for there was no noise of movement, no word spoken. At the fort only the window of the guardroom was alight, and one listening might hear or fancy the vague footfall of the sentry walking his limited beat. The gleam from the window was but a twinkle in the gloom, and only now and again a star shone out responsive from the clouds. The muffled oars did not rattle in the locks; there was hardly a perceptible impact as the blades were immersed in the water. The vague sense of gliding in the darkness away, swiftly away, from all the familiar world, from all that represented his experience hitherto and civilized life, whither he hardly knew, with whom he could not imagine, impressed Callum MacIlvesty’s mind with a very definite repugnance for his errand, and for all the secrecy and mystery with which it had been invested. He wondered, as the sense of distance increased, as the shadow that marked the site of the town merged indistinguishably into the darkness, as the twinkle that indicated the fort glimmered afar off, then was extinguished utterly, whether his invisible and silent companions knew more of him than he of their identity.

“Captain Howard needna hae feared I’d set mysel’ a-talkin’,” he said to himself, realizing that the party had been thus unexpectedly and silently hustled off in order that naught might transpire of their mission, nay, that their absence might not even be noticed at the fort, till the scheme was well on its way to execution. “I’m nane o’ the sort to be given to idle clavers.”

His companions might have this failing, however, he reflected, and thus he drew his plaid about him and wrapped himself in silent cogitation as in the garment.

Each of the party was himself too surly, or perhaps too proud, or it may be too doubtful of the others to express curiosity. Without a whisper, hearing each other breathe, now and again touching one another, a knee, an elbow, in moving in the strait quarters, they slipped like a phantom craft, a crew of shadows, past the wharf and the trading-house, past the group of canoes and pettiaugres anchored or beached there, past a great Indian camp of the peltry hunters, down and down the river, the current aiding the regular strokes of the oars and bearing them swiftly on.

Naught was roused along the banks except an owl, that hooting after them sent a gibing echo full of quaint vocables far along the reaches of the darkling river; and once a great splash in the water close at hand startled the oarsman, and the craft shot further out toward the centre of the stream. It was a wolf marauding in the woods and springing into the water’s edge, but although he howled for a space naught seemed to hear save the solitary night and the stars now venturing forth and now lost in the tumult of the unquiet clouds. The dank wind grew chillier; the darkness more dense; then came a semblance of vision in which one realized rather than saw great gusty bursts of rain and erratic flaws of wind striking across the surface of the river.

At length two vague pallid strata of dull clear sky revealed to Callum an old cornfield, a vast plain whose evidence of agriculture was but a memento of the past; a charred skeleton of a burnt Indian town, now without a tenant, a relic of the Cherokee War; the brown rain-soaked forests beyond with voluminous clouds bulging down among the treetops; the steely expanse of the river swirling under the fall of the torrents and the rush of the wind; and opposite to him, crouching in the bottom of the boat, Mingo Push-koosh!

The Choctaw, too, had been keenly watching for the earliest glimmer of dawn that should discover to him the faces of his silent comrades, and Callum, although knowing naught of the name or rank or nature of the man, recoiled from the look in the Indian’s eye. Push-koosh stared angrily yet maliciously at his changing expression, then daunted a trifle by the arsenal of arms which the Highlanders of that day bore, dirk, claymore, pistols, musket and bayonet, marking the stalwart strength evinced by the soldier’s attitude as he lay at his ease in the bow, the Mingo smoothed his ruffled crest, as if he would treacherously bide his time.

“Does Captain Howard count me no human that he suld send me campaigning wi’ a panther?” Callum asked himself in amazement.

“The big Capteny thinks the two white men will make short work of poor Prince Baby,” Push-koosh reflected, and when he addressed himself to rearranging his arms, as he shortly did on the pretext of protecting them from the weather, he reloaded his pistols with balls previously dipped in poison and thus rendered deadlier than before, by reason of the extraordinary aptitude which the Indians possessed in toxicology.

Only one other was of the party,--the English soldier floutingly called, from his oft-told experiences in Spain, the Señor,--“Sinner” Kenney. To him the Highlander seemed hardly less savage than the Choctaw. The vast wilderness, in this strange and solitary duty, impressed him as appalling; the character of the hardships and dangers to be encountered was not what he had expected; his spirits had sunk immeasurably low.

All day long they held their course in the chill invisibilities of the mist and rain, two now rowing continually, with the third to lighten the labor by alternating regularly with the others. The night passed in the same dreary fashion, each sleeping by turns, that the craft might make all the speed possible. Little good-fellowship prevailed. The Choctaw hated them both alike with the rancor of his race and his prejudice against aught that was British, which he had acquired from his service with the French; and yet they were formidable soldiers, and their prowess awed him. “The Sinner” scorned the Choctaw as altogether beneath his notice, although he repented swiftly any word or act that might be accounted overt aggression, for the Indian was obviously dangerous. Connected conversation was practicable only between the two white men; but “Sinner” Kenney resented the Highlander’s repute of superiority to his station, and was by turns flippantly offensive in manner or surlily rude. There being no solid substratum of good-heartedness and comradeship in him, Callum felt that there was no pulse in common between them that might atone for the English soldier’s boorishness and coarse manners, repugnant to a man of refined breeding. MacIlvesty therefore had little or nothing to say except as regarded the expediting of their progress, and “the Sinner’s” alternating jocularities and impertinences failed for the most part to take effect by reason of the impassiveness of the Highlander and the lack of comprehension on the part of the Choctaw.

After they had entered the Savannah River “the Sinner” began to flatter himself with the prospect of meeting other river craft--this broad stream being a highway of trade--and of seeing denizens of the world hailing from the region below; but his hopes of social interest and cheery converse were dashed by the rain and the mist which closed down impenetrably. More than one settlement they passed wrapped in invisibility in the cloud, as if they themselves were some undiscriminated element of the atmosphere. When at last the vapors began to shift and the sun to shine with a warmth all at variance with the calendar, as it was interpreted at Fort Prince George, where November, chill and drear, had worn away, they were once more in the density of the wilderness; and suddenly one day, Push-koosh, who was steering, gave the boat a deft turn, sent it swiftly shooting in to the bank, letting it run up a little inlet. Then he sprang out; and as it was lightened of the weight of Callum, who had stepped on shore, the Choctaw pulled the craft up on land with the amazed “Sinner” sitting in it.

He protested. “_Diablo!_ Are we to leave the boat here?” he cried aghast, looking about him at the pathless subtropical wilderness.

“This gude man kens the way,” said Callum with frigid staidness. “Here is the captain’s chart he gied me his nainsel’.”

The round head of the experienced English foot-soldier bent over the paper. There was no mistaking the place. The inflowing of a little tributary on the Carolina side, the proximity of a ridge hard by, a series of prehistoric tumuli at no great distance, all sufficiently identified the locality. And what was that indicated toward the southwest, across the breadth of what is now the State of Georgia--a path marked out in red ink? But there was no corresponding suggestion on the face of the tangled wooded country.

“_Voto á Dios!_ I wish his ‘nainsel’ was in perdition! An’ this is the ‘gude man’ who knows the way! He looks ‘gude’ enough to guide us to hell! _Dios mio!_” suddenly catching himself, “the Injun doesn’t understand the lingo, does he? _Cielos!_ he is a fearsome beast!”

Callum imperiously cut short his complaints by striking off through the swamp. Push-koosh, whose outlook at life had brightened since discovering that his comrades were each as obnoxious to the other as to him, and that all three were of a mind only in antagonism to the personnel of the expedition, did not hesitate to imitate the example. With the peculiar easy gait of the Choctaw he set out at a speed that bade fair to try the mettle of the tall Highlander.

“Sinner” Kenney lingered. He looked up the broad, sunny expanse of the brimming river, then over to the Carolina side, noting the bright, soft aspect of the wintry world that would fain emulate the tender, restful peace of early spring. The flowers were not dead, it seemed to say, only asleep, and this bland zephyr might well rouse them with its sweet blandishments. The ripples played within an oar’s length of the boat. He could with his single strength slide it down into the water and in five minutes be rowing briskly on his return trip to Fort Prince George. He would doubtless be able to devise some plausible explanation that would pass muster; for instance, that he had been accidentally separated from his companions; that the Highlander carried the chart and compass; that thus lost in the trackless wilderness his only possibility of extrication had been to take the boat and forthwith return up the river to Fort Prince George.

And indeed as he gazed adown the shadowy region of the swamp on the Georgia side, he thought it looked much like a country in which a man might easily disappear never to return. Albeit heavily wooded, it was in great part submerged with water of varying depth. At the nearest verge he marked a long loglike protuberance, which he realized was an alligator half sunken in mud and ooze. A white heron gleamed amidst the dusky aisles, standing motionless among those curious roots of the cypress called “knees,” which projected high above the dim surface of the black water wherein they grew. The long stately stems of the tall trees themselves were reflected, pallid and columnar, by myriads from the glimmering dark expanse of the swamp, thus duplicating the densities of the half submerged forests, funereally draped with hanging gray moss in endless festoons. It seemed to stretch out illimitably, this nondescript world that was neither navigable nor yet practicable as dry land. And what might be the result of a failure to compass a fair passage?--and what were the conditions of the region on the other side? All were dependent upon the accuracy of Captain Howard’s chart of this untried, unknown world, and the good faith and fair dealing of Mingo Push-koosh! And still gazing, motionless, intent, “the Sinner” hesitated.

Down the vistas of the forest the soldier’s eye was suddenly caught by the vanishing figures of the Highlander and the Choctaw, and the extraordinary speed and ease of their gait struck his attention and roused his emulation.

“Do they think they can beat me on a forced march--that Sawney, stepping like a crane, and the Choctaw with his little bandy dogtrot?”

He critically appraised their powers. His professional pride was enlisted. He suddenly set his hands one on each side of his trig little body, and like machinery fell the sure even lengths of the military double-quick; and so, speedily overhauling his companions, he went with them down into the depths of the dank forests.

The sun rose high above the river and gilded the tip of every lustrous dark wavelet and illumined the live oaks with an emerald splendor. In the shadowy swamp where the “snowy” heron stood among the cypress knees, the hanging wealth of gray moss caught the enriching beams and glistered, fibrous and silver, from the branches of the tall white marble-like pillars of the trees. The little boat still lay empty, motionless, within an oar’s length of the dancing water.

“Sinner” Kenney thought of the craft many times afterward, and sighed for its relinquishment as for a folly; for the dreary, mutinous, fatiguing experience set at naught all the numerous previous hardships of his chequered career. The physical stress in itself was great. The Choctaw, who set the pace, could keep the same gait all day and cover the same great distance day after day, a task under which the two white men languished and flagged and almost succumbed. It would have been impossible to support the contempt of Mingo Push-koosh in their failure, and his triumph in his own superiority, had it not been for the counter-opportunity to jeer in turn, which was afforded them by the oft recurrence of the watercourses in the Creek country; for Push-koosh could not swim. Sometimes an opportune tree uprooted by a storm afforded a footbridge for crossing a stream. More frequently the rivers were of a breadth that rendered this impossible, especially since the autumn floods from the mountains had swollen them beyond all precedent. Push-koosh must have drowned or turned back but for the assistance of his comrades, unwillingly given, by no means a friendly service, and only in the interests of the expedition.

With a hand on the shoulder of each stalwart swimmer, Push-koosh, limp with terror and horror, was propelled through the water. He was spared much, however, in that he could speculate only vaguely on the meaning of “the Sinner’s” fleer while in transit, half intended to frighten the Choctaw and half from natural and involuntary malice. “_Vamos poco á poco, amigo!_ Let’s drop him now, Sawney! Here is a deep hole! _Porqué no?_”

They suffered much from the weight of their arms and provisions, for Captain Howard had wisely decreed that each should be his own commissariat and none the burden bearer of the others, and when the Highlander lost his salt in the river neither of the other two would give him of their store, and the food of Callum MacIlvesty was bitter for a more æsthetic reason, as he ate it unsalted beside the fire at night, each man cooking for himself. They wrangled much, despite their lack of verbal facilities; they quarrelled over their chart, their compass, the possibilities of shortening the way by deviating from their instructions and essaying a more direct route, and sometimes their relations during the day would become so strained that as they lay down by the camp-fire at night, they were fairly afraid of one another, lest malice develop into menace. The Scotchman had his national quarrel with the Englishman, and called him “pock pudding,” and threatened to “knock his harns out.” The Englishman derided the poverty of the Scots, and told gleeful tales of the lack of sophistication of “Highland recruities” in his experience, in comparison with whom, he declared, Push-koosh, the Choctaw, was a man of the world. Push-koosh laughed alike at the Highlander’s kilt and the English soldier’s scarlet breeches. “The Sinner” twitted the Choctaw for his artificially flattened head; and they all would decline to mend the camp-fire to keep off the wolves until green eyes would be glistening close at hand in the underbrush, and the growl that heralds the pouncing spring would sound threateningly on the chill night air. But the preëminent triumph of Push-koosh came when they encountered more savage denizens of the woods than wolves. His was the craft to detect the approach of other Indians; to avoid rencontre; to erase all trace of their passage through the woods; to slip like a ghost, invisible as it were, between camps under cover of darkness; to skirt with infinite skill the verges of Indian towns. Once they were followed by a dog, baying discovery at every step, at last coming so close that only the discharge of an arrow stilled his telltale cry. Once, strangely enough, a little child tottered along the deer path after them, with some vague mistake of identity in its infantile brain, and Push-koosh, being minded to thus effectively stop its approach,--“’Tis but a Muscogee,” he said,--Callum placed his pistol at the Mingo’s temple, and even “the Sinner” threatened reprisal. In the midst of the wrangle some aboriginal instinct of danger stirred in the adventurous three-year-old, and after one long dismayed, open-eyed, and open-mouthed stare, it turned about on its fat legs and took its tottering flight homeward, too young to recount what it had seen or to understand what it feared.

As they neared the southern confines of the Muscogee country the Indian towns became more frequent, and detection by bands of Creeks coming and going through was imminent. This was the extreme crisis of peril, for naught could save the lives of the two British soldiers and their Choctaw guide if captured in this expedition through the country of the inimical Muscogees, who now were impatiently awaiting the signal of their French liberator to rise with all the united Indian tribes against the English rule.

Now it was that the individual traits of each of the party were asserted in such wise as to demonstrate the wisdom of the commandant’s choice of the personnel of the expedition,--the long-headed Callum’s cool and adroit adaptation of even disasters to the common advantage, and his steady endurance in the face of dangers; the resources of the pluck and experience of the English soldier; the woodcraft, the knowledge of Indian wiles and Indian counterwiles of the Mingo. The hardy, invincible courage of all three animated them like a common pulse, and they clung together now with a unanimity of sentiment that might hardly have been expected from their earlier lack of all the sterling qualities that make up good comradeship. Howard had expected only one of the two white men to endure to the end, to survive the hardships of the march, the inimical chances of environment, or internecine strife amongst the three; but the trio were still together one afternoon when they emerged from the woods on a bluff overhanging the Flint River on the east, and there lay prone upon the ground, silent, not so much as moving a muscle, invisible, save to the floating American vulture circling high in the air in the majestic curves of its strong flight. The opposite banks were low and fringed with woods, and beyond and above, the red sunset of the lonely aboriginal days deployed through the sky like a pageant. Naught broke the infinite stretch of the wilderness, no shadow of cloud impinged on the glister of the river. That the foot of man had ever touched these deep reclusive solitudes only a great mound, artificially constructed, silent, imposing, surmounted with forest growths nurtured by the summers of a thousand years, attested his presence, his hopes, his griefs, and the futility of all. Somehow its outline, imposed with such significance against the range of purple hills in the distance, stretching afar off under the red and amber sky, added a melancholy to the languorous burnished haze, the slow down-dropping of the royal sun, so splendidly vermilion, and bespoke a mysterious past and a future to come as unrevealed.

The air was bland with all the suavity of a southern winter. The foliage had changed as the successive stages of their journey had led them on, as though they bore with them some benignant, embellishing secret that blessed the world as they advanced. No more the ice-girt bare bough, the sere leaf flying before the blast. The live oak, the magnolia, the laurel, lifted splendid redundant foliage to glitter glossy in the sun’s last rays, and the flutter of the paroquets made the pecans merry. At a distance a palmetto tree stood out against the sky, all solitary, as if some invisible sandy beach stretched below. The subtle, alluring fragrance of the anise-tree was filling the air, and the mocking-bird sang in the eternal spring, elated, even though the night was coming on apace.

The woods had grown a gray purple; the river chanted a sylvan rune; a star came out in the vermilion sky and shone aloft with a clear white glister; and suddenly in the red and gray and green crystal lines of the stream an alien sound was borne.

A sound it was as of paddles, rythmically striking the water. As it grew nearer, louder, a deer that had led her fawn down to drink on the opposite shore lifted her head, snuffed the air, stamped with her feet all together, and with a bound was off, her fawn beside her, a mile away, while still the concentric circles that her muzzle had stirred in the water widened to larger circumference, while still the echo of the fawn’s vague bleat of alarm and surprise floated softly to the bluff on the summit of which the three emissaries lay silent.

And at last, rounding a point, came a fleet of canoes, gaudily decorated, an incident of vivid color beneath the flaring sunset, and as vividly reflected in the smooth water, tinged with all the secondary splendors of the evening glow. Beneath an umbrella-shaped fan of eagle feathers artificially mottled with crimson reclined the French officer Laroche, recognizable by his keen Gallic features, his arrogant military alertness of pose, albeit painted and arrayed with all the aboriginal splendor appertaining to his adoptive state as a great “beloved man” of the Cherokee nation. His weapons were a silver-mounted dirk and ivory-handled pistols, while fully armed stalwart Cherokees officiated as bodyguard and paddled the boat. The fleet shot so swiftly along that three cautious heads, craftily lifted, with cautious eyes keenly peering, could with difficulty distinguish the fact that the other canoes were manned by Muscogees; the song that they half chanted, half recited, was a pæan of greeting to the beloved officer of the great French king and compared him with favor to sundry celebrities of much note and value of their own tribe.

The three barely waited till this incident of the sunset was past, seeming in its swiftness, its unreality, some shimmering illusion of the haze-freighted air; in its wild chromatic grotesquerie, some necromancy of the gorgeous zenith of amber and red, and the responsive dream of the mirroring water. Then without one word they rose, struck off by a short cut through the dank and darkening woods, and night had hardly fallen before the chief of Hurricane Town, individually averse to the French interest, was amazed by the trooping in of these incongruous and irrelevant figures announcing themselves as the accredited emissaries of Captain Richard Howard, and producing letters from that officer in support of their assertion, duly confirmed when read by the interpreter.

XIX

THE crash seemed afterward to Laroche like the fall of a castle of cards, like the wreck wrought by the wind in the gossamer symmetries of a cobweb, like a sudden awakening to the conditions of reality from the allurements of a dream, so potent seemed the force, so tenuous the fine-spun scheme when all its fibres were rent apart.

So unprescient had he been!

It was at _O-tel-you-yau-nau_ (Hurricane Town) that he met his fate.

Following the many windings of the river, pausing at sundry villages by the way to receive the protestations and rivet the adherence of the gladly harkening Muscogees, he came to his objective point late the next afternoon. A great black cloud seemed to have accompanied him; in its midst were vivid darting lightnings, frequent and menacing for a time, ever and anon showing convolutions of the vapor lighter in hue and texture, superimposed, as it were, upon the denser darker masses. Then all was dulled to a uniform consistency of tone and portent. The huts of the town, the public square, the _chooc-ofau-thluc-co_, or rotunda, the fields, whence the late harvests had been gathered, all were overshadowed thus, and the forest surrounding them seemed to support this canopy amongst its branches.

From out the town the mico and headmen had come to greet him when as their heralded guest he had approached. With white swans’ wings they had gently stroked his face on either side a hundred times or more as he entered the public square; they had placed him beside the mico on the great white seat of the chief’s council-room, _mic-ul-gee in-too-pau_; they had smoked with him the friend-pipe, and the cacina was brewed. Now and again sudden peals of thunder shook the earth, and the yellow lightnings illumined the dreary gray stretches of the forest and cloud and river and the humble little town, all crouching, as it were, amidst these harbingers of the wrath of the great elements.

So confident, so thoroughly at ease was Laroche that he could not afterward remember when those vague _indicia_ of mental disquietude first became perceptible in the manner of the mico Padgee (the Pigeon). The French officer had known that this chief entertained doubts as to the policy of an intertribal peace, as a constructive constraint upon the powers and independence of the Creek Confederacy. Laroche’s mission to Hurricane Town was partly to set at rest these doubts and to present in contrast the great advantages which the Muscogees would secure in the aid of all the tribal forces against the English. Only united strength and united action could avail aught against British encroachment. The national heads of the Muscogee Confederacy had formally acceded to this view, but Padgee was a man of influence, and his unreserved support was desired. A scrupulous heed the mico seemed to give to Laroche’s talk of the advantages of the great Indian coalition, which was to be the subject of official discussion on the morrow upon the arrival of two other chiefs of the vicinity, whose wavering allegiance he desired to confirm by personal influence. Padgee seemed to ponder in dubitation upon every head of the discourse when, the ceremonies of welcome concluded, the two talked the matter over as they sat apart in the great assembly rotunda. Once the Indian said that the plan of Iberville many years ago was not then new. The Muscogee was a union of many adoptive tribes, the great Creek Confederacy, long before Iberville’s idea of the force of a united people was ever promulgated. It was the Creek policy,--absorption and consolidation. It was also the policy of the Six Nations, the Long House.

“It is unique and new in its aims and power,” Laroche argued, “the union of all the tribes for common aggression and common defense, to maintain aboriginal independence against European intrusion; whereas the scheme of the Creek Confederacy was to protect Creek interests only.”

Padgee made haste to nod his feathered head with a mutter of acquiescence; then he fixed his eyes attentively upon the circling figures of the tadpole dance, _Toc-co-yula-gau_, performed by four Indian braves and four squaws on the hard-trodden floor of the great assembly rotunda. The shadows duplicated their feathered heads upon the red painted earthen walls, and beyond the mad whirl of substance and semblance Laroche could look forth through the great portal opposite and see the night lowering, purple and black, and note how the storm gathered and bided its time, while the yellow lightnings now and again keenly flashed. He began to fancy that some deft hand had sown seeds of dissatisfaction more formidable in their upspringing than dragon’s teeth. He was sure some English suggestion had drawn the parallel between the limited policy of the Creek Confederacy and the universal brotherhood promised by the union of all tribes. Still more definite was the echo of an intrusive voice in the councils when Padgee opined, with many an involution, that he loved old times and old ideas best. Said they of earlier years,--wiser than the men of to-day,--that it was well that the British and French should fight each other. Thus the Muscogees between, courted by both, had much peace--except when it pleased them to conquer and absorb smaller tribes.

This was impossible now, Laroche argued, since the Cherokees had joined fortunes once and for all with the French, who also commanded the Choctaw allegiance. The Muscogees could not alone maintain neutrality.

He spoke sharply, and then checked himself that he should be so definitely nettled. Hurricane Town was at best inconsiderable. Padgee was not a representative man. To-morrow would bring the important chiefs whose suspected dissatisfaction could be obviated by conceding their reasonable desires. This was no official occasion, and Padgee doubtless was taking advantage of the _tête-à-tête_ to bring forward his discontents that he might be remembered when lubricating presents were in order, to make the project run the more smoothly. He was obviously talking to hear himself talk! Nevertheless, Laroche was conscious of an increase of impatience when the voice of Padgee, more like a hawk than a dove, was once more rising on the air with a queer blending of plaint and discontent and apology.

He meant no harm, said Padgee. He loved the officer of the great French king like a brother. But the British goods were well named, being good! And he sighed, as being loath to relinquish the values of a trade so long enjoyed.

Floutingly, as if he hardly cared to reply at all, Laroche averred that French merchandise was famous for its quality all the world over, and more than that, it was cheap.

Once more Padgee caught himself and protested that it was not for him to say; the Creek national headmen would decide the question.

“They _have_ decided it long ago,” Laroche interrupted him.

Certainly, Padgee was aware of that, but he felt the loss. _O-tel-you-yau-nau_ (Hurricane Town) had been a favorite stand of the British traders in times past, and the people loved them.

The long serpentine lines of the lighted cane burning upon the floor were growing dim, flickering, dying out gradually. The dreary night without in the quick keen flashes of the lightning was brighter, more distinct, than the dome-shaped rotunda sinking into shadow. The dance was over, the place nearly empty of people. Laroche rose suddenly with a more indubitable monition of treachery. He looked about him for his Cherokee bodyguard. Secure among friends, he had dismissed them to enjoy the hospitalities and return the courtesies of their coadjutors of the new alliance. Padgee, noting the movement, rose too, speaking very rapidly, as if there were scant time to be lost, while the great spaces of the _chooc-ofau-thluc-co_ darkened yet more duskily and the vague lights of the cane trembled to extinction. Outside, the lightning unsheathed its vivid blades, flashing athwart the sky, and the thunder pealed and burst explosively and rolled away, muttering, to the further hills.

It was a long time, said Padgee plaintively, since a British trader had been able to ply his kind and beneficent vocation in Hurricane Town for fear of the martial French at Fort Toulouse; and since the French sent no traders to the villages, save now and then a mere peddler, slipping back and forth from his fort, afraid of his shadow, the Indians of Hurricane Town were often utterly destitute of all those artificial supplies which they needed, so civilized had they come to be. They were fit to die of shame should any one observe how far behind the fashion of the day had they trailed. Only very recently a Chickasaw chief had come to Hurricane Town in a splendid embroidered suit from a British trader, and he, the great mico, Padgee, had naught in which to meet him that was of European manufacture but a cocked hat and a pair of silver shoe buckles.

He paused impressively. Doubtless he felt, as one might say in the artistic jargon of this day, that these articles did not “compose well” with the rest of his attire, a shirt of bead-wrought buckskin and leggings decorated with turkey-cock spurs and fawn’s trotters. Laroche made no reply. Somehow the crisis tingled in his nerves like some electrical current before the event was precipitated.

Therefore, Padgee resumed very swiftly, some folk of a town far off--he could not just say where--had come up to-night to meet the great French officer and--confer with him concerning the condition of the British trade.

Laroche turned upon him.

“Padgee!” he exclaimed, “is this well? I have eaten your bread, I have eaten your salt!”

The mico hesitated at the last moment, but half hearted in his deceit. Perhaps the appeal to the sanctions of his rude hospitality might have availed even now, but its force was abrogated by the possibilities. The British soldiers awaited no longer the preconcerted signal. Military figures, barely distinguishable in the gloom from other shadows of the darksome place, were climbing down from behind the tiers of seats of the primitive amphitheatre; and although one, “the Sinner,” lost his footing and fell rolling down the descent with great thumps, the Highlander was upon Laroche so quickly, so powerfully, that his strong hand stifled the cry for help.

It was managed with infinite address and secrecy, for the two British soldiers would have fallen victims to their own temerity had they dared to show themselves openly and alone, among the Indians, if unprotected and at their mercy. As to the Choctaw, the mere revelation of his personality, with a price upon his head, would have meant his death. Therefore Padgee, armed with his authority as mico, headed the guard of Muscogee braves, his own attendants, whom he designed to send with the captors to Fort Prince George, and accompanied them several miles on the return march. As he had long been inimical to the coalition so earnestly advocated by the French, this fact was the reason that Laroche had appointed Hurricane Town as the rendezvous of the lukewarm, that he might be sure of gaining the ear of Padgee and confirming his allegiance by argument and the example of others. It had needed but a word from Push-koosh to acquaint Captain Howard with this important circumstance, and the British officer in treating with the chief of Hurricane Town had held out prospects of high advancement. Thereafter Padgee had no need to complain of the lack of gold and European gewgaws when visited by strangers; in fact, he was in case to disport himself with a pride in apparel that might better befit a peacock than the humble pigeon whose name he bore.

When the populace outside of the rotunda learned that the great French “beloved man” had been arrested mysteriously in the British interest, they received the news with a wild outcry of despair and muttered threats and even efforts at rescue. More than one, especially in the neighboring towns, suspected that the indifference of Padgee to the success of the French schemes might have contributed to the catastrophe, but none dreamed that the hospitality of Hurricane Town had been violated, that Padgee had renounced the guest within the gates and delivered him up to his enemies, to be dragged away by force to a cruel doom. Hours had passed--indeed it was near day--before the news transpired, and although the Cherokee bodyguard set out at once upon the trail of the captors, they soon found that time itself could not overtake the party. For themselves they were few, unprepared, in a country bristling with hostile conditions, for the commandant at Fort Toulouse, as soon as apprised of the catastrophe, sent out a detachment to attempt a rescue, and the Cherokees feared to be held accountable for the capture of the French officer as for a lapse of vigilance. They therefore relinquished the effort, took moodily to their boat, refusing the tearful condolences of Hurricane Town, and pulled up the Flint River again, lamenting loudly all the way, to the Cherokee country.

What thoughts came to Laroche that stormy night as he half toiled and was half dragged among his captors through the tangled ways of the wilderness! A thousand vain regrets tortured him. The recapitulation of events that might have been ordered otherwise trailed in long sequences through his mind. A vision constantly recurred of a result so different, seeming so real, that only a slight wrench of will would be requisite to tear him from this oppressive dream which surely must needs presently dissolve in obvious fact.

Nevertheless his intellectual faculties, heedful of cause and effect, perceived that the flight was ordered with a craft that bade fair to eliminate all chance of rescue or escape. That they should take their way to the north or diagonally across Georgia was so obviously their proper policy that Padgee turned their steps directly to the south, whence none would dream of following. To increase the distance more effectually and obliterate the traces of their passage through the country, he availed himself of his own boat, hidden among the saw-grass of the marshy borders of a neighboring watercourse, down which they rowed and drifted out of all calculations of pursuit. Indeed this deviation took them so far to the south that they could discern the tang of salt water on the breeze, and hear the voice of the surf singing the iterative song of the sea. Only then did they disembark and take up the line of march toward the Savannah River once more.

Their progress was infinitely laborious; the weather had clouded, and rain filled the marshes and overflowed the streams. Often a fire was impracticable, and without shelter, short of food, in terror of capture, and now and again endangered by faction, the sufferings of the captors were hardly discounted by the anguish of the prisoner. Only once did a chance of escape present itself.

Laroche had observed that the Highlander, now taking command of the party, according to his orders, studiously prevented any opportunity for the prisoner to speak apart with any single individual. MacIlvesty had of course disarmed Laroche and taken from him all such valuables as might tempt the integrity of the others.

“Is this a’ your gowd?” he asked.

“Untie my hands and receive my parole, or else run your own risks,” retorted the French officer.

“An’ fine wad I like to do that, but it is contrary to my orders,” said Callum kindly, “sae I maun e’en look to you mysel’.”

This he did with a vigilance that showed no possibility of relaxation till one stormy night when they gained once more the banks of the Savannah River and found their further progress barred; for their boat, left there, to serve their return, had vanished.