The crafty Cherokees, stealthily approaching ever nearer and nearer, had not seen in the first feeble glimmers of the flames the figures of the seven men crawling gingerly back to the grotto in the covert of the laurel, leaving around the fire merely billets of wood arrayed in the blankets and stolen gear which the Owl had brought off from the battle-field.
“But I am always in the wrong,” plained Oop-pa, sarcastically. “What would you and the big tartan-man have to dress those warriors in if I had not stayed for my goods?”
MacDonnell had urged his scruples. This was hardly according to the rules of war. “But if the Cherokees fire on sleeping men,” he argued—
“Angona,” the wily Chickasaw assured him, suavely, “they are disarmed. We can rush out and overpower them before they can load.”
“They ought to be able to fire three times to the minute,” thought MacDonnell, who was a good drill.
But the Cherokees were not held to the rigorous manual of arms, and did not attain to that degree of dexterity considered excellent efficiency in that day although a breech-loading musket invented by Colonel Patrick Ferguson, who met his death at King’s Mountain, was capable of being fired seven times a minute, and was used not many years after these events, with destructive effect, by his own command at the battle of the Brandywine, in 1777.
MacDonnell, lying prone on the ground in the laurel, his face barely lifted, saw the last segment of the moon slip down behind the great mountain, the following mists glister in the after-glow and fade, a soft, dull shadow drop upon the landscape thensink to darkness, and in the blaze of the fire a quivering feather-crested head protrude above the river-bank. There were other crafty approaches—here, there, the woods seemed alive! Suddenly an alien flare of light, a series of funnel-shaped evanescent darts, the simultaneous crack of a volley, and a dozen swift figures dashed to the scalping of their victims by the fire—to lay hold on the logs in the likeness of sleeping men, to break a knife in the hard fibers of one that seemed to stir, to cry aloud, inarticulate, wild, frenzied in rage, in amaze, in grief, to find themselves at the mercy of the Chickasaws darting out from the laurel!
There was a tumultuous rush, then a frantic, futile attempt to reload; two or three of the prisoners wielding knives with undue effect were shot down, and Choolah, triumphant, majestic in victory, stately, erect, hiscrown of tall white swan’s feathers, his glittering fringes of roanoke, the red and blue of his glossy war-paint, all revealed by the flaring fire, waved his hand to his “Angona” to call upon him to admire his prowess in battle.
The next moment his attention was caught by a sudden swift alarm in the face of one of the Cherokees, a faraway glance that the wily Choolah followed with his quick eye. Something had happened at the camp the Cherokees had abandoned—was there still movement there?
It was some one who had been away, returning, startled to see the bivouac fire sunken to an ember,—for the Cherokees had let it die out to further the advantages of the attack,—then evidently reassured to note the flare a little further down the stream, as if the camp had been shifted for some reason.
Choolah drew his primed and loaded pistol. No Cherokee, however, would have dared to venture a warning sign. And Ronald MacDonnell, with what feelings he could hardly analyze, could never describe, saw leaping along the jagged bank of the river toward them a white man, young, active, wearing a gayly-fringed hunting-shirt and leggings of buckskin, but a military hat and the gorget of a French officer. He was among them before he saw his mistake—his fatal mistake! The delighted shrieks of the Chickasaws overpowered every sense, filling the woods with their fierce shrill joy and seeming to strike against the very sky, “French! hottuk ook-proo-se!” (The accursed people!)
All thought of caution, all fears of wandering Cherokees were lost in the supreme ecstasy of their triumph—the capture of one of the detested French,that the tribe had hated with an inconceivable and savage rancor for generations.
“Shukapa! Shukapa!” (Swine-eater!) they exclaimed in disgust and derision, for the aversion of the Indians to pork was equaled only by that of the Jews, and this was an extreme expression of contempt.
The captive was handled rudely enough in the process of disarming him, which the Owl and Choolah accomplished, while his Cherokees stood at the muzzles of the firelocks of the others. There was blood on his face and hands as he turned a glance on the Scotchman. He uttered a few eager words in French, unintelligible to MacDonnell save the civil preface, “Pardon, Monsieur, mais puis-je vous demander—”
The rest of the sentence was lost in the fierce derisive shrieks of theChickasaws recognizing the inflections of the detested language, “Seente soolish! Seente soolish!” (snake’s tongue!) they vociferated.
But had the conclusion of the request been audible it would have been incomprehensible to Ronald MacDonnell.
The impassive Highlander silently shook his head, and a certain fixity of despair settled on the face of the French officer. It was a young face—he seemed not more than twenty-five, MacDonnell thought. It was narrow, delicately molded, with very bright eyes, that had a sort of youthful daring in them—adventurous looking eyes. They were gray, with long black lashes and strongly defined eyebrows. His complexion was of a clear healthy pallor, his hair dark but a trifle rough, and braided in the usual queue. So often did RonaldMacDonnell have to describe this man, both on paper and off, that every detail of his appearance grew very familiar to him. The stranger’s lips were red and full, and the upper one was short and curving; he did not laugh or smile, of course, but he showed narrow white teeth, for now and again he gasped as if for breath, and more than once that sensitive upper lip quivered. Not that Ronald MacDonnell ever gave the portraiture in this simple wise, for his descriptions were long and involved, minute and yet vague, and proved the despair of all interested in fixing the identity of the man; but gleaning from his accounts this is the way the stranger must have appeared to the young Scotchman. His figure was tall and lightly built, promising more activity than muscular force, and while one hand was held on the buckle of his belt, the left went continually to thehilt of a sword,which he did not wear, but the habit was betrayed by this gesture. There was nothing about him to intimate his rank, beyond the gorget, and on this point Ronald MacDonnell could never give any satisfaction.
The Indian is seldom immoderate in laughter, but Choolah could not restrain his wicked mirth to discover that the two officers could not speak to each other. And yet the pale-faces were so often amazed that the Cherokees and the Chickasaws and the Creeks had not the same language, as if a variety of tongues were thrown away on the poor Indian, who might well be expected to put up with one speech! For only the Chickasaw and Choctaw dialects were inter-comprehensible, both tribes being descended, it is said, from the ancient Chickemicaws, and in fact much of the variation in their speech was but a matter of intonation. The tears of mirthstood in Choolah’s eyes. He held his hand to his side—he could scarcely calm himself, even when he discerned a special utility in this lack of a medium of communication, for the enterprising scout came back once more to say that there were some Chickasaws lower down on the river, where the ford was better. Choolah received this assurance with most uncommon demonstrations of pleasure, evidently desiring their assistance in guarding the prisoners to Grant’s camp, being ambitious of securing the commander’s commendation and intending to afford ocular proof of his exploit by exhibiting the number of his captives. But MacDonnell detected a high note of elation in Choolah’s voice which no mere pride could evoke, and he recognized a danger signal. He instantly bethought himself of the fate at the hands of theChickasaws, more than a score of years before, of the gallant D’Artaguette, the younger, and his brave lieutenant Vincennes, burned at the stake by slow fires, after their unhappy defeat at the fortified town,Ash-wick-boo-ma(Red Grass), the noble Jesuit, Sénat, sharing their death, although he might have escaped, remaining to comfort their last moments with his ghostly counsels.
MacDonnell listened as warily to the talk as he might, and although Choolah said no more than was eminently natural in planning to turn over his prisoners to these Chickasaws by reason of their superior numbers, MacDonnell’s alert sense detected the same vibration when he expressed his decision to leave theEtissuand the Highland officer to guard the Frenchman till his return.
“Then we will together cross the Tennessee river here,” he said.
MacDonnell yawned widely as he nodded his head, his hand over his stretched mouth and shielding his face. He would not trust its expression to the discerning Choolah, for he had again that infrequent guest, “a thought in his mind.”
In truth, Choolah had no intention to take the Frenchman to Grant’s camp. The praise he would receive as a reward was a petty consideration indeed as compared with the delights of torturing and burning so rare, so choice a victim as a French officer. To be sure his excuse must be good and devised betimes, for Colonel Grant was squeamish and queer, objecting to the scalping and burning of prisoners, and seemed indeed at times of a weak stomach in regard to such details. And that came about naturally enough. Hedid not fast, as behooves a war-captain. He ate too much on the war-path. He had two cooks! He had also a man to dress his hair, and another to groom his horse. Naturally his heart had softened, and he was averse to the stern pleasures of recompensing an enemy with the anguish of the stake. This Choolah intended to enjoy, summoning the Chickasaws at the ford below to the scene of his triumph. Besides it requires a number of able-bodied assistants to properly roast in wet weather a vigorous and protesting captive. The Scotchman should suspect naught until his return. True, he might not object, for were not the French as ever the inveterate enemies of the English? But if he should it could avail naught against the will of a round dozen or more of Chickasaws. Besides, was not the prisoner of the detested nation of the French—Nana-Ubat? (Nothings and brothers to nothing.) Nevertheless, it was well they could not speak to each other and possibly canvass fears and offer persuasions. He could spare only one man, the scout, to aid in the watch, but he felt quite assured. Ronald MacDonnell was always notoriously vigilant and exacting, and was held in great fear by guards and outposts and sentinels, for often his rounds were attended by casualties in the way of reprimand, and arrests, and guard-tent sojourns and discipline. Choolah felt quite safe as he set off at a brisk pace with his squad of four Chickasaws, driving the disarmed Cherokees, silent and sullen, before him.
They were hardly out of sight when MacDonnell, kicking the enveloping blanket out of the way, sat down on one of the logs by the fire and spread his big bony hands out to the blaze.It was growing chill; the June night was wearing on toward the dawn; it was that hour of reduced vitality when hope seems of least value, and the blood runs low, and conscience grows keen, and the future and the past bear heavily alike on the present. The prisoner was shivering slightly. He glanced expectantly at the Scotchman’s impassive countenance. No man knew better than Ronald MacDonnell the churlishness of a lack of consideration of the comfort of others in small matters. No man could offer little attentions more genially. They comported essentially with his evident breeding, and his rank in the army; once more the prisoner looked expectantly at him, and then, wounded, like a Frenchman, as for a host’s lack of consideration, he sat down on a log uninvited, casting but one absent glance, from which curiosity seemed expunged, atthe effigies which explained how the Cherokees came to their fate. It mattered little now, his emotional, sensitive face said. Naught mattered! Naught! Naught!
In the sudden nervous shock his vitality was at its lowest ebb. He could not spread his hands to the blaze, for his arms had been pinioned cruelly tight. He shivered again, for the fire was low. MacDonnell noticed it, but he did not stir; perhaps he thought Johnny Crapaud would soon find the fire hot enough. The scout himself mended it, as he sat tailorwise on the ground between the other two men. Now and again theEtissugazed at MacDonnell’s impassive, rather lowering countenance, with a certain awe; if he had expected the officer to show the squeamishness which Colonel Grant developed in such matters, or any pity, he was mistaken; then he lookedwith curiosity at the Frenchman. The prisoner’s lips were vaguely moving, and Ronald MacDonnell caught a suggestion of the sound—half-whispered words, not French, or he would not have understood; Latin!—paters and aves! As he had expected—frogs, papistry, French, and fool!
“What’s that?” the Highland officer said, so suddenly that the scout started in affright.
“Nothing,” said the Indian; “the wind, perhaps.”
“Sticks cracking in the laurel—a bear, perhaps,” suggested MacDonnell, taking up a loaded musket and laying it across his knee. Then “Only a bear,” he repeated reassuringly.
“Choolah ought to leave more men here,” said theEtissu.
“It’s nothing!” declared MacDonnell, rising and looking warily about. “Perhaps Choolah on his way back.”
The scout was true to his vagrant tendencies, or perhaps because of those tendencies he felt himself safer in the dense, impenetrable jungle, crawling along flat like a lizard or a snake, than seated perched up here on a bluff by a flaring camp-fire with only two other men, a mark for “Brown Bess”—the Cherokees were all armed with British muskets, although they were in revolt, and perhaps it was one reason why they were in revolt—for many a yard up and down the Tennessee River. “I go see,” he suggested.
“No, no,” said MacDonnell, “only a bear.”
“I come back soon,” declared theEtissu, half crouching and gazing about, “soon, soon.Alooska, Ko-e-u-que-ho.” (I do not lie, I do not indeed.)
MacDonnell lifted his head and gazed about with a frowning mien ofreluctance “Maia cha!” (Go along) he said at last. Then called out, “Come backsoon,” as his attention returned to the priming and loading of a pistol which he had in progress. “Soon! remember!”
The scout was off like a rabbit. For a moment or two MacDonnell did not lift his eyes, while they heard him crashing through the thicket. Then as he looked up he met the dull despair in the face of the bound and helpless Frenchman. It mattered little to him who came, who went. He gasped suddenly in amazement. The Highland officer was gazing at him with a genial, boyish smile, reassuring, almost tender.
“Run, now, run for your life!” he said, leaning forward, and with a pass or two of a knife he severed the prisoner’s bonds.
In the revulsion of feeling the manseemed scarcely able to rise to his feet. There were tears in his eyes; his face quivered as he looked at his deliverer.
“Danger—big fire—burn,” said the astute MacDonnell, as if the English words thus detached were more comprehensible to the French limitations. Perhaps his gestures aided their effect, and as he held out his hand in his whole-souled, genial way, the Frenchman grasped it in a hard grip of fervent gratitude and started off swiftly. The next moment the young officer turned back, caught the British soldier in his arms, and to MacDonnell’s everlasting consternation kissed him in the foreign fashion, first on one cheek and then on the other.
Ronald MacDonnell’s mess often preyed upon the disclosures which his open, ingenuous nature afforded them. But his simplicity stopped far short of revealing to them this Gallicdemonstration of gratitude—so exquisitely ludicrous it seemed to his unemotional methods and mind. They were debarred the pleasure of racking him on this circumstance. They never knew it. He disclosed it only years afterward, and then by accident, to a member of his own family.
The whole affair seemed to the mess serious enough. For the Chickasaws, baffled and furious, had threatened his life on their return, reinforced by a dozen excited, elated, expectant tribesmen, laden with light wood and a chain, to find their prisoner gone. But after the first wild outburst of rage and despair Choolah, although evidently strongly tempted to force the Highlander to the fate from which he had rescued the French officer, resolved to preserve the integrity of his nation’s pledge of amity with the British, and restrained his men fromoffering injury. This was rendered the more acceptable to him, as with his alert craft he perceived a keen retribution for Ronald MacDonnell in the displeasure of his commanding officer, for the Chickasaws well understood the discipline of the army, which they chose to disregard. To better enlist the prejudice of Colonel Grant, Choolah was preparing himself to distort the facts. He upbraided Ronald MacDonnell with causelessly liberating a prisoner, a Frenchman and an officer, taken by the wily exploit of another. As to the dry wood, he said, the Chickasaws had merely brought some drift, long stranded in a cave by the waterside, to replenish the fire, kindled with how great difficulty in the soaking condition of the forests the Lieutenant well knew.
“Hout!—just now when we are about to cross the river?” cried Ronald,unmasking the subterfuge. “And for what then that stout chain?”
The chain, Choolah protested, was but part of the equipment of one of the pack animals that had broken away and had been plundered by the Cherokees. Did the Lieutenant Plaidman think he wanted to chain the prisoner to the stake to burn? He had had no dream of such a thing! It was not the custom of the Chickasaws to waste so much time on a prisoner. It was sufficient to cut him up in quarters; that usually killed him dead,—quite dead enough! But if the Lieutenant had had a chain, since he knew so well the use of one, doubtless he himself would have joyed to burn the prisoner, provided it had been his own exploit that had taken him,—for did not the Carolinians of the provincial regiment say that when the Tartan men were at home they were as wild andas uncivilized as the wildest Cherokee savage!
“Holauba! Holauba! Feenah!” (It is a lie. It is a lie, undoubtedly), cried the phlegmatic MacDonnell, excited to a frenzy. He spoke in the Chickasaw language, that the insult might be understood as offered with full intention.
But Choolah did not thus receive it. In the simplicity of savage life lies are admittedly the natural incidents of conversation. He addressed himself anew to argument. At home the Tartan men lived in mountains,—just like the Cherokees,—and no wonder they were undismayed by the war whoops—they had heard the like before! Savages themselves! They had a language, too, that the Carolinians could not speak; he himself had heard it among the Highlanders of Grant’s camp—doubtless it was theCherokee tongue, for they were mere Cherokees!
“Holauba! Holauba! Feenah!” No denial could be more definite than the tone and the words embodied.
The wily Choolah, maliciously delighted with his power to pierce the heart of the proud Scotchman thus, turned the knife anew. Did not the provincials declare that the Highlanders at home were always beaten in war, as they would be here but for the help of the Carolinians?
“Holauba! Holauba! Feenah!” protested Ronald resolutely, thinking of Preston Pans and Falkirk.
For the usual emulous bickering between regulars and provincials, which seems concomitant with every war, had appeared in full force in this expedition, the provincials afterward claiming that but for them and their Indian allies no remnant of the British forcewould have returned alive; and the regulars declaring that the Carolinians knew nothing, and could learn nothing of discipline and method in warfare, laying great stress on the fact that this was the second campaign to which the British soldiers had been summoned for the protection of the province, which could not without them defend itself against the Cherokees, and assuming the entire credit of the subjugation of that warlike tribe that had for nearly a century past desolated at intervals the Carolina borders.
Although it had been Choolah’s hope that, by means of provoking against the Lieutenant the displeasure of his superior officer, he might revenge himself upon MacDonnell, for snatching from the Chickasaws the peculiar racial delight of torturing the French prisoner, the Indians had no anticipation of the gravity of the crisiswhen they came to the camp with the details of the occurrence, which, to Colonel Grant’s annoyance, tallied with MacDonnell’s own report of himself.
For there was a question in Colonel Grant’s mind whether the prisoner were not the redoubtable Louis Latinac, who had been so incredibly efficient in the French interest in this region, and who had done more to excite the enmity of the Cherokees against their quondam allies, the British, and harass his Majesty’s troops than a regiment of other men could accomplish. When Grant tended to this opinion, a court-martial seemed impending over the head of the young officer.
“What was your reason for this extraordinary course?” Colonel Grant asked.
And Ronald MacDonnell answeredthat he had granted to his prisoner exactly what he had intended to demand of his captor had the situation been reversed—to adjure him by their fellow feeling as soldiers, by the customs of civilized warfare, by the bond of a common religion, to save him from torture by savages.
“Can a gentleman give less than he would ask?” he demanded.
And when Colonel Grant would urge that he should have trusted to his authority to protect the prisoner, Ronald would meet the argument with the counter-argument that the Indians respected no authority, and in cases of fire it would not do to take chances.
“Why did you not at least exact a parole?”
“Lord, sir, we couldn’t talk at all!” said Ronald, conclusively. “In common humanity, I was obliged to release him or shoot him, and I couldnot shoot an unarmed prisoner to save my life—not if I were to be shot for it myself.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Grant’s heart was well known to be soft in spots. He has put it upon record in the previous campaign against the Cherokees that he could not help pitying them a little in the destruction of their homes,—it is said, however, that after this later expedition his name was incorporated in the Cherokee language as a synonym of devastation and a cry of warning. He was overcome by the considerations urged upon him by the Lieutenant until once more the possibility loomed upon the horizon that it was Louis Latinac who had escaped him, when he would feel that nothing but Ronald MacDonnell’s best heart’s blood could atone for the release. To set this much vexed question at rest the young officer wasrepeatedly required to describe the personal appearance of the stranger, and thus it was that poor Ronald’s verbal limitations were brought so conspicuously forward. “A fine man,” he would say one day, and in giving the details of that sensitive emotional countenance which had so engaged his interest that momentous night—its force, its suggestiveness, its bright, alert young eyes, would intimate that he had indeed held the motive power of the Cherokee war in his hand, and had heedlessly loosed it as a child might release a butterfly. The next day “a braw callant” was about the sum of his conclusions, and Colonel Grant would be certain that the incident represented no greater matter than the escape of a brisk subaltern, like Ronald himself. In the course of Colonel Grant’s anxious vacillations of opinion, the young Highlanderwas given to understand that he would be instantly placed under arrest, but for the fact that every officer of experience was urgently needed. And indeed Colonel Grant presently had his hands quite full, fighting a furious battle only the ensuing day with the entire Cherokee nation.
The Indians attacked his outposts at eight o’clock in the morning, and with their full strength engaged the main body, fighting in their individual, skulking, masked manner, but with fierce persistency for three hours; then the heat of the conflict began to gradually wane, although they did not finally draw off till two o’clock in the afternoon. It was the last struggle of the Cherokee war. Helpless or desperate, the Indians watched without so much as a shot from ambush the desolation of their country. For thirty days Colonel Grant’s forces remainedamong the fastnesses of the Great Smoky Mountains, devastating those beautiful valleys, burning “the astonishing magazines of corn,” and the towns, which Grant states, were so “agreeably situated, the houses neatly built.” Often the troops were constrained to march under the beetling heights of those stupendous ranges, whence one might imagine a sharp musketry fire would have destroyed the dense columns, almost to the last man. Perhaps the inability of the French to furnish the Cherokees with the requisite ammunition for this campaign may explain the abandonment of a region so calculated for effective defense.
Aside from the losses in slain and wounded in the engagement, the expeditionary force suffered much, for the hardships of the campaign were extreme. Having extended the frontierwestward by seventy miles, and withdrawing slowly, in view of the gradual exhaustion of his supplies, Colonel Grant found the feet of his infantry so mangled by the long and continuous marches in the rugged country west of the Great Smoky Mountains that he was forced to go into permanent camp on returning to Fort Prince George, to permit the rest and recovery of the soldiers, who in fact could march no further, as well as to await some action on the part of the Cherokee rulers looking to the conclusion of a peace.
A delegation of chiefs presently sought audience of him here and agreed to all the stipulations of the treaty formulated in behalf of the province except one, viz., that four Cherokees should be delivered up to be put to death in the presence of Colonel Grant’s army, or that four green scalps should be brought to himwithin the space of twelve nights. With this article the chiefs declared they had neither the will nor the power to comply,—and very queerly indeed, it reads at this late day!
Colonel Grant, perhaps willing to elude the enforcement of so unpleasant a requisition, conceived that it lay within his duty to forward the delegation, under escort, to Charlestown to seek to induce Governor Bull to mitigate its rigor.
It was in this connection that he alluded again to the release of the prisoner, captured in the exploit of Choolah, the Chickasaw, although in conversation with his officers he seemed to Ronald MacDonnell to be speaking only of the impracticable stipulation of the treaty, and his certainty that compliance would not be required of the Cherokees by the Governor—and in fact the terms finallysigned at Charlestown, on the 10th of December of that year, were thus moderated, leaving the compact practically the same as in the previous treaty of 1759.
“I could agree to no such stipulation if the case were mine,” Colonel Grant declared, “that four of my soldiers, as a mere matter of intimidation, should be surrendered to be executed in the presence of the enemy! Certainly, as a gentleman and a soldier, a man cannot require of an enemy more than he himself would be justified in yielding if the circumstances were reversed, or grant to an enemy less favor than he himself could rightfully ask at his hands.”
Ronald MacDonnell had forgotten his own expression of this sentiment. It appealed freshly to him, and he thought it decidedly fine. He did not recognize a flag of truce except as averitable visible white rag, and from time to time he experienced much surprise that Colonel Grant did not order him under arrest as a preliminary to a court martial.
PRINTED BY R. R. DONNELLEYAND SONS COMPANY AT THELAKESIDE PRESS, CHICAGO, ILL.