The Story of Old Fort Loudon Part 10

Choo-qualee-qualoo laid down this last proposition with a doubting gravity, for the young man had promulgated it as if with a sense of its importance and a weighty soberness, although he laughed at most that he said himself and at everything that any one else said.

He saw fit to remark that he did not understand how that sober-minded Sawney--meaning the Scotchman--had ever contrived to capture such a fine woman, but that was always the way with these dull prigs. Now as for such rattling blades as himself and his Captain--who would have been disposed to lay the flat of his sword smartly across the shoulders of the orderly, could he have dreamed of mention in such irreverent fellowship--they had no chance with the women, and for his own part this made him very sad. And he contrived to look so for about a minute, as he led the Captain's horse up and down before the door of the council-house, while Choo-qualee-qualoo, at one end of his beat, stood among a clump of laurel and talked to him as he came and went, and Willinawaugh, in the shadowy recesses of a neighboring hut, watched through the open door how his scheme took effect.

It made him very sad, the soldier said, mournfully, for the girls to like other fellows better than him--as they generally did!

And Choo-qualee-qualoo broke off to say here that she did not discern why such preference should be, for this soldier's hair was the color of the Captain's gold lace on his red coat (the orderly was called "Carrots" by his comrades), and he had a face with--and at a loss she dabbled the tips of her fingers delicately about the bridge of her nose and her eyes to intimate the freckles on his fair skin, which beauty-spots she evidently admired.

The Scotchman's French wife was a stunner, the orderly was good enough to declare again, and everybody else thought so too. But he had overheard Captain Demere say to Captain Stuart that her husband had no right to bring her to this western wilderness, and that that terrible journey of so many hundred miles, keeping up on foot with men, was enough to have killed her; and Captain Stuart had replied that she would make a fine pace-setter for infantry in heavy marching order. The orderly protested that for his part, if he were a condemned fine woman like that, he wouldn't live in a wilderness--he would run away from the Scotchman and go back to wherever she came from. Handsomest eyes he ever saw--_except two eyes_!

Here Choo-qualee-qualoo gave Odalie a broadside glance which left no doubt as to whose eyes this exception was supposed to refer, and put two or three strands of the red beads into her mouth, showing her narrow sharp teeth as she laughed with pleasure and pride.

Thus it was that Odalie was apprised of the fact that she was regarded by the Indians as a French prisoner in the hands of the English, and that the young soldier's use of the idea of capture by her husband, figuratively, as in the toils of matrimony, was literally construed.

Her first impulse was to repudiate this suggestion of captivity, of detention against her will. Then her strong instinct of wisdom,--for she had no foresight in the matter,--that made Hamish sometimes charge her with being as politic as Captain Stuart himself, moved her to reserve this detail for the consideration of the commandant of the fort, as every matter, however trivial, that bore upon the growing enmity of the Cherokees toward the English amongst them, and their disposition to fraternize with the French, was important.

The two captains listened with serious attention when she detailed this conversation to them, having repaired to the fort for the purpose, and being received as a guest of much distinction in the great hall, summarily cleared of the junior officers, and, not so summarily, of the clouds of tobacco smoke. They both instantly commended her course in leaving the impression on the minds of the Indian women as it had chanced to be made, and in dismissing them in unimpaired good humor with some little presents--a tiny mirror set locket-wise and an ivory bobbin wound around with red thread. The women had evidently derived special pleasure from the slyness and presumable secrecy of their interview, skulking out with a craft of concealment that completely eluded the notice of Sandy and "Dill," and this had given Odalie a sense of disapprobation and repulsion.

"Why should you care?" demanded Demere, always sympathetic with a woman's whim-whams, even when he could not feel with them. "No amount of explanation could enable the Indian women to comprehend the situation from your standpoint."

And Captain Stuart could not restrain his laughter at her discomfiture.

"Do you consider yourself so free, then? Do you call it freedom--in the holy _bonds_ of matrimony? I had no idea how much you object to hear the clanking of your chains!"

As he noted her long-lashed glance of disdain,--"Doesn't the holy Scripture call it a 'yoke,'" he persisted, bursting out laughing afresh.

She would not reply but sat listening to Captain Demere, who began to reason,--"This impression on the part of the Cherokee women might afford us--I don't know how--some means of learning and frustrating the treacherous plans of the savages. It gives us a source of information through you that we can trust."

"I don't relish the deceitful part a.s.signed to me," she protested.

"What would we do with any information, Mrs. MacLeod, supposing we gain aught of value," returned Demere with some haughtiness, "except to use it for the defense of the fort, and your own outlying station? Are we here to wage war or to maintain peace?"

She was silent, a trifle mortified because of her own mortification to be supposed a mere captive.

"Everybody else knows that you are the commanding officer at MacLeod's Station," said Stuart in pretended consolation, only half smothering a laugh.

"Besides," Demere argued, gravely, "you will never be able to convince them of the facts. Of course you know I intend no disparagement to you when I say they will believe that young soldier's rodomontade in preference to your word--being women of such extreme ignorance."

"Why, the man ought to be gagged!" exclaimed Stuart, in delight at her seriousness.

The color mounted to Odalie's cheek. She had but entered her twenties, and despite her matronly arrogations she felt very young, now and then.

Notwithstanding her humble pioneer status, she retained much of the aristocratic traditions inherited from her "Grand'maman"; she was beginning to feel it a great liberty that the young orderly should have expressed his admiration of her, although of course he was not aware that it would be repeated. She objected that he should know that she knew of it.

"I hope you will not acquaint him with the circ.u.mstances," she said, stiffly.

"By no means," said Demere, appreciating her scruples. "That sort of thing is beyond discipline. The men in a garrison will tell everything they know or think they know."

Odalie sat for a moment longer. "I think," she said, recovering her equanimity after a fashion, "that since I immediately placed the information of this ludicrous _contretemps_ at your disposal, for whatever you may make it worth, I should be promised exemption from the kind of raillery--and jokes--which Captain Stuart--frequent mention of chains, and bond-slave, and matrimonial noose and--such things," she paused, rising and looking at Stuart, wistfully remonstrant, for she could but notice how her chagrin ministered to his mischievous delight.

"How _can you_, Mrs. MacLeod!" he cried. "Captain 'Quawl' will have me clapped into irons at the first offence! And this is the vaunted tender-heartedness of women!"

Even Captain Demere joined in the laugh at her, only becoming grave to insist that she should not, without notice to him, divulge the fact that she was not French, but of Carolinian birth and parentage, and the further fact--and his serious face relaxed--that she, herself, was the commandant at MacLeod's Station, and that Sandy and Hamish, Fifine and "Dill," were the mere minions of her power.

She found discretion the better part of valor, and thought it wise to laugh a little at herself and her own pride, although the dimples came and went in very red cheeks, and her eyes were so bright as they rested on the merry face of the big blond officer that they might be said to flash. She diverted with difficulty Hamish's attention from Captain Demere's half-finished map on the table at the other end of the room, over which the boy had been poring during the entire interview, and then they took their leave.

Little did any of the party realize how important the mistaken impression of the Cherokee women was to prove!

CHAPTER VII

The winter wore gradually away. While the snows were still on the ground, and the eastern mountain domes were glittering white against a pale blue sky, all adown the nearer slopes the dense forests showed a clear garnet hue, that betokened the swelling of congregated ma.s.ses of myriads of budding boughs. Even the aspect of more distant ranges bespoke a change, in the dull soft blue which replaced the hard lapis-lazuli tint that the chill, sharp weather had known. For the cold had now a reviviscent tang--not the bleak, benumbing, icy deadness of the winter's thrall. And while the flames still flared on the hearth, and the thumping of the batten and the creak of the treadle resounded most of the day from the little shed-room where Odalie worked at her loom, and the musical whir of her spinning-wheel enlivened all the fire-lit evenings as she sat in the chimney corner, the thaws came on, and brought the mountain snows down the Tennessee River with a great rushing turbulence, and it lifted a wild, imperious, chanting voice into the primeval stillness. A delicate vernal haze began to pervade the air, and a sweet placidity, as if all nature were in a dream, not dead,--an expectant moment, the crisis of development. Now and again Odalie and Fifine would come to the door, summoned by a loud crackling sound, as of a terrible potency, and watch wincingly the pervasive flare of the great elastic yellow and vermilion flames springing into the air from the bonfires of the piles of cane as the cleared land was transformed from the cane-brake into fields. And soon the ploughs were running. Oh, it was spring in this loveliest of regions, in this climate of garnered delights! As the silvery sycamore trees, leaning over the glittering reaches of the slate-blue river, put forth the first green leaves, of the daintiest vernal hue, Odalie loved to gaze through them from the door of the cabin, perchance to note an eagle wing its splendid flight above the long, rippling white flashes of the current; or a canoe, as swift, as light, cleave the denser medium of the water; or in the stillness of the noon a deer lead down a fawn to drink. She was wont to hear the mocking-bird pour forth his thrilling ecstasy of song, the wild bee drone, and in the distance the m.u.f.fled booming thunder of the herds of buffalo. Who so quick to see the moon, this vernal moon,--surely not some old dead world of lost history, and burnt-out hopes, and destroyed utilities, but fair of face, virginal and fresh as the spring itself,--come down the river in the sweet dusk, slowly, softly, pace by pace, ethereally refulgent, throwing spa.r.s.e shadows of the newly leaved sycamore boughs far up the slope, across the threshold that she loved, with the delicate traceries of this similitude of the roof-tree.

"Oh, this is home! home!" she often exclaimed, clasping her hands, and looking out in a sort of solemn delight.

"Why don't you say that in French, Odalie?" Hamish would mischievously ask. For his researches into the mysteries of the French language, although not extensive, had sufficed to acquaint him with the fact that the tongue has no equivalent for this word, and to furnish him with this home-thrust, as it were. Odalie, always rising with spirit to the occasion, would immediately inquire if he had seen or heard of Savanukah lately, and affect to be reminded to urge him to put himself in preparation to be able to stand an examination in French by that linguistic authority by conjugating the reflective verb _S'amuser_. "So much you might, Hamish, _amuse yourself_ with Savanukah."

"I am not disturbed, now," Hamish would declare, "since we have made interest with the family. I'd just get your friend, Mrs. Savanukah, to intercede for me."

For Odalie had to run the gauntlet of a good deal of merriment in the family circle because of her close acquaintance with the Indian women.

Their visits annoyed her extremely. If she went for an afternoon's talk with Belinda Rush,--the two had become fast friends,--she deprecated leaving her scanty store of possessions lest their dainty order be disturbed by the Indian intruders in her absence. She dared not quit Fifine, whom it was sometimes inconvenient to take, even though the child's father was inside the stockade, lest she be kidnapped, so covert and sly was their slipping in and out, for somehow they were never discovered at the moment of entrance. Nevertheless, she treated her Cherokee callers with such sweet patient courtesy that it is not to be wondered that they came again and again. She gave them trifles that she could spare, and a share of the seeds of vegetables which she had brought with her, and this they received with real and unfeigned grat.i.tude, for the women were the gardeners among the Cherokees and the tillers of the soil.

Odalie herself had that strong nerve of sympathy with the springing growths of the earth that made every turned furrow of the rich mould a delight to her. It was not work--it partook of the nature of a pastime, wrought for the love of it, when following her husband's plough she dropped the Indian corn and covered it with her hoe. She loved the soft, tender, sprouting blades, as they put strongly forth; she loved hardly less the quickly springing weeds even as she cut them mercilessly away with her hoe. She loved the hot sun, and the clear, fresh wind that came rushing down the rushing river, and the delicious delicate perfume of its waterside ferns, and the cool, sleeping shadows in the dark mysteries of the woods, and the solemnity of the great mountains on the eastern horizon, and the song of a thrush in mid-air above it all. And when the clouds gathered and came the soft, soft falling of the steady spring rain, she loved the interval it afforded for the setting of things in order within, and once more she and Hamish and Fifine and the cat were congregated on the buffalo rug in front of the fire, which had dwindled to an ember kept from meal to meal, to sort treasures brought with them in the small compa.s.s of a buffalo horn,--seeds now, the seeds of certain simple flowers, a bulb and a root or two,--the precious roots of an eglantine and a clematis vine. And now that the chance of killing frosts was overpast, Odalie and Fifine were grubbing much of the time in the ground and Hamish often came and grubbed too. The seeds were sown and grew apace; the bulbs and roots throve; the vines began to clamber over the support of a rude bower of saplings built above the door; and soon when Odalie sat here beside her spinning-wheel, in her white linen dress with its broad collar of her own hand-wrought lace, to enjoy the cool air from the mountains, and the color of the red sunset on the river, she had a canopy of vines above her head, and between her upward glance and the sky, a blooming rose, faintly pink, and a bird's nest with four blue eggs.

Captain Demere, coming in at the gate of the stockade one afternoon, exclaimed in surprise and pleasure at the prettiness and the completeness of this rude comfort. There was but one room in the house with a floor; the seats were only puncheon benches with rough staves for legs thrust through auger-holes and one or two of her befrilled "tabourets"; the table was of like manufacture; the beds and pillows were mere sacks filled with dried balsam fringes from the great fir-trees, and supported on the rudest frames; but the fresh aromatic fragrance the fir dispensed, the snow-white linen the couches displayed, the flutter of the quaint bird-decorated curtains at the windows, the array of the few bits of treasured old china, the shelf of precious old books, the cl.u.s.ter of purple and white violets arranged in a great opaline pearly mussel-sh.e.l.l from the river, in default of vase, in the center of the wabbly table, the dainty freshness and neatness of the whole--"This is _home_!" he declared. "I accept a new anthropological dogma. Man is only the fort-builder--woman is the home-maker!"

"Yes," said Odalie in content and pride, surveying her treasures, as she conducted him about the place, for he had not been here since the completion of the improvements; "I often say that this is _home_!"

"But never in French," put in Hamish at her elbow.

Nevertheless, this did not contribute to alter Captain Demere's opinion that the frontier was no place for women, though that would imply, with his later conclusions, no place for home. He went away wearing in his b.u.t.tonhole a sprig of sweetbrier, which he declared again reminded him so of home. He had not thought to find it here, and memory fell upon him unprepared and at a disadvantage. The moon was up when he stepped into his boat, and the orderly, bending to the oars, shot straight out into the river. Long, burnished white lines lay upon its gleaming surface, and looking back Demere could see beyond the shadow and sheen of the sloping bank the cleared s.p.a.ce, where the moonbeams fell in unbroken splendor before the stockade, and through its open gate the log-cabin with its primitive porch, where, young and beautiful, she sat in her white dress in the bright light beside the silent little flax-wheel.

Home undoubtedly! As the boat headed up the river he looked moodily at the ripples, glancing in the moonbeams, and noted with a keen new sensitiveness the fragrance of the eglantine, reminiscent of summers dead and gone, and life as fleeting and frail as the transitory flower.

For the news that came in these days from over the mountains was always heavy news,--rumors of ma.s.sacres, now of a single individual in some exposed and dangerous situation, and again of settlers surprised and overcome by numbers within the defenses of their own stanch stockade.

All along the frontier the spirit seemed to extend, first toward the north and then southward, and it was apparently only a question of time when the quiet and peace that encircled Fort Loudon should be summarily broken. Many of the pioneers, could they now have returned to Virginia or the Carolinas without danger, would have forever relinquished their new homes, and have set forth on their long journey without delay. But the Cherokees about them, personally known to them and apparently without individual animosity, seemed a slighter menace than the probable encounter with wild wandering bands, glutted with blood yet thirsting still for vengeance. In one of Demere's reports about this time, early in the year 1759, he says: "We are living in great harmony here--no 'bad talks' at all."

Again and again he and Captain Stuart, accompanied only by an orderly to mark their sense of confidence, went to Chote to confer in a friendly way with the king and half-king, and seek to induce them to take some order with these depredators, and restore the peace of the border.

The great council-house at Chote was a curious circular structure, formed of withes and willows and wand-like timbers, woven together in a dome-like shape to the height of twenty feet, with a diameter of thirty feet at the base; the whole was covered over with a thick coating within and without of the deeply and richly tinted red clay of that region, and pierced by no window or chimney or other outlet than the tall and narrow doorway. The last time the two officers together sought the presence of the kings in the _Ottare_ district, as the mountainous region was called,--the towns designated as the _Ayrate_ settlements signified the lower country,--they were received here, and Stuart, from the moment of their entrance, knew that their mission was hopeless.

They had recently been ordered to demand the surrender to them of certain notable Cherokees, for having been concerned in the distant border murders, and who lived in the towns of Citico and Tellico hard by, close at hand to both Chote and Fort Loudon. They realized that this measure was at once displeasing and impracticable to the kings, whose authority could not compa.s.s the surrender of their tribesmen to the justice of the gibbet, after the expiatory methods of the English, and who foresaw that such compliance would but provoke reprisal on the paleface and further outbreaks.

Sitting motionless on buffalo rugs, a number of which were spread over the floor of the room, on which the two officers were also invited to be seated, the Indians advanced none of the equivocal statements and doubtful promises and fallacious expectations of peace as heretofore, but kept their eyes fixed upon the ground, while the officers once more expressed their earnest remonstrances and made their summary demand, implicitly obeying their orders, although this extreme and impolitic measure was secretly deprecated by both.

The "talk" was conducted by means of the services of an interpreter, an Indian, who stood behind the great chiefs and recited, now in Cherokee and now in English, and always with a wooden, expressionless accent, as if he were a talking machine and understood not a word for which he furnished the equivalent, in deference to the great company not permitting his mind to take part in the deeper significance of the ideas they interchanged. He kept his eyes fixed upon the blank wall opposite, and effaced his individuality as far as possible. But after the first sentences of merely formal greeting, the wooden clapper of the interpreter's tongue vibrated back and forth with Cherokee only, for the Indian chiefs said nothing to be rendered into English. Silent and stony they sat, looking neither to the right nor left, unmoved by urgency, stolid to remonstrance, and only when Demere with a flash of fire suggested that Governor Lyttleton of South Carolina, or General Amherst the new "head-man," who was now commander-in-chief of the army, would soon take fierce measures to retaliate these enormities, there was a momentary twinkle in the crafty eyes of Oconostota, and he spoke briefly. The interpreter woodenly repeated:--

"I can well believe you, for after an English treaty we have fraud and then force and at last bloodshed."