The Fate Of The Cheera-Taghe

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Title:     The Fate Of The Cheera-Taghe
Author: Mary Noailles Murfree [More Titles by Murfree]

Along the old "trading-path" that was wont to wind from the Cherokee country among the innumerable spurs and gorges of the Great Smoky Mountains, and through the dense primeval forests full five hundred miles to the city of Charlestown, was visible for many years, on the banks of the Little Tennessee, an "old waste town," as the abandoned place was called in the idiom of the Indians. An early date it might seem, in 1744, in this new land, for the spectacle of the ruins of a race still in possession, still unsubdued. Nearly twenty years later, after the repeated aggressive expeditions which the British government sent against the Cherokees, such vestiges became more numerous. This "waste town," however, neither fire nor sword had desolated, and the grim deeds of British powder and lead were still of the future. The enemy came in more subtle sort.

Only one of the white pack-men employed to drive a score of well-laden horses semi-annually from Charlestown to a trading-station farther along on the Great Tennessee--then called the Cherokee River--and back again used to glower fearfully at the "waste town" as he passed. He had ample leisure for speculation, for the experienced animals of the pack-train required scant heed, so regularly they swung along in single file, and the wild whoops of their drivers were for the sake of personal encouragement and the simple joy which very young men find in their own clamor. It grew specially boisterous always when they neared the site of Nilaque Great, the deserted place, as if to give warning to any vague spiritual essences, unmeet for mortal vision, that might be lurking about the "waste town," and bid them avaunt, for the place was reputed haunted.

The rest of the Carolina pack-men, trooping noisily past, averted their eyes from the darkened doors of the empty houses; the weed-grown spaces of the "beloved square," where once the ceremonies of state, the religious rites, the public games and dances were held; the council-house on its high mound, whence had been wont to issue the bland vapors of the pipe of peace or the far more significant smoke emitted from the cheera, the "sacred fire," which only the cheera-taghe, the fire-prophets,[10] were permitted to kindle, and which was done with pomp and ceremony in the new year, when every spark of the last year's fire had been suffered to die out.

Cuthbert Barnett, however, always looked to see what he might,--perhaps because he was a trifle bolder than the other stalwart pack-men, all riding armed to the teeth to guard the goods of the train from robbery as well as their own lives from treachery, for although the Cherokees professed friendship it was but half-hearted, as they loved the French always better than the English; perhaps because he had a touch of imagination that coerced his furtive glance; perhaps because he doubted more, or believed less, of the traditions of the day. And he saw--silence! the sunset in vacant spaces, with long, slanting, melancholy rays among the scattered houses of the hamlet; an empty doorway, here and there; a falling rotting roof; futile traces of vanished homes. Once a deer and fawn were grazing in the weed-grown fields that used to stand so thick with corn that they laughed and sung; once--it was close upon winter--he heard a bear humming and humming his content (the hunters called the sound "singing") from the den where the animal had bestowed himself among the fallen logs of a dwelling-house, half covered with great drifts of dead leaves; often an owl would cry out in alarm from some dark nook as the pack-train clattered past; and once a wolf with a stealthy and sinister tread was patrolling the "beloved square." These were but the natural incidents of the time and the ruins of the old Cherokee town.

Little did Cuddy Barnett imagine, as he gazed on the deserted and desolate place, that he was yet to behold the smoke of the "sacred fire" flaring up into the blue sky from the portal of the temple, as the cheera-taghe would issue bearing the flame aloft, newly kindled in the opening year, and calling upon many assembled people to light therefrom their hearths, rekindling good resolutions and religious fervor for the future, and letting the faults of the unavailing past die out with the old year's fire; that he was to mark the clash of arms in the "beloved square," once more populous with the alert figures of warriors in martial array, making ready for the war-path; that he was to hear the joyful religious songs of greeting to the dawn, and the sonorous trumpeting of the conch-shells, as the vanished Indians of the "old waste town" would troop down at daybreak into the water of that bright stream where long ago they had been wont to plunge in their mystic religious ablutions. All this, however, the pack-men might see and hear, to believe the tradition of the day, in camping but a single night near the old "waste town."

And so anxious were these gay itinerant companies to see and hear nothing of such ghostly sort that whatever the stress of the weather, the mischances of the journey, the condition of the pack-animals, this vicinity was always distinguished by the longest day's travel of the whole route, and the camp was pitched at the extreme limit of the endurance of man and horse to compass distance from Nilaque Great. For believe what one might, the fact remained indisputable, that a decade earlier, when the place was inhabited, strange sounds were rife about the locality, the "sacred fire" was unkindled on the great "Sanctified Day," the two cheera-taghe of the town mysteriously disappeared, and their fate had remained a dark riddle.

One of these men, Oo-koo-koo, was well known in Charlestown. Both were of influence in the tribe, but often he had been specially chosen as one of the delegations of warriors and "beloved men" sent to wait in diplomatic conference on the Governor of South Carolina, to complain of injustice in the dealings of the licensed traders or the encroachments of the frontier settlers, or to crave the extension of some privilege of the treaty which the Cherokee tribe had lately made with the British government.

Two white men, who had become conspicuous in a short stay in the town of Nilaque Great, disappeared simultaneously, and the suspicion of foul dealing on their part against the cheera-taghe, which the Cherokee nation seemed disposed to entertain, threatened at one time the peace that was so precious to the "infant settlements," as the small, remote, stockaded stations of the Carolina frontiersmen were tenderly called.

Therefore the Governor of South Carolina, now a royal province,--the event occurred during the incumbency of Robert Johnson, who having acted in that capacity for the Lords Proprietors, well understood the menace of the situation,--busied himself with extreme diligence to discover the subsequent movements of the two white men, whose names were Terence O'Kimmon and Adrien L'Epine, in order to ascertain the fate of the cheera-taghe, and if evilly entreated, to bring the perpetrators of the deed to justice.

With a long, unguarded, open frontier such as his province presented to the incursions of the warlike and fierce Cherokees, who, despite their depopulating wars with other tribes, could still bring to the field six thousand braves from their sixty-four towns, the inhabitants of which were estimated at twenty thousand souls, he was by no means disposed to delay or to indulge doubts or to foster compatriot commiseration in meting out the penalty of the malefactors. The united militia of South Carolina and Georgia at this time numbered but thirty-five hundred rank and file, these colonies being so destitute of white men for the common defense that a memorial addressed to his majesty King George II. a little earlier than this event, bearing date April 9, 1734, pathetically states that "money itself cannot here raise a sufficient body of them." The search for the suspects, however, although long, exhaustive, and of such diligence as to convince the Indians of its sincerity of purpose, resulted fruitlessly. The government presently took occasion to made some valuable presents to the tribe, not as indemnity, for it could recognize no responsibility in the strange disaster, but for the sake of seeming to comply with the form of offering satisfaction for the loss, which otherwise the Indians would retaliate with massacre.

Nilaque Great with this cloud upon it grew dreary. The strange disappearance of its cheera-taghe was canvassed again and again, reaching no surmise of the truth. Speculations, futile as they were continuous, began to be reinforced with reminiscences of the date of the event, and certain episodes became strangely significant now, although hardly remarked at the time; people remembered unexplained and curious noises that had sounded like muffled thunder in the deep midnight, and again, scarcely noted, in the broad daylight. The "sacred fire" remained unkindled, and sundry misfortunes were attributed to this unprecedented neglect; an expert warrior, young and notably deft-handed, awkwardly shot himself with his own gun; the crops, cut short by a late and long-continued drought, were so meagre as to be hardly worth the harvesting; the days appointed for the annual feasts and thanksgiving were like days of mourning; discontents waxed and grew strong. Superstitious terrors became rife, and at length it was known at Charlestown that the Cherokees of Nilaque Great had settled a new place farther down upon the river, for at the old town the vanished cheera-taghe were abroad in the spirit, pervading the "beloved square" at night with cries of "_A-kee-o-hoo-sa! A-kee-o-hoo-sa!_" (I am dead! I am dead!) clamoring for their graves and the honors of sepulture due to them and denied. And this was a grief to the head men of the town, for of all tribes the Cherokees loved and revered their dead. Thus when other cheera-taghe kindled for the municipality the "sacred fire" for a new year it was distributed to hearths far away, and Nilaque Great, deserted and depopulated, had become a "waste town."

A fair place it had been in its prime, and so it had seemed one afternoon in June, 1734, when for the first time the two white strangers had entered it. Mountains more splendid than those which rose about it on every hand it would be difficult to imagine. The dense, rich woods reach in undiminished vigor along the slopes covering them at a height of six thousand feet, till the "tree line" interposes; thence the great bare domes lift their stately proportions among the clouds. Along these lofty perspectives the varying distance affords the vision a vast array of gradations of color,--green in a thousand shades, and bronze, and purple, and blue,--blue growing ever fainter and more remote till it is but an illusion of azure, and one may believe that the summits seen through a gap to the northeast are sheer necromancy of the facile horizon.

In the deep verdant cove below, groups of the giant trees common to the region towered above the stanchly constructed cabins that formed the homes of the Indians, for the Cherokees, detesting labor and experts in procrastination, builded well and wisely that they might not be forced to rebuild, and many of the distinctive features of the stout frontier architecture were borrowed by the pioneers from aboriginal example. Out beyond the shadows were broad stretches of fields with the lush June in the wide and shining blade and the flaunting tassel. The voices of women and young girls came cheerily from the breezy midst as they tilled the ground, where flourished in their proper divisions the three varieties of maize known to Indian culture, "the six weeks' corn, the hominy corn, and the bread corn." A shoal of canoes skimmed down the river, each with its darting shadow upon that lucent current and seeming as native, as indigenous to the place as the minnows in a crystal brown pool there by the waterside--each too with its swift javelin-like motion and a darting shadow. Sundry open doors here and there showed glimpses of passing figures within, but the arrival of the strangers was unnoticed till some children playing beside the river caught sight of the unaccustomed faces. With a shrill cry of discovery, they sped across the square, agitated half by fright and half by the gusto of novelty. In another moment there were two score armed men in the square.

"Now hould yer tongue still, an' I'll do the talkin'," said one of the white adventurers to the other, speaking peremptorily, but with a suave and delusive smile. "If yez weren't Frinch ye'd be a beautiful Englishman; but I hev got the advantage of ye in that, an' faix I'll kape it."

He was evidently of a breeding inferior to that of his companion, but he had so sturdy and swinging a gait, so stalwart and goodly a build, so engaging a manner, and so florid a smile, that the very sight of him was disarming, despite the patent crafty deceit in his face. It seemed as if it could not be very deep or guileful, it was so frankly expressed. It was suggestive of the roguish machinations of a child. He had twinkling brown eyes, and reddish hair, plaited in a club and tied with a thong of leather. His features were blunt, but his red, well-shaped lips parted in a ready, reassuring smile, and showed teeth as even and white as the early corn. Both men were arrayed in the buckskin shirt and leggings generally worn by the frontiersmen, but the face of the other had a certain incongruity with his friend's, and was more difficult to decipher. It looked good,--not kind, but true. It had severe pragmatic lines about the mouth, and the lips were thin and somewhat fixedly set. His eyes were dark, serious, and very intent, as if he could argue and protest very earnestly on matters of no weight. He would in a question of theory go very far if set on the wrong line, and just as far on the right. The direction was the matter of great moment, and this seemed now in the hands of the haphazard but scheming Irishman.

"If it plaze yer honor," said O'Kimmon in English, taking off his coonskin cap with a lavish flourish as a tall and stately Indian hastily garbed in fine raiment of the aboriginal type, a conspicuous article of which was a long feather-wrought mantle, both brilliant and delicate of effect, detached himself from the group and came forward, "I can't spake yer illigant language,--me eddication bein' that backward,--but I kin spake me own so eloquent that it would make a gate-post prick up the ears of understanding. We've come to visit yez, sor."

The smile which the Hibernian bent upon the savage was of a honeyed sweetness, but the heart of his companion sank as he suddenly noted the keen, intuitive power of comprehension expressed in the face of the old Indian. Here was craft too, but of a different quality, masked, potent, impossible to divine, to measure, to thwart. The sage Oo-koo-koo stood motionless, his eyes narrowing, his long, flat, cruel mouth compressed as with a keen scrutiny he marked all the characteristics of the strangers,--first of one, then deliberately of the other. A war captain (his flighty name was Watatuga, the Dragon-fly, although he looked with his high nose and eagle glance more like a bird of prey), assuming precedence of the others, pressed up beside the prophet, and the challenge of his eyes and the contempt that dilated his nostrils might have seemed more formidable of intent than the lacerating gaze of the cheera-taghe, except that to an Irishman there is always a subtle joy even in the abstract idea of fight. The rest of the braves, with their alert, high-featured cast of countenance, inimical, threatening, clustered about, intent, doubtful, listening.

Adrien L'Epine had his secret doubts as to the efficacy of the bold, blunt, humorous impudence which Terence O'Kimmon fancied such masterful policy,--taking now special joy in the fact that its meaning was partially veiled because of the presumable limitations of the Indian's comprehension of the English language. The more delicate nurture that L'Epine obviously had known revolted at times from this unkempt brusquerie, although he had a strong pulse of sympathy with the wild, lawless disregard of conventional standards which characterized much of the frontier life. He feared, too, that O'Kimmon underrated the extent of the Cherokee's comprehension of the language of which, however, the Indians generally spoke only a few disconnected phrases. So practiced were the savages in all the arts of pantomime, in the interpretation of facial expression and the intonation of the voice, that L'Epine had known in his varied wanderings of instances of tribes in conference, each ignorant of the other's language, who nevertheless reached a definite and intricate mutual understanding without the services of an interpreter. L'Epine felt entrapped, regretful, and wished to recede. He winced palpably as O'Kimmon's rich Irish voice, full of words, struck once more upon the air.

"Me godson, the Governor o' South Carolina," Terence O'Kimmon resumed, lying quite recklessly, "sint his humble respects,--an' he's that swate upon yez that he licks his fingers ter even sphake yer name! (Pity I furgits ut, bein' I never knew ut!)"

Although possessing an assurance that he could get the better of the devil, "could he but identify him," as O'Kimmon frequently said, he felt for one moment as if he were now in the presence. Despite his nerve the silence terrified him. He was beginning to cringe before the steady glare of those searching eyes. It was even as a refreshment of spirit to note a sudden bovine snort of rage from the lightsome Dragon-fly, as if he could ill bridle his inimical excitement.

The adventurers had not anticipated a reception of this sort, for the hospitality of the Indians was proverbial. Credentials surely were not necessary in the social circles of the Cherokees, and two men to six thousand offered no foundation for fear. O'Kimmon had such confidence in his own propitiating wiles and crafty policy that he did not realize how his genial deceit was emblazoned upon his face, how blatant it was in his voice. But for its challenging duplicity there would hardly have arisen a suggestion of suspicion. Many men on various errands easily found their way into the Indian tribes when at peace with the British, and suffered no injury. Nevertheless as the wise Oo-koo-koo looked at O'Kimmon thus steadily, with so discerning a gaze, the Irishman felt each red hair of his scalp rise obtrusively into notice, as if to suggest the instant taking of it. He instinctively put on his coonskin cap again to hold his scalp down, as he said afterward.

"Why come?" Oo-koo-koo demanded sternly.

"Tell the truth, for God's sake!" L'Epine adjured O'Kimmon in a low voice.

"I'm not used to it! 'T would give me me death o' cold!" quavered the Irishman, in sad sincerity, at a grievous loss.

"_Asgaya uneka_ (White man), but no Ingliss," said the astute Indian, touching the breast of each with the bowl of his pipe, still in his hand and still alight as it was when the interruption of their advent had occurred.

"No, by the powers,--not English!" exclaimed the Irishman impulsively, seeing he was already discovered. "I'm me own glorious nation!--the pride o' the worruld,--I was born in the Emerald Isle, the gem o' the say! I'm an Oirishman from the tip o' me scalp--in the name o' pity _why_ should I mintion the contrivance" (dropping his voice to an appalled muffled tone)--"may the saints purtect ut! But surely, Mister Injun, I've no part nor lot with the bloody bastes o' Englishers either over the say or in the provinces. If I were the brother-in-law o' the Governor o' South Carolina I'd hev a divorce from the murtherin' Englisher before he could cry, 'Quarter!'"

Oo-koo-koo, the wise Owl, made no direct answer.

"_Asgaya uneka_ (White man), but no Ingliss," he only said, now indicating L'Epine.

"Frinch in the mornin', plaze yer worship, an' only a bit o' English late in the afternoon o' the day," cried O'Kimmon, officiously, himself once more.

"French father, English mother," explained L'Epine, feeling that the Indian was hardly a safe subject for the pleasantries of conundrums.

"But his mother was but a wee bit of a woman," urged O'Kimmon; "the most of him is Frinch,--look at the size of him!"

For O'Kimmon was now bidding as high against the English aegis as earlier he had been disposed to claim its protection, when he had protested his familiarity with the Royal Governor of South Carolina. In an instant he was once more gay, impudent, confident of carrying everything before him. He divined that some recent friction had supervened in the ever-clashing interests subsisting between the Cherokee nation and the British government, and was relying on the recurrent inclination of this tribe to fraternize with the French. Their influence from their increasing western settlements was exerted antagonistically to the British colonists, by whom it was dreaded in anticipation of the war against a French and Cherokee alliance which came later. Oo-koo-koo, complacent in his own sagacity in having detected a difference in the speech of the new-comers from the English which he had been accustomed to hear in Charlestown, and animated by a wish to believe, hearkened with the more credulity to an expansive fiction detailed by the specious Irishman as to their mission here.

They were awaiting the coming of certain pettiaugres from New Orleans,--a long journey by way of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Cherokee, and the Tennessee rivers,--with a cargo of French goods cheaper than the English. They designed to establish a trading-post at some convenient point, out of reach of the grasping British, and thus to compete with the monopoly of the Cherokee commerce which the English government sought to foster. And then, to furnish a leaven of truth to this mass of lies, he detailed, with such a relish as only an Irishman can feel in a happy incongruity, that the French, having no market in old France for deerskins, the chief commodity of barter that the Indians possessed, disposed of them to ships of the British colonies, from New York and elsewhere, lured thus to New Orleans, in exchange for English cloths and other British manufactures, which the French then surreptitiously furnished to the Indians of the British alliance, underselling them on every hand.

"The intellects of the Frinch are so handsome!" cried O'Kimmon, the tears of delighted laughter in his eyes. "Faix, that is what makes 'em so close kin to the Oirish!"

Albeit the Cherokee treaty with the British forbade the Indians to trade with white men of any other nationality than the English, these professed aliens were promised protection and concealment from the British government, and the pretext of their mission served to countenance their lingering stay.

Soon their presence seemed a matter of course. The Indians had recurred to their methods of suave hospitality. The two strangers encountered only friendly looks and words, while affecting to gratify curiosity by peering into all the unaccustomed habitudes,--the preparation of food, the manufacture of deerskin garments, the care of the sick, the modeling of bowls and jars of clay, in which the Cherokees were notably expert as well as in the weaving of feather-wrought fabrics and baskets, the athletic games, the horse-races, the continual dances and pantomimic plays,--and were presently domiciled as it were in the tribe. Of so little note did they soon become that when they gradually ceased these manifestations of interest, as if familiarity had sated their curiosity, it seemed to occasion no comment. They were obviously free to rove, to stay, to live their lives as they would without interference or surveillance.

Nevertheless, they still maintained the utmost caution. Sometimes, idleness being no phenomenon, they would lie half the day in the shade on the river-bank. The Tennessee was shrunken now in the heated season, and great gravelly slopes were exposed. The two loiterers were apparently motionless at first, but as their confidence increased and the chances of being observed lessened, L'Epine, always dreading discovery, began to casually pass the gravel and sand through his fingers as he lay; sometimes he idly trifled with the blade of a hoe in a shallow pool left by the receding waters, while the jolly Irishman, now grave and solicitous, watched him breathlessly. Then L'Epine would shake his head, and the mercurial O'Kimmon groaned his deep despondency.

Once the Frenchman's head was not shaken. A flush sprang up among the pragmatic lines of L'Epine's face; his dark eyes glittered; his hand shook; for as he held out the hoe, on its blade were vaguely glimmering particles among the sand.

Later the two adventurers cherished a small nugget of red, red gold!

This find chanced below a bluff in a sort of grotto of rock, which the water filled when the river was high, and left quite dry and exposed as it receded in the droughts of summer.

Whether the two strangers were too much and too long out of sight; whether attention was attracted by certain perforated dippers or pans which they now brought into assiduous use, but which they sought to conceal; whether they had been all the time furtively watched, with a suspicion never abated, one can hardly say. They had observed every precaution of secrecy that the most zealous heed could suggest. Only one worked with the pan while the other lay motionless and idle, and vigilantly watched and listened for any stealthy sign of approach. They fully realized the jealousy of the Indians concerning the mineral wealth of their territory, lest its discovery bring hordes of the craving white people to dispossess them. This prophetic terror was later fulfilled in the Ayrate division of the tribe, but to the northward, along the Tennessee River, they sedulously guarded this knowledge. Traditions there are to the present day in the Great Smoky Mountains concerning mines of silver and lead, and of localities rich in auriferous gravel which are approximately ascertained, but which the Cherokees knew accurately and worked as far as they listed;--they carried their secret with them to the grave or the far west.

The exploration of L'Epine and O'Kimmon of necessity was conducted chiefly by day, but one night the prospectors could not be still, the moon on the sand was so bright!

The time which they had fixed for a silent, secret departure was drawing near. Their bags were almost filled, but they lingered for a little more, and covetously a little more still. And this night, this memorable night, the moon on the sand was as bright as day!

The light slanted across the Tennessee River and shimmered in the ripples. One could see, if one would, the stately lines of dark summits along a far horizon. A mockingbird was singing from out the boscage of the laurel near at hand, and the night wind was astir. And suddenly the two gold-washers in the depths of the grotto became conscious that they were not alone.

There, sitting like stone figures one on each side of the narrow portal, were the two cheera-taghe of the town, silent, motionless, watching with eyes how long alert, listening with ears how discerningly attentive, it is impossible to divine.

The gold-washers sprang to their feet, each instinctively grasping for his weapon, but alack, neither was armed! The pan had come to seem the most potent of accoutrements, with which, in good sooth, one might take the world by storm, and the rifle and knife were forgotten, in their absorption. Doubtless the Cherokees interpreted aright the gesture, so significant, so obvious to their methods of life. Both the cheera-taghe were armed with pistol as well as tomahawk and scalping-knife.

Perhaps because of this they felt secure, at leisure, acquiescently allowing the event to develop as it needs must,--or perhaps realizing the significance of the discovery to the young strangers, their palpitant eagerness to gauge its result, their dread of reprisal, of forced renunciation of their booty, the Indians permitted themselves a relish of the torture of an enemy on a more aesthetic scheme than their wont.

The two cheera-taghe, the shadow of their feather-crested heads in the moonlight on the sand of the grotto almost as distinct as the reality, spoke suddenly to each other, and the discomfited gold-seekers, who had learned to comprehend to a certain extent the language, perceived with dismay the sarcasm that lengthened their suspense. For it was thus that the rulers among the Cherokees rebuked their own young people, not upbraiding them with their misdeeds, but with gentle satire complimenting them for that in which they had notably failed.

"A reward for hospitality we find in these young men," said one, whose voice was hoarse and croaking and guttural and who was called Kanoona (the Bull-frog).

"Strangers to us, yet they requite us, for we treated them as our own," said Oo-koo-koo.

"They treat us as _their own!_" the croaking, satiric, half-smothered laughter of this response intimated an aside. Then Kanoona in full voice went on, "Open and frank as the day, they keep no secrets from us!"

"They are honest! They rob us not of the yellow stone which the Carolina people think so precious!" rejoined Oo-koo-koo, while O'Kimmon and L'Epine looked from one to the other as the cheera-taghe sustained this fugue of satiric accusation.

"Not they," croaked the responsive voice, "for behold, we have long time fed and lodged them and given them of our best. We have believed them and trusted them. We have befriended them and loved them."

"And they have befriended and loved us!" said Oo-koo-koo.

Then silence. The river sang, but only a murmurous rune; the mute moonlight lay still on the mountains; the wind had sunk, and the motionless leaves glistened as the dew fell; a nighthawk swept past the portal of the grotto with the noiseless wing of its kind.

"Had they desired to explore our land they would have asked our consent," the croaking voice of Kanoona resumed the antiphonal reproach. "They would not have brought upon us the hordes of British colonists, who would fain drive us from our habitations for their greed of the yellow stone."

"Oh, no! never would they make so base a recompense!--to bring upon us the destruction of our men and women and children, the wresting from us of our land, the casting of us forth from our homes,--because the poor, unsuspecting Indians gave them food and shelter and a haven of rest while waiting for the pettiaugres that are coming up from New Orleans."

"_The pettiaugres from New Orleans_!" Kanoona repeated with a burst of raucous laughter. "Hala! Hala!"

But Oo-koo-koo preserved his gravity. "They would not lie! Surely the white men would not lie!"

Then turning to O'Kimmon he asked point-blank, "Chee-a-koh-ga?" (Do you lie?)

The direct address was a relief to O'Kimmon. He had often wondered to see the young braves reduced almost to tears by this seemingly gentle discipline; he felt its poignancy when the keen blade of satire was turned against himself.

"I did lie!" he admitted, as unreservedly as it he were at confession. "But Oo-koo-koo, we will pay for what we've got. This is all of ut! An' faix, yez have thrated us well,--an' begorra, we would have axed yer consint, if we had dramed we could have got ut!" he concluded ingenuously.

The two Indians gazed at him with a surprise so evident that a chill ran through his every nerve.

"We will never reveal the secret,--the place of the gold," declared L'Epine. Then perceiving in his turn something uncomprehended in their expression he reinforced his promise with argument. "We will want to come back--alone--to get more of it--all for ourselves. We will not be willing to share our discovery with others."

The cheera-taghe still silently gazed at the two young men; then turned toward each other with that patent astonishment yet on their faces. At last they burst forth into sarcastic laughter.

L'Epine and O'Kimmon, albeit half bewildered, exchanged appalled glances. There was no need of speech. Each understood at last.

Return! There was no chance of departure. They were to pay the penalty of the dangerous knowledge they had acquired. Already some vague report, some suspicion of the hidden gold of the locality had been bruited abroad,--thus the Indians must reason,--or these white men would not have come so far to seek it. Should they be permitted to depart, their sudden wealth would proclaim its source, even though as they had promised they should keep silence.

This was equally true should they eventually escape. Therefore--hideous realization!--the actual possession by the Indians of their own country depended upon the keeping of the secret inviolate. Dead men tell no tales!

O'Kimmon, with a swelling heart, bethought himself of his status as a British subject and the possible vengeance of the province. It would come, if at all, too late. For the Cherokees believed the two to be without the pale of the English protection. One had repudiated the government, declaring himself an Irishman, a nationality then unknown to the Cherokees. The other was French,--no reprisal for his sake was possible to a tribe under British allegiance. Death it must be!--doubtless with all the pomp and circumstance of the torture, for from the standpoint of the Indians they had requited hospitality with robbery. Death was inevitable,--unless they could now escape. Had they but one weapon between them they might yet make good their flight.

An Irishman rarely stops to count the odds. With the thought O'Kimmon, heavy, muscular, yet alert, threw himself upon Oo-koo-koo, and in an instant he had almost wrenched the knife from the Indian's belt.

The other Cherokee cried warningly, "_Akee-rooka! Akee-rooka_!" (I will shoot!) Then drew his pistol and fired.

The next moment, perhaps for many moments thereafter, none of them knew very definitely what had happened. There was a cloud of dust, a terrific detonation, a sudden absolute darkness, as in some revulsion of nature, a stifling sensation. They were penned within the grotto by a great fragment of the beetling cliff. Doubtless it had been previously fractured by the action of continuous freezes, and the concussion of the pistol shot in the restricted space of the cave below had brought it down.

The days went on. The men were missed after a time, but a considerable interval had elapsed. The two strangers had of late kept themselves much apart, owing to their absorption and their covert methods of seeking for gold. It was an ill-ordered, roaming, sylvan life they led at best. The cheera-taghe, although "beloved men" and priests of their strange and savage religion, were but wild Indians, and their temporary absence created no surprise. In fact, until sought with anxiety when the drought had become excessive and threatened the later crops, and the services of the cheera-taghe were necessary to invoke and with wild barbaric ceremonials bring down the lightning and thunder to clear the atmosphere and the rain to refresh the soil, it was not ascertained that the prophets had definitely disappeared.

Then it was that excitement supervened, search, anxiety, grief, fear. There began to be vague rumors of untoward sounds, remembered rather than noticed at the time. Faint explosions had been heard in the night as if under the ground, and again in broad daylight as if in the air. None could imagine that the doomed men had sought to attract the attention of the town by firing off their pistols, thus utilizing their scanty ammunition. The strain grew intense; superstitious fancies supplemented the real mystery; the place was finally abandoned, and thus Nilaque Great became a "waste town."

It was ten years, perhaps, after this blight had fallen upon it, that one day as the pack-train came down the valley of the Little Tennessee, on its autumnal return trip to Charlestown, the snow began to sift down. An unseasonable storm it was, for the winter had hardly set in. A north wind sprang up; the snow was soon heavily driving; within an hour the woods, still in the red leafage of autumn, were covered with snow and encased in ice. Only by a strenuous effort would the train be able to pass the old "waste town" before the early dusk,--a mile or two at most; but it was hoped that this might suffice to keep the ghosts out of the bounds of visibility. The roaring bacchanalian glees with which the pack-men set the melancholy sheeted woods aquiver might well send the ghosts out of earshot, presuming them endowed with volition.

Suddenly Cuddy Barnett discovered that one of the pack-horses of his own especial charge was missing,--a good bay with a load of fine dressed deerskins to take to Charlestown, then the great mart of all this far region. A recollection of a sharp curve in the trading-path, running dangerously near a bluff bank, came abruptly into his mind. Drifts had lodged in its jagged crevices, and it might well have chanced that here the animal had lost his footing and slipped out of the steadily trotting file along the river bank unnoticed in the blinding snow.

This theory seemed eminently plausible to his comrades, but when they learned that he was of the opinion that the disaster had happened at the old "waste town," as he had there first missed the animal in the file, not one would go back with him to search the locality,--not for the horse, not for the peltry, not even to avert the displeasure of their employer in Charlestown. Barnett besought their aid for a time, urging the project of rescue as they all sat around the roaring camp-fire under the sheltering branches of a cluster of fir trees that, acting as wind-break, served to fend off in some degree the fury of the storm. The ruddy flare illumined far shadowy aisles of the snowy wilderness, all agloom with the early dusk. Despite the falling flakes, they could still see the picketed pack-horses, now freed from their burdens, huddling together and holding down their heads to the icy blast as they munched their forage. The supper of the young pack-men was broiling on the coals; their faces were florid with the keen wind, their coonskin caps all crested with snow; and the fringes of their buckskin raiment had tinkling pendants of icicles; but although they had found good cheer in a chortling jug, uncorked as the first preliminary of encamping, they had not yet imbibed sufficient fictitious courage to set at naught their fears of the old "waste town."

Barnett at last acquiesced in the relinquishment of his desire of rescue. Some losses must needs occur in a great trade, and considering the stress of the weather, the long distances traversed, the dangers of the lonely wildernesses in the territory of savages, the incident would doubtless be leniently overlooked. And then he bethought himself of the horse,--a good horse, stout, swift, kindly disposed; a hard fate the animal had encountered,--abandoned here to starve in these bleak winter woods. Perhaps he might be lying there at the foot of the cliffs with a broken leg, suffering the immeasurable agonies of a dumb beast, for the lack of a merciful pistol-ball to put him at peace. Barnett could not resist the mute appeal of his fancy.

Presently he was trudging alone along the icy path. The flare of the red fire grew dim behind him; the last flicker faded. The woods were all unillumined, ghastly white, with a hovering gray shadow. The song of the bivouac fainted in the distance and failed; the echo grew doubtful and dull; and now in absolute silence that somehow set his nerves aquiver he was coming in with the dreary dusk and the driving snow to the old "waste town," Nilaque Great.

More silent even than the wilderness it seemed with the muffling drifts heavy on the roofs, blocking the dark open doors of the tenantless dwellings, lying in fluffy masses on the boughs of the trees that had once made the desert spaces so pleasantly umbrageous in those sweet summers so long ago. The great circular council-house, shaped like a dome, was whitely aglimmer against the gray twilight and the wintry background of the woods and mountains,--only the vaguest suggestions of heights seen through the ceaseless whirl of the crystalline flakes. No wolf now, although remembering the casual glimpse he had had he was prepared with rifle and pistol, and held his knife in his hand; no bear; no sign of living creature until, as he skirted the jagged bluff of the river where he fancied the horse might have lost his footing, he heard a sudden whinny of welcome, the sound keen and eerie and intrusive in the strange breathless solemnity of the silent place.

Gazing cautiously over the verge of the precipice, he saw the animal despite the gathering shadows. The horse was quite safe, having doubtless slipped down in the soft densities of a great drift dislodged from the crevice by his own weight. His pack was still on his back, now piled twice as high with snow. He lifted his arched neck as he sprang about with undiminished activity, vainly seeking to ascend the almost sheer precipice.

Daylight, however, was essential for his rescue. The effort now on these icy steeps might cost either man or beast a broken limb, if no more. With an instinct of self-protection the animal had chosen the lee of a great buttress of the cliff, and could stand there safely all night though the temperature should fall still lower. The young pack-man called out a word or two of encouragement, listening fearfully as the sound struck back in the silence from the icy bank of the river, the craggy hillsides, and the resonant walls of the deserted houses in the old "waste town." Himself suddenly stricken to silence, he realized as he turned that the night had at last closed in. It lay dark and desolate in the limitless woods, where a vague sense of motion gave token that the snow was still viewlessly falling in the dense obscurities.

But in the "waste town" itself a pallid visibility lingered in the open spaces where the trees were few, and gloomily showed the empty cabins, the deserted council-house, the vacant "beloved square." Somehow, turn as he would, this dim scene in the midst of the dense darkness of the stormy night was before his eyes. Again and again he plunged into the woods seeking to follow the well-known trail of the trading-path to the camp and rejoin his companions, but invariably he would emerge from the wilderness after a toilsome tramp, entering the old "waste town" at a different angle.

He perceived at length that he could not keep the direction, that he was wandering in a circle after the manner of those lost in forests. His clothing, freezing upon his body, was calculated for warmer weather; the buckskin shirt and leggings, the garb of the frontiersmen, copied from the attire of the Indians, were of a thin and pliable texture, owing to the peculiar skill of the savages in dressing peltry. An early historian describes such costume in a curiously sophisticated phrase as the "summer visiting dress of the Indians." The southern tribes were intensely averse to cold, for in winter they wore furs and garments made of buffalo hides, the shaggy side inward; this raiment was sewed with the sinews of deer and a kind of wild hemp for thread, and with needles dexterously fashioned of fishbone.

Barnett had now no thought of the ghosts of the old "waste town." His first care was to save his life this cruel night; without fire, without food, without shelter, it might be that he had indeed come to the end. He was induced by this reflection to climb the mound to the old council-house. For here the walls, plastered both within and without with the strong adhesive red clay of the region, admitted no wind, while in the cabins which had been dwellings the drifts lay deep beneath the rifts in the dilapidated roofs and the crevices in the wall, and the flying flakes sifted in as the keen gusts surged through. He had had the forethought to gather as he went bits of wood, now a loose clapboard or piece of bark from low-hanging eaves, now a fragment of half-rotten puncheon from a doorstep, and as he groped into the dense darkness of the council-house with his steel and flint he set them alight on the hearth in the centre of the floor.

When he was once more warm and free of the fear of death, other fears took hold upon him. In the first glimmers of the fire he could see through the tall narrow doorless portal only the dark night outside and a flickering glimpse against its blackness of the quivering crystals of the snow,--these but vaguely, for the blue smoke eddying through the great room veiled the opposite side, there being no chimney or window, and he sat in the interior behind the fire.

He gazed furtively over his shoulder ever and anon, as the flames flared up, revealing the deeply red walls of the dome-like place with here and there a buffalo skin suspended against them, the inside of the hide showing, painted in curious hieroglyphics, brilliant with color, and instinct with an untranslated meaning; a number of conch shells lay about, with jars and vases of clay, and those quaintly fashioned earthen drums, the heads of tightly stretched deerskin,--all paraphernalia of the savage worship which the cheera-taghe had conducted, now abandoned as bewitched.

Sitting here comfortably in the place of those men of the "divine fire," Cuthbert Barnett, his rifle by his side, his knife in his belt, his coonskin cap pushed back from his face, once more florid, warm, tingling from the keen wind of the day and the change to this heated air, and with perchance a drowsy eyelid, began to marvel anew as to the fate of the cheera-taghe. Hardly a drowsy eyelid, he consciously had, however, for he had resolved that he would not sleep. His situation here alone was too dangerous; he feared wolves,--the fire that would otherwise affright them might untended sink too low. He feared also some wandering Indian. Should he be discovered here by means of the unaccustomed light he might be wantonly murdered as he slept, or in revenge for the sacrilege of his intrusion among these things that the savages had esteemed sacred.

Therefore, when he suddenly saw the cheera-taghe he saw them quite plainly. Tall, stately, splendidly arrayed in their barbaric garb, draped with their iridescent feather-wrought mantles, their heads dressed with white plumes, a staff of cane adorned with white feathers in the right hand, a green bough in the left, preceded by those curiously sonorous earthen drums, of which the drone blended with the notes of the religious song, _Yo-he-wah-yah! Yo-he-wah-yah!_ they thrice led the glittering procession of the "holy dance" around and around the "beloved square."

A blank interval ensued. And then again he saw them, nearer now, more distinct; they were entering the temple; they were close at hand; triumphant of mien, assured, so full of life!--he could laugh to think that he had had a dream, or had heard somehow, that they were dead or lost or vaguely gone. For here, without seeming in the least to notice his presence, they kindled anew with friction of bits of poplar or white oak the fire for the new year, the _cheera_, the "sacred flame," to bear it outside to distribute it to the assembled people of Nilaque Great. Without was summer; the trees were full of green leaves; canoes were glancing along the shimmering river; the "beloved square" was crowded with braves,--he saw their feathered crests wave and glisten; the wind was blowing fresh and cool; the sun shone.

And suddenly it was shining in his face, as it came up over the Great Smoky Mountains, sending its first long slanting wintry beams through the narrow portal to the hearth where he had lain asleep before the ashes of the once "sacred fire," covered with the fresh ashes of last night's vigil, for they too were dead. He staggered to his feet and went out into the glistening dawn of this snowy sunlit day, hardly able to reconcile its aspect with the summer-tide scene he had just quitted. Now and again he paused, half-bewildered, as if unfamiliar with the pathetic miseries of the old "waste town"--the scene in his mind savored far more of reality.

The necessity of caring for the pack-horse, perhaps better than aught else, served to restore his faculties. He found it easy now to climb down the jagged face of the bluffs of the river bank, whence the snow had vanished, for in the changeable southern climate a sudden thaw had begun in the earlier hours and now the warm sun was setting all the trees and eaves adrip. As he stood below the cliff on the sandy slope whence the snow had slipped down into the river, the volume of which the storm of last night would much increase after the long drought of the summer, he carefully examined the horse to ascertain what injuries he might have sustained; a few abrasions on the right flank seemed to be all, until the animal moved, a bit stiffly with the near fore leg. This attracted Barnett's attention to a gash on the knee received doubtless when the horse first fell on the ground,--a queer gash, long, jagged, unaccountable, as if it had been made by a dull blade. Glancing down to search the gravel, the pack-man discerned, half-imbedded in the sand, the edge of a fragment of a knife, a scalping-knife, broken half in two; and there, lying not three yards away, was a handle attached to a belt heavily wrought with roanoke,--only a bit of the belt,--and the other half of the knife.

The pack-man's hand trembled and his florid cheek went pale, for these lay just under the sharp edge of a huge fragment of rock that had evidently fallen from the cliff above, breaking the blade and holding the belt fast.

How long he stood and stared he did not know. For a time he heard without realizing the significance of the sounds the whoops and shouts of his comrades, wildly racing back through the old "waste town" in search of him; but although in the strenuous duty of his rescue they would venture to pass it in broad daylight, no ardor of persuasion could induce them to linger there to investigate the locality of his find, or to aid in moving the rock and exploring the grotto that had evidently proved a sepulchre.

On the contrary, they deemed the discovery might be resented by the Indians as intrusive, and, keeping the secret, they made haste to get out of the country with even more speed than their wont. Cuthbert Barnett, however, carried his information to the authorities in Charlestown, who, promptly acting upon it, solved the mystery of the fate of the cheera-taghe.

Since peace with the Cherokees was becoming more and more precarious, some satisfaction was experienced by the Royal Governor of South Carolina, James Glen, at that time, in being able to urge upon the attention of the head-men of the tribe the fact that, although the two white strangers had obviously been captured in the act of robbing Cherokee soil of its gold, they had as evidently been unarmed, and the Irishman, a British subject, had been shot down by one of the cheera-taghe, for there was the bullet still imbedded firmly in the sternum of his broad chest. Thus a political crisis, which the event had threatened, was averted.

Despite the evil chance that had befallen the gold-seekers, now widely bruited abroad, stealthy efforts were ever and anon made by the hardy frontier prospectors of those days, already busy in the richer deposits of the Ayrate division of the Cherokee country, to pan also the sands of the banks of the Tennessee; but the yield here was never again worth the work, and the interest in the possibility of securing "pay gravel" in this region died out, until the later excitements of the discovery of the precious metal in a neighboring locality, Coca Creek, during the last century.

The old "waste town" long remained a ruin, and at last fell away to a mere memory.

Footnote 1: 10. _Page_ 231. Their tribal name, "men of fire," and their great veneration for that element have given rise to the conjecture that the Cherokees were originally fire-worshipers, as well as polytheistic. The interpolation of the intensative syllable "ta" is, according to Adair, a "note of magnitude," and the title of their prophets, whose functions are blended as priests, conjurers, physicians, and councilors,--the cheera-taghe,--signifies "men of divine fire." But Adair protests that the theistic ideals of the Indians were wholly spiritual, and that they had no plurality of gods. They paid their devotions merely to the "great beneficent supreme holy spirit of fire, who resides as they think above the clouds," and he argues plausibly that if they worshiped fire itself they would not have willfully extinguished the sanctified element annually on the last day of the old year throughout the nation, the invariable custom, before the cheera-taghe of each town kindled the "holy fire" anew, this being one of their exclusive functions. It may be that in their ancient rhapsodies (many of which Mr. James Mooney has collected for the Smithsonian Institution) addressed to bird or flame or beast the Indians adopted a poetic license no more significant of polytheism than the flights of fancy of many Christian poets in odes to the moon, to Fate, "to the red planet Mars," to the "wild west wind." Mere impersonation and invocation in apostrophe and paeans are not necessarily worship. Doubtless these spells and charms often arose from a superstitious half-belief, an imaginative freak, such as possesses the civilized visionary who shows a coin to the new moon to propitiate its fancied waxing influence in behalf of a balance at the banker's, or the Christianized Scotch Highlander of even the early nineteenth century who threw a piece of hasty pudding over the left shoulder on the anniversary of _Bealdin_ (the Gaelic for no other than Baal) to appease the spirits of the mists, the winds, the ravens, the eagles, and thus protect the crops and flocks. There is a thin boundary line as difficult to define as "to distinguish and divide a hair 'twixt south and southwest side," between true belief and feigned credence.

The veneration of the ancient Cherokees for the element of fire, in addition to their name, its careful conservation throughout the year, their addresses to its spirit, _Higayuli Tsunega, hatu ganiga_ (O Ancient White, you have drawn near to listen), is farther manifested by its traces found in the exploration of burial mounds, intimating a ceremonial introduction of the element at the remote period of interment,--if, indeed, the construction of these mounds can he ascribed to the Cherokees. Those on which their town houses were erected at a later date, the clay-covered rotunda forming a superstructure looking like a small mountain at a little distance, according to Timberlake, wherein were held the assemblies, whether for amusement or council or religious observances, served also as a substitute for the modern bulletin-board. Two stands of colors were flying, one from the top of the town house, the other at the door. These ensigns were white for peace, and exchanged for red when war impended. "The news hollow," as Timberlake phrases the cry, sounded from the summit of the mound, would occasion the assembling of all the community in the rotunda to hear the details from the lips of the chief. How much more the: "death hollow," harbinger of woe!

[The end]
Mary Noailles Murfree's short story: The Fate Of The Cheera-Taghe

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