The Story of Old Fort Loudon. Mary Noailles Murfree

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СКАЧАТЬ killed—a spy doubtless, the forerunner of these Cherokees, who, but for thinking them French, would have let out their spirits into the truly unknown, by way of that great mountain pass opening on an unknown world. If the savages but dreamed of the fate that had befallen their scout!—she hardly dared look at Hamish when she thought of the dead Indian, lest her thought be read.

      She wondered what had become of her neighbors; where had they gone, and how had they fared, and where was she herself going in this journey to Choté—a name, a mere name, heard by chance, and repeated at haphazard, to which she had committed the future.

      This fresh anxiety served to renew her attention. Willinawaugh, still rehearsing the griefs of his people, and the perfidy, as he construed it, of the government, was detailing the perverse distortion of the English compliance with their treaty to erect a great defensive work in the Cherokee nation—the heart of the nation—to aid them in their wars on Indian enemies, and to protect their country and the non-combatants when the warriors should be absent in the service of their allies, the English. Such a work had the government indeed erected, on the south bank of the Tennessee River, mounted with twelve great cannon, not five miles from Choté, old town, and there, one hundred and fifty miles in advance of Anglo-American civilization, lay within it now the garrison of two hundred English soldiers!

      Odalie's heart gave a great bound! She felt already safe. To be under the protection of British cannon once more! To listen to an English voice! Her brain was a-whirl. She could hear the drums beat. She could hear the sentry's challenge. She even knew the countersign—"God save the king!"—they were saying that to-night at Fort Loudon as the guard turned out;—she did not know it; she never knew it; she was only sure of it!

      Willinawaugh had never heard of the agriculturist who sowed dragon's teeth and whose crop matured into full-armed soldiers. But he acutely realized this plight as he detailed how the Cherokees had protested, and had sent a "talk" (letter) to the Earl of Loudon, who had been at the time commander-in-chief of the British forces in America, setting forth the fact that the Cherokees did not like the presence of so many white people among them as the two hundred soldiers and the settlers that had gathered about the place. The military occupation made the fort a coercion and menace to the Cherokee people, and they requested him to take away the soldiers and relinquish the fort with its twelve great guns and other munitions of war to the Cherokee nation—to which suggestion the Earl of Loudon had seemed to turn a deaf ear.

      Alexander MacLeod, deliberating gravely, realized that under such circumstances the fort would ultimately be used against the English interest that it was designed to foster, by reason of the ever-ready machinations of the French influence among the Cherokees. The fort was evidently intended to afford protection to the Cherokees, but only so long as they were the allies of the English.

      Much of the night passed in this discourse, but at length Willinawaugh slept, his feet toward the fire, around which the other Indians, all rolled in their blankets, like the spokes of a wheel about a hub, were already disposed. Alexander MacLeod had been nearly the last man to drop out of the conversation. He glanced up to note that Odalie sat still wide awake with her back against the trunk of a great chestnut-oak, her eyes on the fire, the child in her arms. They exchanged a glance which said as plain as speech that he and Hamish and she would divide the watch. Each would rest for two or three hours and watch while the others slept. It behooved them to be cautious and guard against surprise. The recollection of that dead Indian, lying on his face in the woods miles to the north of them, and the doubt whether or not he belonged to this party, and the sense of vengeance suspended like a sword by a hair—all impinged very heavily on Hamish's consciousness, and in his own phrase he had to harry himself to sleep. Alexander, realizing that, as the ablest of the family, he was their chief means of defense, betook himself to much-needed repose, and Odalie was the only waking human being in many and many a mile. Now and again she heard far away the hooting of an owl, or the scream of a panther, and once, close at hand, the leaves stirred with a stealthy tread and the horses snorted aloud. She rose and threw more lightwood on the flaring fire, and as the flames leaped up anew two bright green eyes in the dusk on the shadowy side of the circle vanished; she saw the snarl of fierce fangs and no more, for the fire burned brilliantly that night as she fed the flames, and far down the aisles of the primeval forest the protective light was dispensed. Above were the dense boughs of the trees, all red and yellow, but through that great gate, the gap in the mountain wall, she could look out on the stars that she had always known, keeping their steadfast watch above this strange, new land. So accustomed was she to nature that she was not awed by the presence of the somber, wooded, benighted mountain range, rising in infinite gloom, and austere silence, and indefinable extent against the pallid, instarred sky.

      She began to think, woman-like, of that home she had left; in her mind it was like a deserted living thing. And the poor sticks of furniture all standing aghast and alone, the door open and flapping in the wind! And when she remembered a blue pitcher—a squat little blue jug that had come from France—left on a shelf by the window with some red leaves in it to do duty as a bouquet—so relieved was she now of her fears for the lives of them all that she must needs shed tears of regret for the little blue pitcher—the squat little blue jug that came from France. And how had she selected so ill among her belongings as to what she should bring and what leave? Fifine had a better frock than that serge thing; it would not wear so well, but her murrey-colored pelisse trimmed with the sarcenet ribbon would have added warmth enough. If it were not such a waste of goods she would make over her paduasoy coat for Fifine, for she loved to see a small child very fine of attire. But precious little time she would have for remodeling the paduasoy coat—a primrose-tinted ground with dark red roses, that had been her "grand'maman's" when new. "I wonder if I expected to live always in a hollow tree, that I should have left that pair of sheets, new ten hundred linen, the ones that I have just woven," she arraigned herself indignantly, as she mentally went over the stock in the pack. "And did I think I should be so idle that I must bring instead so much spun-truck so as to weave others. To think of those new linen sheets! And then too that lovely, quaint little jug—the little squat blue jug that came from France!"

      Oh, no; Odalie was not at all lonely during the long watch through the night, and did not lack subjects of meditation. The time did not hang heavily on her hands!

      It hardly seemed that an hour had passed when Hamish, in obedience to some inward monition, turned himself suddenly, looked up, stretched himself to a surprising length, then sat up by the fire, motioning to her to close her eyes.

      His face was compassionate; perhaps he saw traces of tears about her eyes. He could not know why she had been weeping, or he might have accounted his sympathy wasted. For Hamish looked upon crockery as inanimate and a mere manufacture, yet endowed with a perverse ingenuity in finding occasions to come into disastrous contact with a boy's unsuspecting elbow, and get itself broken and the boy into disgrace. He had his gentle interpretation of her sorrow, and motioned to her, once more, to close her eyes, and pointed up at the skies, where Orion was unsheathing his glittering blade above the eastern mountains—a warning that the night was well-nigh spent and a chill day of early December on the way. And it seemed only an inappreciable interval of time before Odalie opened her eyes again, upon a crimson dawn, with the rime white on the sparse red and brown leaves and bare boughs; to see breakfast cooking under Hamish's ministrations; to see Fifine washing the cat's face with fresh water from the spring—very cold it was, as Fifine herself found it, when it came her turn to try it herself and cry "Quelle barbarie!"—to see the Indians getting a party to horse to go back and search for one of their number, who had become separated in some way; to see poor Hamish's face pale with fear and consciousness, and then harden with resolution to meet the worst like a man.

      At length they set forth in the frosty dawn of a new day, changing their route and making their progress further southward along untried ways she had never thought to travel. The sun came grandly up; the mountain range, wooded to the summit, flaunted in splendid array, red, and yellow, and even purple, with the heavy growths of the sweet-gum trees, and their wealth of lingering foliage. Here and there, along the heights, grim crags СКАЧАТЬ