CHAPTER XVI
WhenEnsign Raymond encountered the snow-storm he was already advanced some two days’ march on his mission to Choté Great, the “beloved town,” the city of refuge of the whole Cherokee nation. The tempest came first in a succession of capricious flurries; then the whole world seemed a maelstrom of dizzily whirling flakes. The young officer and his force pushed on with mettlesome disregard of its menace, although for days it persistently fell. Afterward it drifted with the wind into great mounds, it obscured the trail, hid the landmarks, set many a pitfall in the deep chasms and over the thin ice of unsuspected watercourses in narrow and steep ravines. Night brought hard freezes; the thaws of the rising temperature at noonday were resolved into ice at dusk, and the trees, ceasing to drip, were hung with icicles on every bough and twig. The great pearly moon, now and again showing above the mountains through gusty clouds, revealed strange endless forests glimmering with crystalline coruscations, despite the obscurity, as if endowed with some inherent source of light. The bivouac fires made scant impression on these chill primeval environments; the flare on the ruddy faces of the young soldiers, with their red coats and their snatches ofsong and their simple joy in the contents of their unslung haversacks, paled as it ventured out amidst the dense mysterious woods. The snowy vistas would presently grow dim, and shadows thronged adown the perspective. Before the ultimate obscurities were reached, the vanishing point, certain alien green glimmers were often furtively visible,—a signal for the swift replenishing of the fires and a renewed flaring of the flames high into the air, with great showers of sparks and a fierce crackling of boughs. For the number of wolves had hardly been diminished by the Cherokee War with the British, so recently at an end, although the easily affrighted deer and buffalo seemed for a time to have fled the country. The predatory animals had doubtless found their account in the slaughter of the battle-fields, and Raymond’s chief anxiety at night was the maintenance of the vigilance of the fire-guard, whose duty it was to feed the protective flames with fuel. To drive off the beasts with musketry was esteemed a wanton waste of powder, so precious was ammunition always on the frontier. Moreover, the bellicose sound of British muskets was of invidious suggestion in the land of the sullen and smarting Cherokees, so reluctantly pacified, and recently re-embittered by the downfall of secret cherished schemes of the assistance of the French to enable them to regain their independence. Now the French were quitting the country. Canada was ceded; the southern forts were to be evacuated. The “great French father” had been overpowered and forced to leave them to their fate, and theirtreaties with the British, half-hearted, compulsory, flimsy of intention, were to be kept or broken at the peril of their national existence. They resisted this conviction,—so high had been their hopes. They had long believed that a confederation of the Indian tribes under French commanders would drive the British colonies of the south into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. They had grown heady with this expectation, and prophetically triumphant. They were now desperate with the sudden dissolving of this possibility forever,—vindictively inimical.
There was an incident of the march which might have seemed to an older man than Raymond far more menacing than the wolves that patrolled the camp. Nightly there came visitors to his fire, which was a little apart from the bivouac of the rank and file, as beseemed a commander’s dignity. The soldiers were wont to gaze askance at the guests across the intervening spaces, as the fire threw their long shadows upon the snow. Feather-crested shadows they were, but never the same. Each night certain chiefs from the town nearest the end of the day’s march appeared out of the darkness with protestations of welcome to the vicinity, and sat with the giddy young commander beside his fire and talked with faces of grave import, for the smattering of the Cherokee language that Raymond had picked up was such as might suffice for casual conversation. The soldiers wondered and doubted as they watched, for their lives hung on the discretion of this light-pated youth. They were brave men enough and versed in Indian warfare,but acquainted too with Indian treachery. The war was over, both with the French and the Indian tribes, but that gratuitous sacrifice of life, the death of the few occurring in the interval between the negotiation of a treaty and the slowly pervading news of the consummation of peace, has a peculiar horror for every soldier. They put their own heads together around the fire and questioned much what could these men, holding aloof all day, coming darkly, dubiously with the shadows, have in traffic with their “Babby” Ensign,—what subject of earnest persuasion. The lengthened discourse would be drawn out long after tattoo had sounded, and when the soldiers, constrained to keep to fixed hours, lay around the glowing coals like the spokes of a wheel, they still furtively watched the figure of the gay young commander, erect, alert, very wide awake in his dapper trim uniform, and his blanketed feather-tufted visitors, their eager faces shown by the fitful flicker and flare of the ensign’s fire. An icy bough would wave above them, and so chill was the intervening atmosphere that the leaping flames wrought no change in its glittering pendants. A star would frostily glint high, seen through the snow-laden branches of the pine. Sometimes the clouds would part and the pearly moon would cast a strange supernal lustre on the scene,—the great solitary mountains on every side; the long vacant snowy valleys glimpsed through some clifty defile; the shadowy skulking figures of wolves, primeval denizens of the wilderness; the bivouac of the soldiers;and these incongruously colloguing figures beside the officer’s fire.
The words of the visitors appeared destined to be in vain. For a head which seemed so easily turned Ensign Raymond’s was curiously hard.
Not go to Choté? They thought it not worth the while?—he would always ask with a note of affected surprise, as if the subject had never before been broached.
For this was the gravamen of their arguments, their persuasion, their insistence—that he should not go to Choté.
Was there not Nequassee, on the hither side of the tumultuous Joree mountains? The head-men of the Cherokee nation would delight to meet him there and confer with him on whatever subject the splendid and brave Captain Howard might desire to open with them by the mouth of his chosen emissary, Ensign Raymond.
It was diplomacy, certainly, but it jumped with Raymond’s adolescent relish of tantalizing, to give them no intimation of the fact that he, himself, had as yet no knowledge of the purpose of his embassy, his instructions being to open his sealed orders at Choté. Thus he turned, and evaded, and shifted ground, and betrayed naught, however craftily they sought to surprise him into some revelation of his intent.
Only to Choté he must go, he said.
Two Indians who sat with him particularly late one night, head-men from the neighboring town ofCowetchee, were peculiarly insistent,—first, that he and his command should accept the hospitality of their municipality, that he, himself, might lie in the comforts of their “stranger house,” and then, since he could not so far depart from his orders as to break up his camp—if he must repair to one of the Overhill towns—how near was Talassee, just beyond a precipitous ridge of the mountains, or Ioco, or Chilhowee, or Citico,—but not to Choté, surely. So far,—nearly as far as Tellico Great! Not to Choté,—oh, no; never so far as to Choté!
“But to Choté,” said Ensign Raymond, “to Choté must I go.”
They never looked at each other, these crafty sages of Cowetchee. Only the suspicion bred of long experience could discern aught of premeditation in their conduct of the interview. One conserved a peculiarly simple expression. His countenance was broad, with high cheek bones and a long flat mouth. He had a twinkling eye and a disposition to gaze about the camp with a sort of repressed quizzical banter, as if he found the arrangement of the troops and their accoutrements, the dress and arms of the officer, the remnants of his supper, the methods of its service, the china and silver, all savoring strongly of the ludicrous and provocative of covert ridicule. He held his head canted backward as he looked from half-closed lids, across the shimmering heated air rising above the coals, into the young man’s face, infinitely foreign to him. Youth is intensely averse to the slightest intimation of ridicule, and Raymond,with his personal pride, his impulsive temperament, his imperious exactingness, could not have brooked it for one moment had he not early observed that each demonstration was craftily designed to shake his equilibrium, and preceded some cogent question, some wily effort to elicit a betrayal of the purport of his mission to Choté, and only to the “beloved town.” The other Indian was grave, suave, the typical chief, wearing his furs and his feathers with an air of distinction, showing no surprise at his surroundings, hardly a passing notice indeed. He was erect, dignified, and walked with an easy light tread, different in every particular from the jocose rolling gait affected by the Terrapin.
The giddy Raymond began to pique himself on his capacity to meet these emergencies which obviously Captain Howard had not anticipated. They invested the expedition with a subtler difficulty than either had dreamed he might encounter. He flushed with a sense of triumph, and his bright eyes were softly alight as he gazed on the glowing coals. He bethought himself with great relish how these adventures would garnish his account of his trip, and having naught to do with its official purpose might serve to regale the fireside group, where a golden-haired girl might be pleased again to call him “prodigiously clever.” He was suddenly reminded of the string of pearls around her bare white throat which he had noticed at the commandant’s table, with the depressing reflection that Captain Howard came of well-to-do people while he, himself, had little buthis commission and his pay, and that Mervyn was rich,—rich in his own right,—and would eventually be a baronet. For here were pearls around the savage throat of the Terrapin,—pearls indeed of price. A single gem of his string were worth the whole of Arabella Howard’s necklace. These were the fine fresh-water pearls from theUnio margaritiferusof the southern rivers, and they had a satin-like lustre and rarely perfect shape, which bespeak a high commercial value. The Terrapin wore strings of shell beads, which he appraised more dearly,—the wampum, or “roanoke” as the southern tribes called it,—and which fell in heavy fringes over his shirt of otter fur. He had a collar of more than two hundred elk teeth; his leggings were of buck-skin and solid masses of embroidery. As Ensign Raymond’s well-bred observation, that sees all without seeming to notice aught, took in these details, he began to have an idea of utilizing the visit of the Indians in a method at variance with their weary marching and counter-marching upon the citadel of his secret,—the purport of his mission to Choté, Old Town.
He meditated gravely on this, as he sat in his camp chair by the smooth stump of a great tree, felled for fuel, on which had been laid his supper, serving as table, and now holding the case-bottle of brandy, the contents of which had been offered and sparingly accepted by the Indians, for the chiefs were by no means the victims of fire-water in the degree in which the tribesmen suffered.
“Tus-ka-sah,” Raymond said suddenly, “tell meyour real name. I know you are never the ‘Terrapin.’” For an alias was reputed to be the invariable rule of Indian nomenclature. The Cherokees were said to believe that to divulge the veritable cognomen divested the possession of the owner, destroyed his identity, and conferred a mysterious power over him never to be shaken off. Thus they had also war names, official names, and trivial sobriquets sufficing for identification, and these only were communicated to the world at large, early travellers among the tribe recording that they often questioned in vain.
Tus-ka-sah’s real face showed for one moment, serious, astute, suspicious, and a bit alarmed, so closely personal, so unexpected was the question. Then he canted his head backward and looked out from under heavy lowered lids.
“La-a!” he mocked. He had caught the phrase from English settlers or soldiers. “La-a!” he repeated derisively. Then he said in Cherokee, “If I should tell you my name how could I have it again?”
Raymond pondered a moment on this curious racial reasoning. “It would still be yours. Only I should know it,” he argued.
“La-a!” bleated Tus-ka-sah derisively, vouchsafing no further reply, while the other Indian knitted his perplexed brow, wondering how from this digression he could bring back the conversation to the trail to Choté.
“I know what your name ought to be,” declared Raymond.
Once more a sudden alarm, a look of reality flickeredthrough the manufactured expressions of the Terrapin’s face, as if the ensign might absolutely capture his intimate identity in his true name. Then realizing the futility of divination he said “La-a!” once more, and thrust out his tongue facetiously. Yet his eyes continued serious. Like the rest of the world, he was to himself an object of paramount interest, and he experienced a corrosive curiosity as to what this British officer—to him a creature of queer, egregious mental processes—thought his name ought to be.
“It ought to be something strange and wonderful,” said Raymond, speciously. “It ought to be the ‘Jewel King’—or,” remembering the holophrastic methods of Indian nomenclature—“this would be better—‘He-who-walks-bedizened.’”
The eyes of the Indian had no longer that predominant suffusion of ridicule. They were large, lustrous, and frankly delighted.
“Agwa duhiyu! Agwa duhiyu!” (I am very handsome), he exclaimed apparently involuntarily. He glanced down complacently over his raiment of aboriginal splendor, passing his hand over his collar of elk teeth and tinkling his many strings of shell beads, but it was only casually that he touched his necklace of pearls. The gesture gave Raymond an intimation as to the degree in which were valued the respective ornaments. It reinforced his hope that perhaps the pearls might be purchased for a sum within the scope of his slender purse. How they would grace the hair of the fair Arabella, her snowy neck or arm. To be sure, he could not presume tooffer them were they bought in a jeweller’s shop in London. But as a trophy from the wilderness, curiously pierced by the heated copper spindle, by means of which they were strung on the sinews of deer, the price a mere pittance as for a thing of trifling worth,—surely Captain Howard would perceive no presumption in such a gift, the young lady herself could take no offence. Nevertheless, the pearls were rarely worth giving in a sort he could not hope to compass otherwise, nor indeed she to own, for, but for the method of piercing, rated by European standards their size and lustre would have commanded a commensurate price.
“I should like to buy a jewel from the great chief, ‘He-who-walks-bedizened,’” said Raymond, his cheek flushed, his ardent eyes afire. “There would be a peculiar interest to tell abroad that this was the necklace of the ‘Jewel King.’”
The Fox flashed an aggrieved and upbraiding glance upon the Terrapin. Had they come hither to chaffer indeed of beads, when the trail to Choté lay open, and by the utmost arts the sages of all the towns could not thence divert this wayward soldier?
“How much?” demanded “He-who-walks-bedizened.”
He pursed up his lips, canted his head backward, and set his eyes a-twinkle under their lowered lids.
Raymond’s heart beat fast. He had all the sensitive pride of a poor man, highly placed socially. He would not for all the world have offered her the trifling personal ornament within his means,—such acompliment as Mervyn might well have paid. He tingled with jubilance at the thought of an actual munificence, which her father could not appropriately forbid her to accept because it was an aboriginal curio, costing so disproportionately to its beauty and value.
He laid a guinea on the table.
“La-a!” bleated the Terrapin, in the extremity of scorn.
Another guinea, and still another, and yet the Indian shook his head. The Fox, albeit his eyes gloated upon the gold, as if it appealed to an appetite independent of his individuality, growled out an undertone of remonstrance which the Terrapin heeded no more than if he had not heard.
Money slips fast through the fingers of a poor man of good station, but Raymond was schooled to a modicum of prudence by the urgency of his desire to possess the gems. Realizing that the demands of Tus-ka-sah would be limited only by his supposed capacity to pay and his willingness to part with his gold, he called a halt lest these, being over-estimated, frustrate the project that had become insistently, eagerly precious to him.
“Let the great chief name the price of his necklace,” he suggested a trifle timorously, fearing a sum beyond the possibility of his wildest extravagance.
The eyes of both the Indians followed the gold pieces, as he swept them from the table and into his purse, with a glitter of greed akin to the lookof a dog who gazes at a bone for which he is too well trained to beg. Then Tus-ka-sah, with a slow and circumspect motion, took the pearls from his neck and spoke with a deliberate dignity.
“When you return to your own country call all your people together,”—Raymond hardly smiled at this evidence of the Indian’s idea of the population of England, so heartily were his own feelings enlisted in the acquisition,—“tell them this is the necklace of the ‘Jewel King,’ ‘He-who-walks-bedizened.’ Then name to them the pearls, for they have true names,—these, the smaller of the string, are the little fish that swim in the river, and these are the birds that fly in the clouds. These twelve large ones are the twelve months of the year,—this, the first, is the green corn moon; this is the moon of melons; this the harvest moon; this the moon of the hunter.” As he told them off one by one, and as Raymond leaned forward listening like a three years’ child, his cheek scarlet, his dark eyes aglow, the wind whisking the powder off his auburn hair despite his cocked hat, the Fox watched the two with indignant impatience.
If the Terrapin observed the officer’s eagerness he made no sign,—he only said suddenly:—
“Andallare yours—if—you go not to Choté.”
The young officer recoiled abruptly—in disappointment, in mortification, in anger.
He could not speak for a moment, so sudden was the revulsion of sentiment. Then he said coldly, “You trifle with me, Tus-ka-sah!”
He checked more candid speech. For prudential reasons he could not give his anger rein. Harmony must be maintained. If cordial relations were not conserved it should not be the ambassador of a friendly mission to break the peace.
The Cherokees were as eager as he to let slip no chance. The Fox, understanding at last the trend of his colleague’s diplomacy, uttered guttural soothing exclamations. But Tus-ka-sah, perceiving the reluctance of the officer’s relinquishment of the opportunity, the eagerness of his desire, his angry disappointment, sought to whet his inclination and made a higher bid. He took from some pocket or fold of his fur garments a buck-skin bag and thence drew a single unpierced pearl, so luminous, so large, so satin-smooth, so perfect of contour, that Raymond, forgetting his indignation at the attempted bribery, exclaimed aloud in inarticulate delight, for this indeed was a gem which those who love such things might well fall down and worship.
It came from the Tennessee River. Tus-ka-sah made haste to recite its history to slacken the tension of the difference which had supervened.
The jewel king of the mussels, he said, had worn it on his breast; but when his shell, which was his house, was harried and his people scattered, and he torn ruthlessly out, this treasure fell as spoils to the victor. Only its custodian was Tus-ka-sah—this gem belonged to the Cherokee nation—one of the jewels of the crown, so to speak. And it too had a name, the “sleeping sun.” The chief paused to pointfrom the moony lustre of the great pearl, shown by the light of the fire, to the pearly lustre of the moon, now unclouded and splendid in the dark vault of the deep blue sky.
“The ‘sleeping sun’!” Raymond exclaimed entranced, remembering Arabella Howard’s joy in the fancy, and thinking how the unique splendor of this single pearl would befit her grace.
He had a prophetic intimation of the proffer even before it came.
“Since you scorn my necklace,” Tus-ka-sah said in Cherokee, “this—this—the nation will give you if you go not to Choté, beloved town.”
Raymond had never dreamed that his loyalty could be tempted by any treasure. He did not pique himself on his fidelity. It was too nearly the essence of his individuality, the breath of his life. An honest man cannot levy tribute for his integrity—he feels it a matter of course, impossible to be otherwise. Raymond was dismayed to find his distended eyes still fixed upon the gem,—they had a gloat of longing that did not escape the keen observation of the chiefs. For this was unique. This was a gift no other could bestow,—it was indeed fit for a princess.
He experienced a vague internal revolt against the authority of his superior officer. Why did the instructions specify Choté? Any mission to the head-men could be as effectively discharged at any of the seven great “mother-towns.” As to the aversion of the chiefs to his appearance in the “beloved town,” this was doubtless some vagary of their strangesavage religion against the errors of which it was puerile and futile to contend. If they esteemed his presence at Choté a profanation of the “ever-sacred” soil, why persist in intruding logic upon their superstition—especially since compliance would be so richly rewarded? Moreover, there were practical considerations in their favor. Choté was yet distant half a hundred miles, perhaps,—a weary march in this frozen wilderness for the already exhausted detachment. Though seasoned to Indian warfare, they were new to the topography of this particular region. Hard at hand was the lesser town of Little Choté—thus even the casual talk of the troops could not betray him. Captain Howard need never know that he had not penetrated to Choté Great, “the beloved city.” He could open here his sealed orders, accomplish every detail of his mission, he thought, and yet secure the rich guerdon of his compliance with so simple a request.
Raymond rose suddenly to his feet, trembling in every limb. Tempted—tempted thus by a bauble! Barter his honor for the lustres of the “sleeping sun”! His face was scarlet. His eyes flashed. His lip quivered.
“I am a poor man, Tus-ka-sah,” he said, “and stop me, my heart grows very heavy for the sake of the ‘sleeping sun.’ I would give gold for it, to the extent of my power. Gad, I would willingly be poorer still for its sake. But you cannot bargain with me for my duty as a soldier. Go to Choté, says my superior, and to Choté I go.”
He could hardly understand the deep disappointment expressed in the faces of the Indians who consciously were trembling on the verge of the accomplishment of their secret design. Tus-ka-sah first recovered himself with a fleer at the confession of poverty, so characteristically scorned by the Indians. “Poor!La-a!Poor!” He stuck his head askew with an affronting leer that made his grimace as insulting as a blow. “For no poor man!” he added, bundling up his great pearl into its buck-skin bag, with the air of indignantly terminating the interview, as if he had received the proffer of a sum beneath contempt for his valuable jewel.
Whether or not he would have devised some return to the negotiation, a sudden accident definitely terminated it. At last the great flare of the fire, the ascending column of heated air, began to affect the snow congealed upon the boughs of the pine above their heads. The thawing of a branch effected the dislodgment of a great drift that it had supported in a crotch. The snow fell into the fire with a hissing noise, and in one moment all was charred cinders and hot mounting steam where once were red-hot coals and the flash of flames. Raymond called out a warning to the fire-guard, who were presently kindling the protective blaze at a little distance, and as his servant, roused from sleep, began to shift his effects thither from the despoiled site of his camp, he sat on the edge of the stump, listening to the growling of the wolves which, encouraged by the obscurity, werenow dangerously near. He had not marked when nor how the two Indians had disappeared, but they were gone in the confusion, and on the morrow he resumed his march.