Chapter VIII: Part 8

To Lieutenant Everard was intrusted the command of this small military force to escort certain commissioners appointed by the government to the Cherokee country for the purpose of treating with the Indians concerning the projected cession of land, which was not made, however, for several years thereafter, because of an incident of much significance here chronicled--in fact not until 1768. In view of the doubtful temper of the Cherokees and the unsettled state of the country, it was exclusively and comprehensively his duty to see to it that the heads of these gentlemen were unmolested, with their brains securely inside and their scalps securely outside, nor were they expected in return to minister in any degree to his entertainment. But it is not too much to say that Lieutenant Everard would have regarded a brisk brush with Indian enemies with less awe, despite his slight numerical strength, than the ponderous themes, the weighty presence, the worshipful gravity of the commissioners of the crown. There was not a conversable person among them, in the estimation of the gay and dapper lieutenant, and the march thither and back, with the negotiations at Choté, was calculated to occupy a matter of many weeks. The surveyor was of the same ultra-sober type, and the subordinate attendants he considered as unbefitting his society. Of course familiar association with the men of his company, having only their noncommissioned officers, was inappropriate, even if their ruder breeding had not rendered them unacceptable.

Thus it was that after a day or two of floundering out of his element, he was thrown upon Callum MacIlvesty for solace. For he knew that MacIlvesty, although serving in the ranks, was a man better born and better bred than himself. Of course he was aware that the train of woes, the attainder for treason and forfeiture of estates, following the rebellions of 1715 and 1745, wrecking a number of noble families, brought to the ground the branches as well as the parent stem; and in this instance Callum’s commanding officer had acquainted Lieutenant Everard with the “gentleman ranker’s” name and condition just before their departure from Charlestown, when this small detachment of Highlanders was ordered to reinforce the escort, as they were familiar with the wild country, a number of them having served with the British troops in this region the two preceding years during the Cherokee War.

The forlorn young officer, so grievously solitary in this expedition, soon ceased to ride with the commissioners, and fell into the habit first of riding near the Highlander as Callum MacIlvesty, alert, active, with a vivid interest in life, strode along in the marching column whose fluttering tartans played tag with the wind and whose burnished accoutrements set up a bright kaleidoscopic glitter at the vanishing point of many a winding woodland perspective. When the talk grew more animated and the interest keener, Lieutenant Everard would throw the reins to an orderly and march on foot beside his new-found friend in his lowly place; whereat the first sergeant of the English detachment would glance at the nearest corporal with meaning eyes, and all adown the column the scarlet elbows of the fours called “battle comrades” would give each other the touch with more emphasis than the effort to march in due alignment necessitated. Often, however, in fact most usually, the whole force marched with the route step, when conversation was admissible and comment freer than before. For it was obviously a derogation from the dignity of a commissioned officer to continue this familiar association with a common soldier and in so far subversive of discipline, and when the crisis came there were those amply prepared to say “I told you so!”

“The lieutenant wouldn’t demean himself by walkin’ an’ talkin’ familiar with a non-com like me,” the first sergeant of the English contingent averred. “An’ I can’t see as I am a worse man or a less loyal subjec’ ’cause I ain’t got fine, titled kin taken in open rebellion an’ attainted o’ treason--one of ’em, Callum’s great uncle, was executed for treason and his head perched up over a city gate--there yet, for aught I know!”

For this was the fate of many of the good and noble who had adhered to the political faith of their fathers.

The Highlanders of the escort, however, some of whom were rescued from imbroglio on this theme by a simple incapacity to speak or understand a word of English, and who clattered away cheerily enough together in Gaelic, deemed this association no sort of condescension on the part of Lieutenant Everard. So well aware were they of the claims to distinction of sundry ancestors of Callum MacIlvesty that this penniless scion of a line of half mythical Highland princes, extending back in dim procession into the mists of ages, seemed far superior in social status to Lieutenant Everard, whose best prospect was some day to represent a comparatively modern but well-endowed English baronetcy.

Perhaps Everard might have justified his course by the plea that the expedition was not strictly military, and thus permitted some abrogation of strictly military rule. Every detail to insure safety, however, was rigorously observed. When the tents were pitched sentinels were posted, the various guards mounted, all the discipline of a military camp preserved. When on the march scouts were thrown out, and a baggage and rear guard maintained. But, he argued, surely he could not be expected to live so long a time without a being with whom to exchange a congenial word. And if he saw fit to single out a man near his own age, of his own station in life, only constrained to serve in the ranks by reason of poverty because of political misfortunes, he did not conceive that Callum MacIlvesty was lifted out of his place as a soldier and absolved from the duty of obedience because thus admitted, unofficially, to the society of his superior in military rank.

Although both men felt the irking of the anomalous situation, their mutual relish of congenial companionship rendered them adroit in nullifying the difficulty. When Everard gave an order he addressed the Highlander as “MacIlvesty,” who simply and implicitly obeyed it as a soldier should. But if Everard spoke to him as “Callum Bane,” he received the request as from a friend and complied or not as he chose, for the sobriquet had come to be a mark of friendly familiarity, as it was not necessary on this expedition as a means of identification. While the regiment had not the disaster in nomenclature that beset the corps of the Sutherland Fencibles, in which one hundred and four men answered to the name of “William Mackay,” seventeen being in one company, still in the Forty-Second there was much patronymic repetition, and in one company there were three Callum MacIlvestys severally distinguished as “Callum Roy” (the red-haired) and “Callum Dhu” (the dark) and “Callum Bane” (the fair).

This fair-haired Callum seemed an attractive personality to Lieutenant Everard, who felt a compassionate regret that a youngster of such good parts should have no better prospects, for these were the days of the purchase of commissions, and this serious thought was often in Everard’s mind as they sat alone beside the camp-fire, making so far as opportunity favored them a convivial night of it. Callum had been grateful for the recognition of his true quality in the humble guise of the private soldier and in the coarse tartan. It was as a salve to his wounded spirit and sense of exile. It had been with a great effort at self-assertion, as a rallying of forces after a defeat, that he had been able to regain in a measure his normal poise, a semblance of his wonted brave cheerfulness, subsequent to his obvious supplantation in the favor of Lilias. Her indifference had pierced him with a pain all the keener because of his ardent sincerity. Perhaps because he had already suffered so much from untoward fate he was endued with the strength to suffer more without succumbing utterly. He was fortunate in the stubborn resources of his indomitable pride. He would not pine like a love-sick girl, he said to himself. He would nerve himself to bear this latest and bitterest fling of fortune like a man. He was the better enabled to meet it with a bold front since the continual exactions of Everard occupied his attention, and left him little time for that silent brooding so pernicious yet so precious to the youth crossed in love. There was an element of humiliation in the situation which seared his sensitive pride like actual fire. Jock Lesly had found his account in the Indian trade, and thus Lilias would have no inconsiderable inheritance, while Callum had naught to offer but his heart, which seemed no great matter after all, and the hand of an ordinary foot-soldier. He had roused himself with a loyal feeling that he owed it to his ancestry, his name, his sense of honor, and of honorable achievements in those who had gone before, his own unimpeachable record, not to think so meanly of himself; and thus the warm appreciation of his personal qualities and high descent, irrespective of his incongruously humble station which Everard had manifested, the admitted equality of their association, had aided to restore his mental calm and self-respect, and seemed at this crisis more valuable than it could be at any other time.

The responsibility and anxiety consequent upon escorting the party of the commissioners through the country of savages, so inimical and treacherous as Everard had discovered that the Cherokees still were, weighed very sensibly upon the officer’s consciousness. Therefore the relaxation at intervals afforded by congenial companionship was all the more acceptable. The tension of the situation augmented the nervous stress of his intolerance of the learned and inopportune disquisitions which the botanist forced continually upon him. He sought to dissemble his displeasure and irritation, however, for he was essentially a gentleman, according to his lights, notwithstanding his repudiation of bigwigs and botany. For all their dullness and slow decorum he had shown every respectful observance to the elderly civilians whom it was his duty to escort, and they, being civilians, thought his choice of a companion very appropriate. They all looked upon Lieutenant Everard with much favor. They could not know, of course, how often he would pause in his talk with Callum, when the two were alone beside the camp-fire, and shake his head with an unutterable thought even to hear the voice of the botanist, the well-known Herbert Taviston, as it was raised in his guarded tent to call out a string of Latin plant names of the growths of the Great Smoky region to another of the commissioners already abed under his own canopy, while the Highlander, whose ills in life were so much grimmer than boredom, laughed in glee at the officer’s dismay and disaffection. So often Everard shook his head for this cause that its decorous powder suffered, and that is saying much. For so perfect of accoutrement was he, so point-device, so solicitous in every detail of dress, that one can hardly think of the fop’s dying save in full uniform, as befitting the importance of the occasion. The fact that extremes meet is suggested in the thought that the savages, when going out to battle with another tribe, often importuned the white traders for such attire as would enable them to “make a genteel appearance in English cloth when they died.” That the highly civilized Everard would die in his boots was a foregone conclusion, but one is sure that they were elaborately polished whatever the emergency, his burnished sword in his hand, his neckcloth richly laced about his throat, his hair curled according to its graceful wont. It was a very fine head of hair, and for that reason he did not wear the fashionable wig. Of a rich brownish auburn hue, his hair rose up from his forehead in a natural undulation that gave all the fashionable effect; it curled crisply at the sides; it was thick, long, and lent itself with every address to be plaited in a queue at the back. He had brown eyes, darkly lashed, a large aquiline nose, a curling, disdainful, discontented mouth, and a complexion sunburned a permanent scarlet, for despite his fripperies he had seen much service and was by no means a tin soldier. The dashing young officer was a somewhat dazzling exponent of a position and a status which Callum felt to be his own by right, and the simply educated and much denied Highland youth listened greedily to the stories with which Everard sought to beguile the tedium: stories of cosmopolitan life, society, the gay world, the gossip of the times in high circles, London, Paris, Vienna,--for Everard had seen life,--he had seen the world! Sometimes these choice narratives were military, and Callum’s pulse would quicken, for he was ambitious of deeds of valor and the opportunity of command. Sometimes the chronicle of Everard’s experiences became boastful and coxcombical, and adroitly suggested other conquests than those of the battlefield.

Nevertheless to Everard the tedium was intolerable. They could not gamble at cards, the reigning vice and pleasure of the day, for the extremity of the poverty of Callum Bane precluded this, and Everard would have been both ashamed and sorry to win his meagre pay. Now and again they played a dreary game without hazard, merely “for the fun of the thing,” but Everard found more genuine amusement in object lessons with the cards, in which he elucidated the methods and mysteries of sundry new games, the latest rage, which he had picked up when he was last in London or Paris. This interest palled too after a time, and in reverting to the chronicle of his experiences he was even fain to elaborate questions of the cuisine; he described queer dishes of which he had partaken in out of the way quarters of the world whither his military duties had chanced to carry him; he learnedly compared the abilities of the cooks of different inns and coffee-houses in divers cities; and he vaunted the discrimination and keen discernment of his palate as a judge of wines till the “bouquet,” of which he spoke so knowingly, seemed to dispense an actual fragrance to the alert senses of the imaginative listener. None of these subtle refinements appertained to the beverage of which Everard invited Callum’s opinion one night as the two boon spirits lingered long about the camp-fire, now and again mending it as it sank, for the hour wore on to the chill of midnight.

“You have to go on guard duty anyhow presently, Callum Bane,” the officer said, “so you might as well stay here till the corporal goes out with the relief.”

They had been in high glee, and the lieutenant was loath to lose his merry company.

The camp was now pitched at Ioco Town,--by Callum, alack, so well remembered,--west of the Chilhowee Range, and the English surveyor had offered the lieutenant some particularly fierce tafia, doubtless originally distilled for the Indian trade (against the law), the “fire water” that wrought such woe among the tribes. The sober-minded civilians had not cared to deviate from their usual refreshment of brandy and water or wine which they had brought for their consumption during the journey, but the officer was disposed to experiment. Neither Everard nor Callum was accustomed to this particular drink nor pleased with it, and now and again reverted to the officer’s Scotch whiskey, wherein they demonstrated the fact that they were both Britons and compatriots. Then once more they essayed the contemned rum, and again to take the taste out drank the home-brew.

“My certie! it’s got the smell o’ the peat ontil it!” cried the Scotchman in his simple joy and bibulous patriotism.

Despite his exaltation of the Scotch product, however, the rum had no cause to complain of him when some criticism of the beverage by Everard required that it should be sampled anew, and then they once more sagely conferred together.

That Everard was more irritable than usual was amply manifest in the expression of his uplifted eyes and the cant of his eyebrows when suddenly the learned Herbert Taviston issued forth all nightcapped from his tent, and, snugly wrapped in a gaudy floriated dressing-gown, once more sought the solace of the fire.

“You seem very comfortable here, my dear sir,” he said with complacent sweetness and self-satisfaction, all unaware of the piteous spectacle his nightcapped well-informed head presented in the estimation of the military man, who was already alienated by a surfeit of botany, and whose hair, blowsing in the chill wind about his high forehead, was not even sheltered by his hat. “I find my tent quite cold. We should have done better to take up our quarters in this vacant house hard by, as it seems to be abandoned.”

He nodded the tassel of his nightcap toward the slumbering town of Ioco, the nearest conical-roofed houses showing dimly against the densely black night. Some residue of light seemed held in the Tennessee River, for now and again came a sidereal glimmer from the reflection of the stars on the invisible surface, and a mysterious vista opened between the towering forests on either bank, where the unseen stream led like some great shadowy roadway into regions of deeper darkness beyond. Ioco Town, long and narrow, stretched along the bank, still and silent. Only the wind was abroad. Of the nearest dwellings all seemed alike, but one quite apart from the others, close at hand in fact, was vacant, according to the adroitly waving tassel,--doubtless impelled by previous knowledge rather than present assurance of the circumstance.

The officer spoke up with only half masked acerbity. He felt responsible, as he was indeed, for the conduct of the expedition to the best advantage, and all details as to transportation, lodgment, the commissariat, passed under his direct supervision. No slight matter was such a march in that region in those days. Now a river had risen out of fording depth, and ferriage was to be improvised, from whatever materials could be had in the dense wilderness, and safely achieved; now an accident occurred to the baggage train, a horse going hopelessly lame, or getting astray; now a shortage supervened in certain provisions for the commissioners that had proved more acceptable than others which thus outlasted them. All the time the discipline of a military camp was to be maintained, the soldiers provided for after their kind, the thousand maladroit incidents of a march of five hundred miles to be severally met and adjusted, without assistance or advice, and reconciled to the comfort and safety of an official party of elderly civilians.

“You will do me the favor to remember, sir, that since the change in the weather I have urged you and the other civilian gentlemen to accept the invitation of the chiefs of Ioco Town and quarter yourselves in their ‘stranger-house,’ a very commodious lodging and vastly superior to yonder tumble-down hovel.”

Everard pointed with the stem of his pipe toward the stove-like “winter-house,” a mere shadow crouching low in the night and only revealed because of the far-reaching flare of the freshening camp-fire. The yellow flames sprang cheerily up with a roar and a jet of leaping red sparks. The boughs of the tall hickory trees high over their heads showed fluctuating glimpses of the amber and scarlet hues of the still redundant leafage; a star scintillated through the fringes of a pine; the tents of the little encampment glimmered white at regular intervals in the dusky aisles of the woods; now and again the dull red glow of a fire at some distance, about which was grouped the guard, asserted its fervors, “lights out” being an order held not applicable to it nor to the fire in front of the commissioners’ tents; and continually, regularly, the tramp of an unseen sentry, walking his beat, smote on the air with a dull mechanical iteration like the ticking of a clock.

“I should have placed a strong guard about the building,” Everard went on, “and as the rest of the escort lies so near Ioco you would have been as secure certainly if not safer than here as you are.”

For Everard, not unnaturally, considered the complaint of the discomforts to which the commissioners were subjected as a reflection upon his conduct of the march.

The tassel on the learned nightcap wagged in deprecation. “My dear sir, most true, most true, but”--

“I remember you insisted that you preferred the camp because of possible infection from smallpox in the Indian dwellings,” the officer mercilessly went on, with a curl of the upper lip, already so disdainfully disposed. He had that flouting scorn of the fear of contagion which a man naturally acquires whose life is in continual jeopardy from epidemics, constrained to dwell in hordes, and subject every hour to the chances of the times. “For myself,” he protested, “except that I am obliged to keep the escort in camp to avoid brawls between the soldiers and the young Cherokee braves, I should prefer to billet the whole force upon the town, in the good, cosy, dry winter-houses, since this unseasonable chilly change in the weather. There is no more danger from smallpox for you in sleeping in their ‘stranger-house’ than in the handshaking that went on in the powwowing over the terms of the cession at Choté with the headmen. Shoot me, sir, but you ought to see an epidemic in an army--something to be afraid of! Gad, sir, the men died with cholera in India like sheep--and with scurvy, too, on board ship, both going and coming.”

The tassel on the nightcap had lost its pliant urbanity. Be a man ever so scientific, so civilian, so intrusted with peaceful commissional powers, he cannot admit an inference of fear, even of disease, in taking ordinary precaution.

“All, my good sir, within the scope of civilization and the best deterrent effects of a scientifically applied materia medica. The army chirurgeons do good service--excellent, excellent. But here, among the savages, no disinfectant processes obtain, and no intelligent effort to prevent the spread of the dread scourge. Why, sir, in 1738 the Cherokees lost almost half their number by the ravages of the smallpox and their ignorance in dealing with the disease.”

“And if they had lost _all_ their number I should not hesitate to sleep in one of their winter-houses twenty-four years later. Ha, ha, ha!” The rum was evidently getting in its work. “Hey, Benson,” the lieutenant called to his servant in the one illumined tent hard by, “make up my bed in that vacant winter-house, and hark ye, build a fire in the middle of the floor, Injun-wise! Gad! I’ll not be diddled out of the comforts of life for fear of a Cherokee distemper twenty-four years gone!”

The nightcap wished itself where it belonged, on its pillow. To retire with dignity became the most definite motive in the brain that it surmounted, and in this emprise it conceived that some aid might be secured by a few words of casual conversation with the officer’s companion, who was therefore civilly addressed.

Now the worshipful Herbert Taviston would have been excited to a frenzy by a false classification of the meanest herb of the earth, and would have repudiated it as an unrighteous pretension and a mischievous effort to subvert the accepted grades and relations of a careful and accurate system. But if aware that such elements and considerations existed in matters military, they were in his estimation of no practical moment, and he turned toward the Highland soldier with as pliant a grace of his tasseled crest as erstwhile it had borne in bending before the commander of the force. And in fact he might well be oblivious of distinctions of rank. The young Highlander had a handsome, kindly, intelligent face and a manner of refinement and dignity, and bating his coarse garb and rustic dialect he might have easily seemed a man of degree. Moreover, he was here hobnobbing familiarly with his officer.

“Do you find your pipe a solace, my dear sir?” Mr. Taviston blandly demanded, for smoking was not then the universal habit that it was sometime earlier and has been since.

“Aye, sir,” the Highlander replied politely, a trifle embarrassed by the obvious mistake as to his rank rather than his quality. “But it isna sae cantie a crony as a queigh o’ gude browst, neither,” he added blithely, with an effort to reëstablish the _entente cordiale_.

The young officer, with sullen, attentive eyes, that held a spark of red fire in their brown depths, glowered at them.

“Ah, so indeed!” suavely commented the elderly nightcap. “But have you observed, sir, that the Indians have another kind of tobacco than that which is commonly smoked,--which is of course the _Nicotiana Tabacum_? Now this other tobacco plant is a small-leaved, green, bitter species which they use exclusively in their religious ceremonies, their incantations, their necromancy, known as”--

“As _Nicotiana diabolica_,” suggested the officer.

Now had the nightcap housed but a modicum of tact and permitted a laugh at this fling, all might yet have gone well. But trust a man of scientific hobbies for serious denseness.

“Not at all, sir,” he said with asperity. “That name is unknown to the herbalist. The plant is _Nicotiana rustica_ with us. With the Cherokees it is _Tsalagayuli_, and the Muskogees call it _It-chau-chee-le-pue-puggee_, ‘the tobacco of the ancients,’ and the Delawares, _Lenkschatey_, ‘original tobacco,’--showing an interest parity of signification; with the coast Indians it is _Uppowoc_; the Tuscaroras call it _Charho_; the Pamlico Indians, _Hoohpau_; and the Woccon Indians, _Vucoone_. Now,” turning back to the Highlander with an air of excluding the ill-starred jester on subjects of such grave moment, “there is a so-called tobacco, not even related to the genus _Nicotiana_--it is the _Lobelia inflata_--which furnishes the Indians with a powerful medicinal infusion. Have you noticed in your march hither, and perhaps in your previous campaigns in the Cherokee country, the amazing expertness of the Cherokees in the matter of simples?”

“He is too simple himself,” put in the officer, with an airy laugh.

The Highlander’s face was flushing painfully. He was carrying a goodly quantity of mixed liquor of the fiercest description, and it had not as yet shaken a nerve; but the consciousness of his false position between his two companions was aiding its potency, and his equilibrium was beginning to tremble.

The botanist, touched in his sensitive pride, calmly ignored Lieutenant Everard at his own camp-fire; and the officer, who had borne much from his idiosyncrasies and had assiduously sought to promote his comfort and security on the weary march hither, gazed at him with a deepening glow of that fiery spark in his eyes.

“The Cherokees’ expert knowledge of toxicology in plant forms is amazing,” continued the botanist. “They excel all savage nations in their discoveries of vegetable poisons and their application. And then their botanical nomenclature--how happy--how apt! Are you conversant, sir, with their generic plant names?”

“The title of the parent stem, do you mean?” said the unlearned Highlander hesitating, fumbling in his mind as to what Cherokee plant names were considered applicable as to a parent stem.

“He doesn’t lay much nowadays on the title of parent stems,” interpolated Everard flippantly. “His own branch has lost its head, through that head having been so heady as to lose his head.”

A keen steely glance, as significant as the drawing of a burnished blade, flashed from the Highlander’s eyes and was received full in the gaze of the facetiously fleering officer. The subject of the forfeiture of estates, the loss of titles, the attainder of treason, was not fit for jesting with one who had suffered so fiercely by them, and except in his cups no man would have been more definitely and respectfully aware of this than Everard. And yet the fiery liquor was not altogether to blame. He was as cruelly hampered by the false position as his lowly friend, who nevertheless in every essential that he reverenced was his equal if not his superior. To be ignored, to be talked down, and meekly submit to keep his mouth closed was more than his patience could admit. But he was practically helpless. He could not seize that egregious nightcap by the tassel and punch that learned head. He could only assert himself by interjecting scoffs and fleering laughter, and because of the fiery cup these were ill advised.

“It is singular how very fitting and descriptive is the Cherokee plant nomenclature!” chirped the botanist. As he sat on a block of wood beside the fire, his face seemed ludicrously small in its strait toggery, in comparison with its enlarged and bewigged aspect by day, and he looked like an elderly infant, if such an anachronism can be pictured. His gaudy gown was drawn close about his spare figure, but he had forgotten to be cold, and his smiling eyes were fixed absently on the face of the young Highlander, as fitting the fingers of his delicate hands daintily together he continued to speak of the accurate niceties of Cherokee plant names.

“_Atali kuli_, ‘the mountain climber,’” he translated, his lingering tones almost chanting, so great was his pleasure in the definition; “the mountain ginseng, my good sir.” Then, fairly intoning the Latin like a priest, he added, “_Panax quinquefolium_, of the order _Araliaceæ_, also a native of China, sir.”

“_He_ is not a native of China, sir. He was made out of a peat bog,” put in Everard flippantly.

Naturally the nightcap addressed the civil Highlander.

“Then there is _Ahowwe akata_, ‘deer-eye,’--yes, the word _ahowwe_ signifying deer,--with us the _Rudbeckia fulgida_. And again,” dropping his voice now in deprecation of the suggestion of indelicacy, as if a lowered tone made the allusion more seemly, “there is _Unistiluisti_, meaning ‘they stick on,’”--in a whisper, “beggar’s lice,”--then at full voice, as if the Latin would mend the matter, “_Myosotis Virginiana_.”

The lieutenant looked ostentatiously disgusted. He had indeed never heard of the plant, and the Latin did not impose upon him, but the mention of the insect from which it took its name was an insult to ears polite. “Oh fie, sir!” he said rebukingly, for he was indeed aweary of it all.

The nightcap turned hastily toward the Highlander, who was heavily harassed between the two, the double discord of their moods jarring upon his nerves and bringing them more under subjection to his previous potations. “Then, my dear sir, there is the Indian shot, the _Canna_,--as you are aware the Celtic word for ‘a cane,’--with us the ‘headache plant,’ and”--

“Come, come, sir, enough of this,” cried Everard, scarcely listening, and forced to rise. “We have nothing to do with headaches. It grows late, and your hearer cannot meet your phrase nor match your learning, although as to the question of heads he knows more about them than you can ever teach him. Nothing fixes them in the memory like having them grinning from a city gate.”

The Highlander had risen too. He had a pictorial imagination, and there still lingered upon its sensitive retina, so to speak, images of the night’s talk, before the botanist had come to the fireside: the aspect of London, the castellated Rhine, the glitter of Paris, and many a suave and southern scene beneath a blue and tropic sky. Suddenly these were all obliterated. That woeful land upon which the cruel hand of Doom had rested so heavily, the sequestered estates, the beggared gentry, the starving peasants, the scattered clans, the hunted fugitives, the proscribed national garb, the hopeless exiles, the prison, the scaffold, the gibbet--all rose up before him as elements in a stricken gray landscape, in ghastly wintry guise. For one moment he hesitated. Then stepping aside from the fire, he reached out and struck the flippant mocker full in the face.

The officer, taken all unaware, reeled as if he would lose his balance. Then, for he was of a fine, alert physique, he recovered the perpendicular, and it seemed as if he would spring like a panther upon the Highlander, who had thrown himself into a posture of defense. The next moment Everard’s military identity was fully reasserted, and the proud Highlander writhed under the realization that the officer would not return the blow. He would not demean himself by striking so low a thing,--a man of the ranks. His voice rang out crisp and steady as he called the corporal of the guard, placed Callum under arrest, and named the manner and locality of his detention and the details when he should be brought up “at orders” the following morning. Then wholly sobered, Everard turned with dignified courtesy upon the botanist, who was now protesting and squawking like some fluttered fowl instead of a refined and elegant gentleman in the discharge of a public trust.

“I must beg your favor, sir,” the lieutenant said, by way of denial of a wild plea for clemency for the culprit. “I understand my duty and I shall do it. And may I beg that you will now retire to your tent, as all this stir may rouse the camp to the prejudice of discipline and good order? I wish you a very good-night, sir!”

And the nightcap with a depressed and lankly pendent tassel and the floriated gown disappeared under the flap of the tent and enlivened the spaces around the fire no more.

XI

POOR Callum Bane! Sober in good truth and sad as well! As soon as his guard had quitted his side, he flung himself down on the earth floor of the Indian winter-house, to which he had been conducted, with his cheek pressed to the clay. He wished that the day had come when it might cover him. Then he recoiled with the thought that this might not be far distant. Striking an officer was a most serious military offense. Even apart from its military aspect it was an insult for which only blood could atone. He knew that Lieutenant Everard could never face his world, the officers of his regiment, his mess, if they were aware that as man to man he had tamely submitted to receive a blow in the face. And since he could not challenge one of so low a station as a common soldier, he had let the matter revert to its normal aspect of insubordination, and the military law would take its course.

Yet Callum could have shed the tears that stood hot and smarting in his eyes for this sad finale to their gay young friendship. He had felt that it augured a certain magnanimity in Everard to ignore what he was in station in the knowledge of what he was by descent. Callum would never have admitted, not even in his most secret thoughts, that he found aught lacking in Jock Lesly, whose instincts rendered him a man of intrinsic worth; but this association on equal terms with Everard, a man of refined manners and gentlemanly phrasings and careful nurture, was to Callum like a return to the companionship of his earlier life, and a relief after the ruder comradeship of the boisterous common soldier and the dull routine of mechanical duty. He had taken a certain pleasure, too, in the realization that his society was the young officer’s only solace in the long and dreary march with its peculiar personal isolation. But it was a pleasure fraught with much pain,--the contemplation of this man in a position which but for an untoward fling of fate might have been his own also. The thought often lent a sharp edge to the close and intimate observation of Everard’s opportunities and their development, but Callum was not of a jealous temperament, and did not visit upon the individual, even in secret meditation, the disasters which national circumstances and conditions had wrought. Despite the difference in station and habits, wealth and education, the two had grown fraternally fond of each other, and now there was that between them which could be washed out only with blood, and the officer in the direct discharge of his duty had chosen that it should be with the blood of the soldier.

The sentinel still stood at the doorway, for there was no door, but gradually his glances within, prompted by curiosity, had grown infrequent. There was no guard tent. The men were of the best class, picked for the expedition, and so far not even a trifling misdemeanor had sullied the record of their good conduct. Punctual, alert, efficient, cheerful, invaluable each had seemed in every emergency, and thus the only unoccupied shelter that might conveniently hold a culprit was the clay-constructed winter-house, which stood aloof and vacant on the edge of Ioco Town. The preparations which Everard had ordered, with the intention of occupying it himself, had gone no farther than the kindling of a fire on the clay hearth in the centre of the floor, before it was diverted to the uses of a prison. The smoke, in thin, shifting, scroll-like forms, circled gray and blue about the red clay walls without an exit save such crevices as the wind and rain and neglect had wrought. As Callum had dropped down on the inner side, the vapors served to screen him somewhat from the observation of the sentinel, who, he now began to notice, had become absolutely oblivious of him. This matter riveted his attention presently. There was evidently some strange stir in the encampment, an odd circumstance, and Callum reflected in sudden affright that he had been bound, needlessly and cruelly he considered. The handcuffs, always carried _pro forma_, were among the baggage, and, it being deemed unmeet to rouse its custodians to overhaul it at that hour, a stout rope had been substituted. A vague clamor of voices came to his ears. He observed that the sentinel at the doorway had become rigid with suppressed excitement. Could it be that an attack by the Indians was threatened? Remembering his bonds, Callum’s blood ran cold. The force, while strong enough for protection against unauthorized vagabonds or possible bands of robbers, could not resist successfully an organized assault by the braves of this great tribe. He might well be forgotten in such a crisis--left here bound and helpless, to be captured and tortured and burned. The next moment, listening with every pulse tense, he realized that the voices were those of the soldiers in altercation or extenuation. One shrilly clamoring in Gaelic, as if the strength of his lungs and the pitch of the tone could render his gibberish intelligible to Lieutenant Everard, revealed to Callum’s practised ear the cause of the disturbance.

An Indian horse-race had been held in a neighboring town, and albeit this amusement was one which appealed especially to the tastes of the pleasure-loving lieutenant, so grievously debarred and deplorably dull on this uncongenial expedition, he would not attend it himself and issued positive orders that no man of the force should be present. Nay, he went so far as to see to it that none had leave of absence from the camp on any pretext on the day when this diversion took place. He very definitely appreciated the perils which menaced his little command in case of any antagonism or open quarrel with the tribesmen of the towns. Had his mission been strictly military, to make a stanch defense or a brisk onslaught, it would have been far simpler, in his estimation, whatever dangers or disasters hostility might involve. But the success of his mission depended upon the preservation of a strict peace. Apart from the safe-conduct and guardianship of the commissioners and their attendants, fully one third of the party being non-combatants,--and no man believes so implicitly as does the British regular in the absolute incapacity of the non-professional to do battle in any behalf, or to be of any belligerent value even in his own defense,--the interests of the government were at stake. Nothing could so quickly sow the seeds of dissension, the acute officer argued within himself, as the winning of the Indians’ money and valuable furs and other choice gear at the projected horse-race. He did not doubt that charges of fraud would arise, a fracas ensue, the security of the commissioners’ camp be placed in jeopardy, and the cession itself imperiled. Hence his self-denial, for he was a good judge of horseflesh himself, and dearly loved a show of speed, and the Cherokees of that day owned some extraordinary animals.

Everard had felt himself extremely ill used by fate, as he was turning away from the camp-fire, after his dismissal of the astonished corporal with the prisoner, and his low bow to salute the disappearance of Mr. Herbert Taviston. His face was smarting with pain from the blow, his heart burned hot within him, his pride upbraided his condescension to this man of low estate, who had so ungratefully requited recognition of his real quality as a born gentleman. While Everard was beginning to revolve troublous doubts as to how the course of action upon which he had resolved in these unprecedented circumstances would be regarded by his mess and superior officers, a new and unprovoked disaster was presented. One of the corporals in the functions of officer of the day appeared, and with a mechanical salute and a look of abject despair reported that several of the men, three English soldiers and one Highlander, had run the guard that afternoon and had attended the horse-race, in which they had found their account. They had smuggled into camp after dark a quantity of valuable furs, some strings of the fresh-water pearls of the region, and the Highlander had jingling in his sporran some French money, several louis d’ors. So successfully indeed had they managed their enterprise that its discovery was made only through the anxiety of the Cherokees to repossess themselves of these pieces of French gold. By no means adepts in banking principles, they had, nevertheless, with an unassisted natural intelligence evolved the idea of a premium. As soon as the headmen learned the fact of the loss of this money, they secretly offered to redeem the louis d’ors with English currency and pay a guinea extra for the exchange. The “mad young man,” Wahuhu by name, who had been grievously deprived by fate of his money, browbeaten by his elders upon discovery of the circumstances, and sent upon this secret errand to retrieve the disaster, was greatly perturbed by the unaccustomed restrictions of the camp. He had himself sought to run the sentry, and being taken in charge by the officer of the guard, naïvely demanded to see and confer with a certain Highland soldier. By adroit cross-questioning the facts had been elicited by the corporal--little by little because of the Indian’s reluctance to disclose aught and the linguistic deficiencies of the Highlander.

“Lord, sir, he is a poor creature!” said the corporal, laying the matter before his superior officer. “He cannot talk at all.”

“An enlisted man cannot be dumb,” said the officer with asperity.

“No, sir, but he can’t be understood, sir. He can talk no English, nor even the gibberish they call ‘braid Scotch,’ nor yet Cherokee. He has nothin’ but the Gaelic, sir.”

“And yet he can run the guard and bet at a horse-race?”

“Yes, sir; an’ win his sporran full o’ louis d’ors!”

And with true Scotch thrift the accomplished personage in question would not be parted from them. Thus it was that his voice was presently lifted in the midnight. He spoke on his own behalf. He mistrusted the interpretation of his Scotch comrades, for his ear discerned the difference in their accent from the speech of the English soldiers and the lieutenant, and he cherished the conviction that were the Gaelic but addressed directly and distinctly to the commanding officer, he being a sensible man could not steel his comprehension against it. Wherefore the Highlander yelped and shrilly piped into the night air until the very hem of his kilt quivered with his vocalizations, and the lieutenant stood as if bewitched before him, gazing at the spectacle he presented.

The whole camp was astir. Lights gleamed in sundry tents, all white and translucent in the darkness. Military figures had ventured out and stood in the shadows, some bearing weapons on the pretext of having fancied the tumult a summons to arms. The officer of the guard had attended with the Indian negotiator, who was instantly set at liberty by the order of the lieutenant, but who still lingered with wild eyes and a constant keen turning of the head to and fro to see and to hear; that he was not altogether unsupported might be inferred from vague vistas that the camp lights flung down the aisles of the forest, where shadowy faces and feathered crests showed, flitting like a fancy. And of all, the central figure was Eachin MacEachin, his red hair rough from his pillow and his well-earned dreams of wealth; his dress in disarray, one stocking well-braced and gartered, the other hanging over his shoe and showing his shapely sturdy leg and his great bare rough red knee; his kilt fluttering in the wind; his freckled face eager and distorted with his vociferations to his discerning commander. And in truth, aided by adroit gesticulations, his words were not so far from intelligible. He spurned the proposition of an exchange. As he opened his sporran of badger skin and took therefrom a glittering gold piece and exhibited it to the lieutenant, then with an ecstatic leer put it between his strong white teeth and bit hard on it to prove it genuine, there was no need for a mortified compatriot, who had volunteered to interpret to the officer, to say,--

“She aye threepit she ha’ gotten ta gowd, sir. She mistrust ta English guinea.” Then with a look of blank distress, “She’ll aye mainteen she saw muckle French gowd in ta Forty-foive. She’ll no be so well acquent wi’ ta guinea.”

The object of his aid, desirous of speaking for himself, now and again turned upon his interpreter with a furious Gaelic phrase of repudiation, to which the better soldier, who had run no guard and consequently had won no money, vouchsafed no retort, only commenting indirectly by shaking his head and exclaiming, “Hegh, sir, she’s but a puir creature!”

“I am not so sure of that,” said the lieutenant dryly, “unless I can count what he has got in that sporran!”

Suddenly something in the aspect of the glittering coin which the Highlander still held in his fingers struck Lieutenant Everard’s attention. His face changed sharply. He asked for the coin, and calling for a candle keenly scrutinized the piece by the flickering taper, as the corporal held it, screening with his hand the feeble flame from the wind. In another moment the lieutenant demanded the transference of the remaining five louis d’ors to his custody, sternly insisting, despite the wild plaintive protests of Eachin MacEachin.

All this, the Gaelic being as intelligible to Callum as the English, came to him on the chill night air, and he marveled at Everard’s persistence in taking custody of the coins, for although it was the habit of the Highland soldiery to make their officers their bankers, this trust was altogether voluntary, and not by duress, as in the case of poor Eachin MacEachin and his ill-gotten “gowd.” As it was the favor of chance, like fairy gold, its possession may have seemed equally precarious; or as it was won in direct disobedience of orders, he may have even entertained doubts of the lieutenant’s intentions in the matter of its ultimate return to him, for the Highlanders were as a rule peculiarly averse to the control of any officers save those of their own regiments and more than once mutinied rather than serve under strangers. For whatever reason, so valiantly indeed did Eachin MacEachin resist Lieutenant Everard’s orders that force at last became necessary, and his voluble insubordination in the pain of parting with his gold made Callum acquainted with the fact that he might presently expect company in his imprisonment. This recalled his mind summarily to his own plight. He realized the importance of the officer’s efforts to avoid a clash with the Indians, and wondered what effect this circumstance would have in the discipline of the military offenders. Suddenly he turned sick and his blood ran cold. The corporal punishment, then in vogue in the British army, was regarded by the better class of soldiers as so great a degradation that a man once brought to the lash was practically ruined, socially and morally. The indignity came all at once into Callum’s mind as a possible solution of Everard’s difficulty in his case. He knew that he could not be shot without a regularly organized court-martial, which, necessarily delayed, in view of the personnel and conditions of the force, until their return to Charlestown, would also publish far and wide the officer’s derogation of his dignity in associating on equal terms with a private, who had struck him over their drink as an equal might have done. Everard would flinch from this disclosure, for it would impugn his fitness for his position. And yet he could not challenge a private nor submit as man to man to the ignominy of a blow in the face. The summary punishment of a flogging at the head of the line would dispose of the matter with the utmost contempt and amply avenge the indignity. Callum was terrified lest Everard’s authority in this independent command of a detachment, so remote from superior military jurisdiction, gave him such latitude, or could be so stretched in view of his dilemma. With the mere thought Callum sprang from the floor with a suddenness that loosened every taut strand of the ropes that bound him. His breath was short; he gasped; the blood almost burst from his veins as his heart plunged and the arteries throbbed. He must be quick; the little makeshift prison would soon be recruited; and of captives, one was a spy on another. He could scarcely see, through the blue swirls of smoke, the sentry at the door, whose attention was still riveted on the excited scene without. Callum had caught at the first wild scheme of release, hardly canvassing its practicability. He did not reckon with the pain or the danger when he thrust his bound hands into the flames to burn off the cords. The thought in his brain, the ignominy that threatened him, seared far tenderer perceptions than appertain to the flesh. The fire caught at the hemp, and he set his teeth hard. The ligaments had at last fallen away when discovery suddenly menaced him.

“Look out for your plaid in there, Callum,” said the sentry abruptly. “I smell something burning.”

“’T isna wool,” rejoined Callum promptly. “My plaid isna even scorching.”

And the sentinel, thus satisfied, once more turned his attention without.

Callum looked about him wildly. His first impulse was to throw himself upon the sentinel’s back, overturn him, and fly down the dark aisles of the woods--to what? Certain recapture, and an ignominy that overawed his proud spirit more than death.

“Gae cannily--gae cannily,” he said to himself, as he crouched uncertainly behind the flare of the fire and the veiling tissues of the smoke.

The house, like all of its kind, had neither window nor chimney. It seemed to him of far ampler proportions than such as were used for a single family, and yet it did not approach in dimensions the great assembly rotunda, which could contain an audience of several hundred persons. It occurred to him that it might have been used as a fort at some date long previous, when perhaps Ioco had served as a barrier town, and this was its outlying defense. He remembered having noted the vestiges of an ancient stockade outside, and with the idea that it might have once held an Indian garrison, his keen eyes searched the interior. The old cane-wrought divan, that once perchance encircled the clay-plastered walls, had long ago vanished, leaving only a mark to suggest it. But above this, on a level with the ground outside, for the floor was fully two feet lower than the surface of the earth, he detected a series of vague circles of white chalk. These white circles indicated where loopholes were concealed beneath the clay of the wall, to be utilized by the forted party in firing on an approaching enemy. He rushed to the nearest in a sudden frenzy. The clay gave way in his blistered baked hands; and suddenly, with an inrush of the sweet woodland air without and a glimpse of the black night beyond, was revealed the loophole, adroitly fashioned by savage skill how many years agone! A limited opening it proved, however, barely sufficient to admit of the flight of an arrow thence, and just above the surface of the ground, but it gave a purchase to the frantic clutching of his strong hands and for the use of a clasp knife of an ordinary sort that had been stowed in his sporran; for although he had been searched for concealed weapons, it had been but a cursory investigation, as his wrists were bound. The blade broke when the work was nearly completed, but his fingers, although almost nailless and lacerated to bleeding, finished the enlargement of the aperture, and he dragged himself through the narrow horizontal space and stood, breathless, exhausted, in the dark woods without.