Chapter 10

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_ CHAPTER X

Demere was not a man to consider an omen and attach weight to trifling chances, yet he was in some sort prepared for disaster. Within the hall a pair of candles stood on the table where it was the habit to transact official business,--to write letters; to construct maps of the country from the resources of the information of the officers and the descriptions of the Indians; to make out reports and the accounts of the post. Writing materials were kept in readiness here for these purposes--a due array of quills, paper, inkhorn, wafers, sealing-wax, sand-box, and lights. As the door was opened the candles flickered in the sudden draught, bowed to the wicks grown long and unsnuffed, and in another moment were extinguished, leaving the place in total darkness, with the papers on which hung such weighty interests of life and death, of rescue or despair, unread in his hand.

"The tinder-box--the flint--where are they? Cannot you strike a spark?" he demanded, in agitated suspense, of Stuart, who made more than one fruitless effort before the timorous flame was started anew on the old and drooping wicks, which had to be smartly snuffed before they would afford sufficient light to discern the hasty characters, that looked as if they might have been written on a drumhead--as in fact they were.

"Here--read them, John--I can't," said Demere, handing the package to Stuart, and throwing himself into a chair to listen.

Although the suspense had been of the kind that does not usually herald surcease of anxiety, he was not prepared for the face of consternation with which Stuart silently perused the scrawled lines.

"From Montgomery!" he exclaimed. "But our dispatches evidently have never reached him."

For in the bold strain of triumph Colonel Montgomery acquainted the commandant of Fort Loudon with the successful issue of his campaign, having lost only four men, although he had burned a number of Indian towns, destroyed incalculable quantities of provisions, killed and wounded many braves, and was carrying with him a train of prisoners, men, women, and children. He was now on the march to the relief of Fort Prince George, which the savages had invested, where the garrison was in much distress, not for the want of provisions but for fuel to cook food, since the enemy was in such force that no sortie could be made to the woods to procure a supply. Two of his prisoners he had set at liberty, Fiftoe, and the old warrior of Estatoe, that they might acquaint the nation of his further intentions, for, if the Indians did not immediately sue for peace and deliver up the principal transgressors to justice, he would sally forth from Fort Prince George on another foray, and he would not hold his hand till he had burned every Cherokee town of the whole nation. He deputed Captain Stuart and Captain Demere to offer these terms to the Upper towns, and let them know that they were admitted to this clemency solely in consideration of the regard of the government for Atta-Kulla-Kulla. This chieftain, the half-king of the Cherokee tribe, had deprecated, it was understood, the renewal of the war, since he had signed the last treaty at the Congarees, and having shown himself friendly on several occasions to the British people his majesty's government esteemed him as he deserved.

The two officers gazed silently at one another. Montgomery was obviously entirely unaware of their situation. Here they were, penned up in this restricted compass, besieged by an enemy so furious that even a hat showing but for one moment above the palisades,--for the soldiers had tried the experiment of poising an old busby on the point of a bayonet,--would be riddled in an instant. Often a well-directed bullet would enter the small loop-holes for musketry, and thus, firing from ambush, endanger the sentinel as he stood within the strong defenses. More than once arrows, freighted with inflammable substances, all ablaze, had been shot into the fort with the effort to fire the houses; it was dry weather mostly, with a prospect of a long drought, and the flames thus started threatened a conflagration, and required the exertions of the entire garrison to extinguish them. This proclivity necessitated eternal vigilance. Ever and anon it was requisite that the cannon should renew their strong, surly note of menace, and again send the balls crashing through the forest, and about the ears of the persistent besiegers. Only the strength of the primitive work saved the garrison from instant massacre, with the women and children and the settlers who had sought safety behind those sturdy ramparts. Of the ultimate danger of starvation the officers did not dare to think. And from this situation to be summoned to send forth threats of sword and fire, and to offer arrogant terms of peace, and to demand the surrender, to the justice of the gibbet, of the principal transgressors in the violation of the treaty!

There were no words that could express what they felt. They could only look at one another, each conscious of the other's sympathy, and say nothing.

Outside, Odalie, Belinda, and Ensign Whitson were singing a trio, the parts somewhat at haphazard, the fugue-like effects coming in like the cadences of the wind, now high, now low, and in varying strength. The stars still glittered down into the parade; the moon cast a gentle shadow along the palisades; the sentries in the block-house towers, the gunners lying flat beneath their great cannon, feeling the dew on their faces, looking toward the moon, the guard ready to turn out at the word,--all listened languorously, and drank in the sweets of the summer night with the music. A scene almost peaceful, despite the guarded walls, and the savage hordes outside, balked, and furious, and thirsting for blood.

"Let us see the express, Paul," said Stuart at last.

The express had repeatedly served as a means of communication between Fort Loudon and Fort Prince George, and as he came in he cautiously closed the door. He was a man of war, himself, in some sort, and was aware that a garrison is hardly to be included in the conference between commanders of a frontier force and their chosen emissary. With the inside of his packet his brain was presumed to have no concern, but in such a time and such a country his eyes and ears, on his missions to and fro, did such stalwart service in the interests of his own safety that he was often able to give the officers at the end of his route far more important news, the fruits of his observation, than his dispatches were likely to unfold. He was of stalwart build, and clad in the fringed buckskin shirt and leggings of the hunter, and holding his coonskin cap in his hand. He had saluted after the military fashion, and had evidently been enough the inmate of frontier posts to have some regard for military rank. He waited, despite his look of having much of moment to communicate, until the question had been casually propounded by Stuart: "Well, what can you tell us of the state of the country?" then in disconnected sentences the details came in torrents.

Montgomery's campaign had been something unheard of. His "feet were winged with fire and destruction,"--that was what Oconostota said. Oh, yes, the express had seen Oconostota. But for Oconostota he could not have made Fort Loudon. He had let him come with the two warriors, set free by Montgomery to suggest terms of peace and spread the news of the devastation, as a safe-guard against any straggling white people they might chance to meet, and in return they afforded him safe-conduct from the Cherokees. The devastation was beyond belief,--dead and dying Indians lying all around the lower country, and many were burned alive in their houses when the towns were fired. Many were now pitifully destitute. As the fugitives stood on the summits of distant hills and watched their blazing homes and great granaries of corn--"I could but be sorry for them a little," declared Major Grant of Montgomery's command.

But the result was not to be what Montgomery hoped. The Cherokees were arming anew everywhere. They would fight now to the death, to extermination,--even Atta-Kulla-Kulla, who had been opposed to breaking the treaty. Oh, yes, he had seen Atta-Kulla-Kulla. The chief said he would not strike a blow with a feather to break a treaty and his solemn word. But to avenge the blood of his kindred that cried out from the ground he would give his life, if he had as many years to live as there were hairs on his head! The express added that Atta-Kulla-Kulla had been sitting on the ground in his old blanket, with ashes on his head, after the council agreed to break the treaty. But now he was going round with his scalp-lock dressed out with fresh eagle-feathers, and armed with his gun, and tomahawk, and scalp-knife, and wearing his finest gear, and with all his war-paint on--one side of his face red, and the other black, with big white circles around his eyes,--"looks mighty keen," the man exclaimed with a sort of relish of the fine barbaric effect of the fighting trim of the great warrior.

Then his face fell.

"And I told Oconostota that I would not deliver his message to you, Captain Stuart and Captain Demere, sir," he hesitated; "it was not fit for your worshipful presence; and he said that the deed might go before the word, then."

"What message did he send?" asked Demere, with flashing eyes.

"Well, sir, he said Fort Loudon was theirs,--that it was built for the Cherokees, and they had paid the English nation for it in the blood they had shed in helping the Virginians defend their frontier against the French and their Indian allies. But you English had possessed the fort; you had claimed it; and now he would say that it was yours,--yours to be burnt in,--to be starved in,--to die in,--to leave your bones in, till they are thrust forth by the rightful owner to be gnawed by the wolf of the wilderness."

There was a momentary silence.

"Vastly polite!" exclaimed Captain Stuart, with a rollicking laugh.

"Lord, sir," said the man, as if the sound grated upon him, "they are a dreadful people. I wouldn't go through again what I have had to risk to get here for--any money! It has been full three weeks since I left Oconostota's camp. He is with the Lower towns--him and Atta-Kulla-Kulla, but Willinawaugh is the head-man of the force out here. They seemed to think I was spying,--but they have got so many men that I just doubts but what they want you should know their strength."

"You will go back to Colonel Montgomery at Fort Prince George with dispatches?" said Demere.

The man's expression hardened. "Captain Demere," he said, "and Captain Stuart, sir, I have served you long and faithful. You know I bean't no coward. But it is certain death for me to go out of that sally-port. I couldn't have got in except for that message from Oconostota. He wanted you to hear that. I believe 'Old Hop' thinks Willinawaugh can terrify you out of this place if they can't carry it by storm. I misdoubts but they expects Frenchmen to join them. They talk so sweet on the French! Every other word is Louis Latinac! That French officer has made them believe that the English intend to exterminate the Cherokees from off the face of the earth."

He paused a moment in rising discontent,--to have done so much, yet refuse aught! "I wouldn't have undertook to bring that message from Oconostota except I thought it was important for you to have your dispatches; it ain't my fault if they ain't satisfactory." He cast a glance of the keenest curiosity at the papers, and Captain Stuart, lazily filling his pipe, took one of the candles in his hand and kindled the tobacco at the blaze.

"Nothing is satisfactory that is one-sided," he said easily. "We don't want Colonel Montgomery to do all the talking, and to have to receive his letters as orders. We propose to say a word ourselves."

A gleam of intelligence was in the scout's eyes. It was a time when there was much professional jealousy rife in the various branches of the service, and he had been cleverly induced to fancy that here was a case in point. These men had a command altogether independent of Colonel Montgomery, it was true, but he was of so much higher rank that doubtless this galled them, and rendered them prone to assert their own position. He bent his energies now, however, to a question touching his pay, and answering a seemingly casual inquiry relative to the fact that he had heard naught of Gilfillan and the other express, was dismissed without being subjected to greater urgency.

The two maintained silence for a time, the coal dying in Captain Stuart's pipe as he absently contemplated the fireless chimney-place filled now with boughs of green pine.

Demere spoke first. "If we can get no communication with Colonel Montgomery it means certain death to all the garrison."

"Sooner or later," assented Stuart.

The problem stayed with them all that night. They were forced to maintain a cheerful casual guise in the presence of their little public, and the appearance of the express put great heart into the soldiery. The fact that the commandant was in the immediate receipt of advices from Colonel Montgomery and his victorious army seemed itself a pledge of safety. The express was turned loose among them to rehearse the exploits of Montgomery's troops,--the splendid forced marches they made; the execution of their marksmanship; the terror that the Cherokees manifested of their sputtering grenades, hurled exploding into the ambuscades by the stalwart grenadiers at the word,--"Fall on"; the interest of the Indians in the sound of the bagpipes and in the national dress, the plaid and philibeg, of the Highlanders, which, although now generally proscribed by law, was continued as a privilege granted to those enlisted in regiments in the British army. He told of the delight of the Highlanders in the sight of the Great Smoky Mountains, how they rejoiced to climb the crags and steep ravines even of the foothills. He repeated jokes and gibes of the camp outside Fort Prince George, for Montgomery had overtaken him and raised the siege before he reached the fort, so difficult was the slow progress of the express among the inimical Cherokees. He detailed Colonel Montgomery's relish of the sight of a piece of field artillery which Ensign Milne showed him; that officer had mounted it one day before the siege when he was with a detail that he had ordered into the woods to get fuel for the post, and a band of Cherokees had descended upon him,--"a Quaker," he called it; you might have heard Colonel Montgomery laugh two hundred miles to Fort Loudon, for of course it wouldn't fight,--a very powerful Friend, indeed,--only a black log mounted between two wheels, which the soldiers had been in the habit of using to ease up the loads of wood. But the Indians were deceived, and with their terror of artillery got out of range in short order, and the soldiers made their way back into the fort under the protection of their "little Quaker."

When the barracks were lost in slumber, and the parade was deserted but for the moon, and the soft wind, and the echo of the tramp of the sentry, Captain Stuart went over to Captain Demere's house, and there until late the two discussed the practicabilities, that each, like a blind trail, promised thoroughfare and led but to confusion. The officers did not dare to call for volunteers to carry dispatches to Montgomery, in the face of the fact that the express just arrived could not be prevailed on to return. Without, moreover, some assurance of the safety of the messengers previously sent out, no man would now so lightly venture his life as to seek to slip through the vigilant savage hordes. To explain the terrors of the crisis to the garrison would be to have the ferocious Cherokees without, and panic, mutiny, and violence within. Yet a man must go; a man who would return; a man who would risk torture and death twice. "For we must have some assurance of the delivery of our dispatches," Stuart argued. "I am anxious as to the homing qualities of our dove that we are about to send out of this ark of ours," he said, as he lay stretched out at full length on the buffalo rug on the floor, in the moonlight that fell so peacefully in at the window of his friend's bedroom. Demere was recumbent on his narrow camp-bed, so still, so silent, that more than once Stuart asked him if he slept.

"How can I sleep,--with this sense of responsibility?" Demere returned, reproachfully.

But Stuart slept presently, waking once to reply to Demere's remark that a married man would have the homing quality desired, the fort holding his family; Stuart declared that no one would be willing to leave wife and children to such protection as other men might have presence of mind to give them in a desperate crisis. The mere communication might create a panic.

"Of all things," said Stuart, as he lay at his stalwart length, his long, fair hair blowsing in the wind over the rug, "I am most afraid of fear."

When Demere presently asked him if he were quite comfortable down there, his unceremonious presence placing him somewhat in the position of guest, his silence answered for him, and he did not again speak or stir until the drums were sounding without and the troops were falling in line for roll-call.

Neither gave sign of their vigil; they both were exceedingly spruce, and fresh, and well set up, to sustain the covert scrutiny of the garrison, who regarded them as a sort of moral barometer of the situation, and sought to discern in their appearance the tenor of Montgomery's official dispatches.

That morning, when Stuart went with his spy-glass to reconnoiter from the tower of one of the block-houses, he noted, always keenly observant, a trifle of confusion, as he entered, in the manner of the sentinel,--the smart, fair-haired, freckled-faced young soldier whose services were sometimes used as orderly, and whose name was Daniel Eske. The boy immediately sought to appear unconcerned. The officer asked no question. He raised the glass to his eye and in one moment discerned, amongst the laurel jungles close to the river, an Indian, a young girl, who suddenly lifted her arm and gracefully waved her hand toward the bastion. Stuart lowered the glass and gravely looked a grim inquiry at the young soldier.

Daniel Eske answered precipitately: "For God's sake, sir, don't let this go against me. I'm not holding any communication with the enemy,--the red devils. That baggage, sir, has been twice a-waving her hand to me when I have been on guard here. I never took no notice, so help me God,--Captain,--I--"

The distance being minimized by the lens, Stuart could discern all the coquettish details of the apparition; the garb of white dressed doe skin--a fabric as soft and flexible, the writers of that day tell us, as "velvet cloth"--the fringed borders of which were hung with shells and bits of tinkling metal; the hair, duly anointed, black and lustrous, dressed high on the head and decorated with small wings of the red bird; many strings of red beads dangled about the neck, and the moccasons were those so highly valued by the Indians, painted an indelible red. With a definite realization of the menace of treachery in her presence, Stuart's face was stern indeed as he looked at her. All at once his expression changed.

"Do as I bid you," he said to the sentry, suddenly remembering "Wing-of-the-Flying-Whip-poor-will," and her talk of the handsome young orderly with his gold hair and freckles, and his gossip touching the Scotchman's beautiful French wife, whom she regarded merely as a captive. "Wait till she waves again. But no,--she is going,--show yourself at the window,--must risk a shot now and then."

The loop-hole here attained the size of a small window, being commanded only by the river, which would expose any marksman to a direct return fire.

"Now, she sees you," exclaimed Stuart, as the young fellow's face appeared in the aperture, gruff, sheepish, consciously punished and ridiculous,--how could he dream of Stuart's scheme! "Take off your hat. Wave it to her. Wave it with a will, man! There,--she responds. That will do." Then, with a change of tone, "I advise you, for your own good, to stay away from that window, for if any man in this garrison is detected in engaging in sign language with the enemy he will certainly be court-martialed and shot."

"Captain," protested the boy, with tears in his eyes, "I'd as lieve be shot now, sir, as to have you think I would hold any communication with the enemy,--the warriors. As to that girl,--the forward hussy came there herself. I took no notice of her waving her hand. I'd--"

But Captain Stuart was half down the ladder, and, despite young Eske's red coat, and the fact that he smelled powder with more satisfaction than perfume, and could hear bullets whizzing about his head without dodging, and had made forced marches without flinching, when he could scarce bear his sore feet to the ground, the tears in his eyes overflowed upon the admired freckles on his cheek, and he shed them for the imputation of Captain Stuart's warning as to communicating with the enemy.

That officer had forgotten him utterly, except as a factor in his plan. He sat so jocund and cheerful beside the table in the great hall that Odalie, summoned thither, looked at him in surprise, thinking he must have received some good news,--a theory corrected in another moment by the downcast, remonstrant, doubtful expression on Demere's face. He rose to offer her a chair, and Stuart, closing the door behind her, replied to something he had already said:--

"At all events it is perfectly safe to lay the matter before Mrs. MacLeod."

To this Demere responded disaffectedly, "Oh, certainly, beyond a doubt."

"Mrs. MacLeod," said Stuart deliberately, and growing very grave, as he sat opposite to her with one hand on the table, "we are trusting very deeply to your courage and discretion when I tell you that our situation here is very dangerous, and the prospect nearly desperate."

She looked at him silently in startled dismay. She thought of her own, of all that she loved. And for a moment her heart stood still.

"You know that all received methods, all military usages, fail as applied to Indian warfare. You can be of the greatest service to us in this emergency. Will you volunteer?" There was a little smile at the corner of Stuart's lip as he looked at her steadily.

"No, no, I protest," cried Demere. "Tell her first what she is to do."

"No," said Stuart, "when you agreed to the plan you expressly stipulated that you were to have no responsibility. Now if Mrs. MacLeod volunteers it is as a soldier and unquestioningly under orders."

"It is sudden," hesitated Odalie. "May I tell my husband?"

"Would he allow you to risk yourself?" asked Stuart. "And yet it is for yourself, your husband, your child, the garrison,--to save all our lives, God willing."

Odalie's color rose, her eyes grew bright. "I know I can trust you to make the risk as slight as it may be,--to place me in no useless danger. I volunteer."

The two men looked at her for one moment, their hearts in their eyes.

Then Captain Stuart broke out with his reassuring raillery. "I always knew it,--such a proclivity for the military life! In the king's service at last."

Odalie laughed, but Captain Demere could not compass a smile.

Stuart's next question she thought a bit of his fun. "Have you here," he said, with deep gravity, "some stout gown, fashioned with plaits and fullness in the skirt, and a cape or fichu,--is that what you call it,--about the shoulders? And, yes,--that large red hood, calash, that you wore the first day you arrived at the fort,"--his ready smile flickered,--"on an understanding so little pleasing to your taste. Go get them on, and meet me at the northwestern bastion."

The young soldier, Daniel Eske, still standing guard in the block-house tower, looked out on a scene without incident. The river shone in the clear June daylight; the woods were dark, and fresh with dew and deeply green, and so dense that they showed no token of broken boughs and riven hole, results of the cannonade they had sustained, which still served to keep at a distance, beyond the range of the guns, the beleaguering cordon of savages, and thus prevent surprise or storm. Nevertheless there were occasional lurking Indians, spies, or stragglers from the main line, amongst the dense boughs of the blooming rhododendron; he saw from time to time skulking painted faces and feathers fluttering from lordly scalp-locks, which rendered so much the more serious and probable the imputation of communicating with the enemy that the presence and gestures of Choo-qualee-qualoo, still lingering there, had contrived to throw upon him. Her folly might have cost him his life. He might have been sentenced to be shot by his own comrades, discovered to be holding communication with the enemy, and that enemy the Cherokees,--good sooth!

Suddenly rampant in his mind was a wild strange suspicion of treachery. His abrupt cry, "Halt, or I fire!" rang sharply on the air, and his musket was thrust through the window, aiming in intimidation down alongside the parapet, where upon the exterior slope of the rampart the beautiful Carolina girl, the French wife of the Scotch settler, had contrived to creep through the embrasure below the muzzle of the cannon, for the ground had sunk a trifle there with the weight of the piece or through some defect of the gabions that helped build up the "cheek," and she now stood at full height on the berm, above the red clay slope of the scarp, signing to Choo-qualee-qualoo with one hand, and with the other motioning toward the muzzle of his firelock, mutely imploring him to desist.

How did she dare! The light tint of her gray gown rendered her distinct against the deep rich color of the red clay slope; her calash, of a different, denser red, was a mark for a rifle that clear day a long way off. He was acutely conscious of those skulking braves in the woods, all mute and motionless now, watching with keen eyes the altercation with the sentry, and he shuddered at her possible fate, even while, with an unrealized mental process, doubts arose of her loyalty to the interests of the garrison, which her French extraction aided her strange, suspicious demonstration to foster. He flushed with a violent rush of resentment when he became aware that Choo-qualee-qualoo was signing to him also, with entreating gestures, and so keen-eyed had the Indian warfare rendered him that he perceived that she was prompted to this action by a brave,--he half fancied him Willinawaugh,--who knelt in the pawpaw bushes a short distance from the Cherokee girl and spoke to her ever and anon.

"One step further and I fire!" he called out to Odalie, flinching nevertheless, as he looked down into her clear, hazel, upturned eyes. Then overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility he raised the weapon to fire into the air and lifted the first note of a wild hoarse cry for "Corporal of the guard,"--and suddenly heard O'Flynn's voice behind him:--

"Shet up, ye blethering bull-calf! The leddy's actin' under orders."

And not only was O'Flynn behind him but Stuart.

"Sign to Mrs. MacLeod that she may go," said that officer, "but not for long. Shake your head,--seem doubtful. Then take your hat and wave it to the Cherokee wench, as if you relent for her sake!"

"Oh, sir,--I can't," exclaimed the young soldier even while he obeyed, expressing the revolt in his mind against the action of his muscles.

"It's mighty hard to kape the girls away from ye, but we will lend ye a stick nex' time," said Corporal O'Flynn, in scornful ridicule of his reluctance, not aware of the imputation of colloguing with the enemy to which the long-range flirtation with Choo-qualee-qualoo had seemed to expose him in Captain Stuart's mind.

Captain Stuart had placed in a loop-hole the muzzle of a firelock, which he sighted himself. O'Flynn leveled another, both men being of course invisible from without; as the young sentinel obeyed the order to openly lounge in the window and look toward Choo-qualee-qualoo he could see within the parapet that the gunners of the battery were standing to their shotted pieces, Captain Demere, himself, in command. With this provision against capture, or for revenge, one might fear, rather than protection, Odalie took her way down the steep slope amongst the impeding stakes of the fraises, thickly sown, and looking, it might seem, like dragons' teeth in process of sprouting. More than once she paused and glanced up at the sentinel leaning in the window with his firelock and entreated by signs his forbearance, which he seemed to accord qualified, doubtful, and limited. She soon crossed the ditch, the glacis, so swift she was, so sure and free of step, and paused in the open space beyond; then Choo-qualee-qualoo, too, began to advance. Better protected was the Cherokee girl, for she carried in her hand, and now and again waved, laughingly, as if for jest, a white flag, a length of fluttering cambric and lace.

"By the howly poker!" exclaimed Corporal O'Flynn, beneath his breath, "that is the cravat of a man of quality,--some British officer of rank, belike."

He glanced with anxiety at Captain Stuart, whose every faculty seemed concentrated on the matter in hand.

"The Cherokees know that a white flag is a sign which we respect, and that that squaw is as safe with it as if she were the commandant of the post. I only wish Mrs. MacLeod could have a like security." This aspiration had the effect of fastening O'Flynn's eye and mind to the sighting of his firelock and obliterating his speculations concerning the cravat as spoil stripped from some slain officer of rank.

The two women met in the open space, with the rifles of how many keen-sighted, capricious savages leveled toward the spot Demere hardly dared to think, as he watched Odalie in a sort of agony of terror that he might have felt had she been a cherished sister. They stood talking for a time in the attitudes and the manner of their age, which was near the same, swinging a little apart now and then, and coming together with suddenly renewed interest, and again, with free, casual gestures, and graceful, unconstrained pose, they both laughed, and seemed to take a congenial pleasure in their meeting. They sat down for a time on a bit of grass,--the sward springing anew, since it was so little trodden in these days, and with a richness that blood might have added to its vigor. Odalie answered, with apparent unsuspiciousness, certain shrewd questions concerning the armament of the fort, the store of ammunition, the quantity of provisions, the manner in which Stuart and Demere continued to bear themselves, the expectation held out to the garrison of relief from any quarter,--questions which she was sure had never originated in the brain of Choo-qualee-qualoo, but had been prompted by the craft of Willinawaugh. Odalie, too, had been carefully prompted, and Stuart's anticipatory answers were very definitely delivered, as of her own volition. Then they passed to casual chatting, to the presentation of a bauble which Odalie had brought, and which seemed to touch Choo-qualee-qualoo to the point of detailing as gossip the fact that the attack on the white people had been intended to begin at MacLeod Station, Willinawaugh retaining so much resentment against the Scotchman to whom he had granted safe-conduct, thinking him French, when he only had a French squaw as a captive. Savanukah, who really spoke French, had made capital of it, and had rendered Willinawaugh's pretensions ridiculous in the eyes of the nation, for Willinawaugh had always boasted, to Savanukah at least, that he understood French, although it was beneath his dignity to speak it. This was done to reduce Savanukah's linguistic achievements, and to put him in the position of a mere interpreter of such people, when Savanukah was a great warrior, and yet could speak many languages, like the famous Baron Des Johnnes. And what was there now at MacLeod Station? Nothing: stockade, houses, fields, all burnt! Great was the wrath of Willinawaugh!

This talk, however, was less to the taste of Choo-qualee-qualoo than questions and answers concerning the young sentinel, whom the Cherokees had named Sekakee, "the grasshopper," as he was so loquacious; she often paused to put the strings of red beads into her mouth, and to gaze away at the glittering reaches of the river with large liquid eyes, sending now and then a glance at the window where that gruff young person leaned on his firelock. Savanukah's wife said Sekakee must be hungry, Choo-qualee-qualoo told Odalie. Was Sekakee hungry? She would bring him some beans. Savanukah said they would all be hungry soon. And the fort would be the Indians', and there would be nobody in the land but the Cherokees, and the French to carry on trade with them--was Odalie not glad that she was French?--for there had been great fighting with the English colonel's men, and Willinawaugh had told her to tell the captains English both that fact: much blood did they shed of their own blood, as red as their own red coats!

Odalie regarded this merely as an empty boast, the triumphs of Montgomery's campaign rife this day in the garrison, but it made her tremble to listen. Nevertheless, she had the nerve to walk with Choo-qualee-qualoo almost to the water-side, near the shadowy covert of the dense woods. Nothing lurked there now,--no flickering feather, no fiercely gay painted face. Her confidence seemed the ally of the Indians. The French captive of the Carolina Scotchman would be to them like a spy in the enemy's camp!

Perhaps the ordeal made the greater draughts on the courage of the men who stood in the shelter of the works and sighted the guns. The tension grew so great as she lingered there in the shadows that cold drops stood on Demere's face, and the hand with which Stuart held the firelock trembled.

"It's a woman that can't get enough of anything," O'Flynn muttered to himself. "I'll have the lockjaw in me lungs, for I'm gittin' so as I can't move me chist to catch me breath."

But Odalie turned at last, and still signaling anxiously to the sentry, as if to implore silence and forbearance, she crossed the open space with her swift, swinging step, climbed the red clay slope among the spiked staves of the fraises, knelt down, slipped through the embrasure, and was lifted to her feet by Demere, while the gunners stood by looking on, and smiling and ready to cry over her.

Twice afterward, the same detail, all enjoined to secrecy, loaded their cannon, and stood with burning matches ready to fire at the word, while the maneuver was repeated; an interval of a day or so was allowed to elapse on each occasion, and the hour was variously chosen--when it was possible for the French woman to escape, as Choo-qualee-qualoo was given to understand. Both times Demere protested, although he had accorded the plan his countenance, urging the capricious temper of the Indians, who might permit Mrs. MacLeod's exit from the fort one day, and the next, for a whim, or for revenge toward her husband, who had incurred their special enmity for outwitting them on his journey hither, shoot her through the heart as she stood on the crest of the counterscarp. And of what avail then the shotted cannon, the firelocks in the loop-holes!

"You know they are for our own protection," he argued. "Otherwise we could not endure to see the risk. The utmost we can do for her is to prevent capture, or if she is shot to take quick vengeance. Loading the cannon only saves our nerves."

"I admit it," declared Stuart,--"a species of military sal-volatile. I never pretended to her that she was protected at all, or safe in any way,--she volunteered for a duty of great hazard."

Demere, although appreciating the inestimable value to the garrison of the opportunity, was relieved after the third occasion, when Alexander MacLeod, by an accident, discovered the fact of these dangerous sorties in the face of a savage enemy, no less capriciously wicked and mischievous than furious and blood-thirsty. His astonished rage precluded speech for a moment, and the two officers found an opportunity to get him inside the great hall, and turning the key Stuart put it in his pocket.

"Now, before you expend your wrath in words that we may all regret," he said, sternly, "you had best understand the situation. Your wife is not a woman to play the fool under any circumstances, and for ourselves we are not in heart for practical jokes. Mr. MacLeod, we have here more than three hundred mouths to feed daily, nearly three hundred the mouths of hearty, hungry men, and we have exhausted our supply of corn and have in the smoke-house barely enough salted meat to sustain us for another fortnight. Then we shall begin to eat the few horses. We are so closely beleaguered that it has proved impossible to get an express through that cordon of savages to the country beyond. To communicate with Colonel Montgomery as early as practicable is the only hope of saving our lives. Mrs. MacLeod's sorties from the fort are a part of our scheme--the essential part. You may yet come to think the dearest boon that fate could have given her would have been a ball through her brain as she stood on the escarp--so little her chances are worth!"

This plain disclosure staggered MacLeod. He had thought the place amply victualed. A rising doubt of the officers' capacity to manage the situation showed in his face.

Stuart interpreted the expression. "You see,--the instant disaster is suggested you can't rely on us,--even you! And if that spirit were abroad in the garrison and among the settlers, we should have a thousand schemes in progress, manipulated by people not so experienced as we, to save themselves first and--perhaps the others. The ammunition might be traded to the Cherokees for a promise of individual security. The gates might be opened and the garrison delivered into the enemy's hands by two or three as the price of their own lives. Such a panic or mutiny might arise as would render a defense of the place impracticable, and the fort be taken by storm and all put to the sword, or death by torture. We are keeping our secret as well as we can, hoping for relief from Montgomery, and scheming to receive assurance of it. We asked Mrs. MacLeod's help, and she gave it!"

The logic of this appeal left MacLeod no reply. "How could you!" he only exclaimed, glancing reproachfully at his wife.

"That is what I have always said," cried Stuart, gayly, perceiving that the crisis was overpast. "How could she!"

There was no more that Odalie could do, and that fact partially reconciled the shuddering MacLeod to the past, although he felt he could hardly face the ghastly front of the future. And he drew back wincingly from the unfolding plans. As for Odalie, the next day she spent in her room, the door barred, her hair tossed out of its wonted perfection of array, her dress disordered, her face and eyes swollen with weeping, and when she heard the great guns of the fort begin to send forth their thunder, and the heavy shot crashing among the boughs of the forest beyond, she fell upon her knees, then rose, wild and agitated, springing to the door, yet no sooner letting down the bar than again replacing it, to fall anew upon her knees and rise once more, too distraught for the framing of a prayer.

Yet at this same moment Mrs. MacLeod, in her familiar gray serge gown and red calash, was seen, calm and decorous, walking slowly across the parade in the direction of the great hall of the northwest bastion. The soldiers who met her doffed their hats with looks of deep respect. Now and again she bowed to a settler with her pretty, stately grace,--somewhat too pronounced an elegance for the wife of so poor a man as MacLeod, it was thought, he being of less ornamental clay. She hesitated at the door of the block-house, with a little air of diffidence, as might befit a lady breaking in upon the time of men presumed to be officially busy. The door opened, and with a bow of mingled dignity and deprecation she entered, and as the door closed, Hamish dropped the imitation of her manner, and bounded into the middle of the room with a great gush of boyish laughter, holding out both arms and crying, "Don't I look enticing! To see the fellows salaaming to the very ground as I came across the parade!--what are you doing to my frock, Captain Demere?" he broke off, suddenly. "It's just right. Odalie fixed it herself."

"Don't scuffle up these frills so," Captain Demere objected. "Mrs. MacLeod is wont to wear her frock precisely."

"Did O'Flynn mistake you for Mrs. MacLeod?" asked Stuart, relishing the situation despite his anxiety.

"I wish you could have seen the way he drew down that red Irish mouth of his," said Hamish, with a guffaw, "looking so genteel and pious!"

"I think it passes," said Demere, who was not optimistic; but now he too was smiling a little.

"It passes!" cried Stuart, triumphantly.

For the height of Odalie and Hamish was exactly the same--five feet eight inches. Hamish, destined to attain upward of six feet, had not yet all his growth. The full pleated skirt with the upper portion drawn up at the hips, and the cape about the shoulders, obviated the difference between Odalie's delicately rounded slenderness and Hamish's lank angularity. The cape of the calash, too, was thrown around the throat and about the chin and mouth, and as she was wont to hold her head down and look up at you from out the dusky red tunnel of its depths the difference in the complexion and the expression of the hazel eyes of each was hardly to be noticed in passing. To speak would have been fatal, but Hamish had been charged not to speak. His chestnut curls, brushed into a glossy similarity, crept out and lay on the folds of the red cape of the calash with a verisimilitude that seemed almost profane.

Admonished by Stuart to have heed of long steps, and the dashing swing of his habitual gait, he was leaning on Sandy's arm, as they went out, in an imitation of Odalie's graceful manner. The young sentry, Daniel Eske,--no one else was permitted at these times to stand guard in this block-house tower,--noted this, with the usual maneuver of Mrs. MacLeod's escape through the embrasure, and he was filled with ire. He had fancied that her husband did not know of this recklessness, as he was half inclined to think it, although evidently some fine-spun scheme of Captain Stuart's; it seemed especially futile this evening, so near sunset, and the odd circumstance of the cannonade having sufficed to clear every Indian out of the forest and the range of the guns. Mrs. MacLeod could not speak to Choo-qualee-qualoo now, he argued within himself; the girl would not be there in the face of this hot fire! How rapidly Mrs. MacLeod walked; only once she paused and glanced about her as if looking for the Cherokee girl,--what folly!--for with a flash of fire and a puff of white smoke, and a great sweeping curve too swift to follow with the eye, each successive ball flew from the cannon's mouth over her head and into the woods beyond.

From the opposite bank of the river an Indian, crouched in the cleft of a rock, yet consciously out of the range, watched her progress for one moment, then suddenly set off at a swift pace, doubtless to fetch the young squaw, so that when the firing should cease she could ascertain from the French woman what the unusual demonstration of the cannonade might signify.

It was only for a moment that the sentry's attention was thus diverted, but when he looked again the gray gown, the red calash, the swiftly moving figure had disappeared. The gunners had been ordered to cease firing, and the usual commotion of sponging out the bore, and reloading the guns, and replacing all the appliances of their service, was interrupted now and again by the men looking anxiously through the embrasure for Mrs. MacLeod's return. They presently called up an inquiry to the sentinel in the tower, presuming upon the utility of the secret service to excuse this breach of discipline. "Why," said the soldier, "I took my eye off her for one minute and she disappeared."

"You mean you shut your eyes for five minutes," said Corporal O'Flynn, gruffly, having just entered. "Captain Stuart told me that he himself opened the little gate and let her in by the sally-port. And there she is now, all dressed out fresh again, walking with her husband on the parade under the trees. An' yonder is the Injun colleen,--got here too late! Answer her, man, according to your orders."

Against his will the young sentinel leaned out of the window with a made-to-order smile, and as Choo-qualee-qualoo waved her hand and pointed to the empty path along which Odalie was wont to come, he intimated by signs that she had waited but was obliged to return to the fort and was now within, and he pointed down to the gorge of the bastion. To-morrow when there should be an eastern sky she would come out, and Choo-qualee-qualoo signed that she would meet her. Then she lingered, waving her hand now and again on her own account, and he dutifully flourished his hat.

"Gosh," he exclaimed, "if treachery sticks in the gizzard like this pretense there is no use in cord or shot,--the fellow does for himself!"

He was glad when the lingering twilight slipped down at last and put an end to the long-range flirtation, for however alert an interest he might have developed, were it voluntary, its utility as a military maneuver blunted its zest. Choo-qualee-qualoo had sped away to her home up the river; the stars were in the sky, and in broken glimmers reflected in the ripples of the current. The head-men among the cordon, drawn around Fort Loudon, sat in circles and discussed the possible reasons of the sudden furious cannonade, and the others of minor tribal importance listened and adjusted their own theories to the views advanced; the only stragglers were the spies whom the cannonade had driven from the woods that afternoon, now venturing back into the neighborhood, looking at the lights of the fort, hearing often hilarious voices full of the triumph of Montgomery's foray, and sometimes finding on the ground the spent balls of the cannonade.

It had so cleared the nearer spaces that it had enabled Hamish, in a guise become familiar to them, to gain the little thicket where Choo-qualee-qualoo and Odalie were wont to conclude their talks. Close by was the mouth of the cavernous passage that led to MacLeod's Station, which no Indians knew the white people had discovered. With a sudden plunge the boy was lost to sight in its labyrinthine darkness, and when Hamish MacLeod emerged at the further end five miles away, in his own garb, which he had worn beneath the prim feminine attire,--this he had carefully rolled into a bundle and stowed in a cleft in the rocks of the underground passage,--he issued into a night as sweet, as lonely, and as still, in that vast woodland, as if there were no wars or rumors of wars in all the earth. But, alas! for the sight of Odalie's home that she had loved and made so happy, and where he had been as cherished as Fifine herself,--all grim, charred ashes; and poor Dill's cabin!--he knew by this time that Dill was dead, very dead, or he would have come back to them. The fields, too, that they had sown, and that none would reap, trampled and torn, and singed and burnt! Hamish gave but one sigh, bursting from an overcharged heart; then he was away at full speed in the darkness that was good to him, and the only friend he had in the world with the power to help him and his.

Captain Demere that night was more truly cheerful than he had been for a long time, despite his usual port of serene, although somewhat austere, dignity.

"The boy has all the homing qualities you desired in an express," he said to Stuart. "He will come back to his brother's family as certainly as a man with wife and children, and yet in quitting them he leaves no duty to devolve on others."

"Moreover," said Stuart, "we have the satisfaction of knowing that he safely reached the mouth of the underground passage without detection. He could not have found the place in a dark night. In the moonlight he would have been seen, and even if we had protected his entrance by a cannonade, and cleared the woods, his exit at the other end of the passage would have been intercepted. Disguised as Mrs. MacLeod, seeking to meet Choo-qualee-qualoo in bold daylight, he passed without a suspicion on the part of the Indians. And we know that the exit of the passage at MacLeod Station is fully three miles in the rear of the Indian line. I feel sure that the other two expresses never got beyond the Indian line. This is the best chance we have had."

"And a very good chance," said Demere.

Stuart could but laugh a little, remembering that Demere had thought the plan impracticable, and, although there was no other opportunity possible, had protested against it on the point of danger involved to Mrs. MacLeod. Stuart, himself, had quaked on this score, and had seized on this ingenious device only as a last resort.

"Mrs. MacLeod is fine timber for a forlorn hope," he said reflectively.

The matter had been so sedulously guarded from the knowledge of the garrison, save such share as was of necessity divulged to the men who fired the guns, the young sentinel, and Corporal O'Flynn,--and even they were not aware that there had been a sortie of any other person than Mrs. MacLeod,--that Hamish's absence passed unnoticed for several days, and when it was announced that he had been smuggled out of the fort, charged with dispatches to Colonel Montgomery, no one dreamed of identifying him with the apparition in the gray gown whom the gunners had seen to issue forth and return no more. Even Corporal O'Flynn accepted the statement, without suspicion, that Captain Stuart had let Mrs. MacLeod in at the sally-port. These excursions, he imagined, were to secure information from Choo-qualee-qualoo.

The announcement that an express was now on the way was made to encourage the men, for the daily ration had dwindled to a most meager portion, and complaints were rife on every hand both among the soldiery and the families of the settlers. A wild, startled look appeared in many eyes, as if some ghastly possibility had come within the range of vision, undreamed-of before. The facts, however, that the commandant was able to still maintain a connection beyond the line of blockading Cherokees, that Hamish had been gone for more than a week, that decisive developments of some sort must shortly ensue, that the officers themselves kept a cheerful countenance, served to stimulate an effort to sustain the suspense and the gnawing privation. Continual exertions were made in this direction.

"Try to keep up the spirits of the men," said Demere to O'Flynn one day.

"I do, sor," returned O'Flynn, his cheek a trifle pale and sunken. "I offer meself to 'm as an example. I says to the guard only to-day, sor, says I,--'Now in affliction ye see the difference betune a person of quality, and a common spalpeen.' An' they wants to know who is this person of quality, sor. And I names meself, sor, being descended from kings of Oirland. An', would ye belave me, sor, not one of them bog-trotting teagues but what was kings of Oirland, too, sor."

Corporal O'Flynn might have thought his superior officer needed cheering too, for the twinkle in his eye had lost none of its alluring Celtic quality.

The distressing element of internecine strife and bickerings was presently added to the difficulties of the officers, who evidently faced a situation grievous enough in itself without these auxiliary troubles. Certain turbulent spirits opined loudly that they, the humbler people, had advantage taken of them,--that the officers' mess was served in a profusion never abated, while the rest starved. Captain Stuart and Captain Demere would not notice this report, but the junior officers were vehement in their protestations that they and their superiors had had from the beginning of the scarcity the identical rations served out to the others, and that their gluttony had not reduced the general supply. The quartermaster-sergeant confirmed this, yet who believed him, as Mrs. Halsing said, for he carried the keys and could favor whom he would. That he did not favor himself was obvious from the fact that his once red face had grown an ashen gray, and the cheeks hung in visible cords and ligaments under the thrice-folded skin, the flesh between having gradually vanished. The African cook felt his honor so touched by this aspersion on his master's methods that he carried his kettles and pans out into the center of the parade one day and there, in insubordinate disregard of orders, cooked in public the scanty materials of the officers' dinner. And having thus expressed his indignant rage he sat down on the ground among his kettles and pans and wept aloud in a long lugubrious howl, thus giving vent to his grief, and requiring the kind offices of every friend he had in the fort to pacify him and induce him to remove himself, his pans, and his kettles from this unseemly conspicuousness.

At the height of the trouble, when Stuart and Demere, themselves anxious and nervous, and greatly reduced by the poor quality and scarcity of food, sat together and speculated on the problem of Montgomery's silence, and the continued absence of the express, and wondered how long this state of things could be maintained, yearning for, yet fearing the end,--talking as they dared not talk to any human being but each to the other,--Ensign Whitson burst into the room with an excited face and the news that there had been a fight over in the northeast bastion at the further side of the terrepleine.

Captain Stuart rose, bracing his nerves for the endurance of still more.

"A food riot? I have expected it. Have they broken into the smoke-house?"

Whitson looked wild for one moment. "Oh, no, sir,--not that!--not that! Two Irishmen at fisticuffs,--about the Battle of the Boyne!--Corporal O'Flynn and a settler."

For the first time in a week Stuart laughed with genuine hilarity. "Mighty well!" he exclaimed. "Let us settle the important questions between the Irish Catholics and the Irish Protestants before we go a step further!"

But Demere was writhing under the realization of a relaxed discipline, although when O'Flynn presented himself in response to summons he was so crest-fallen and woe-begone and reduced, that Demere had not the heart to take summary measures with the half-famished boxer.

"O'Flynn," he said, "do you deem this a fitting time to set the example of broils between the settlers and soldiers? Truly, I think we need but this to precipitate our ruin."

Stuart hastily checked the effect of this imprudent phrase by breaking in upon a statement of Corporal O'Flynn's, which seemed to represent his right arm as in some sort a free agent, mechanically impelled through the air, the hand in a clinched posture, in disastrous juxtaposition with the skulls of other people, and that he was not thinking, and would not have had it happen for nothing, and--

"But is the man an Irishman?" asked Stuart. "He has no brogue."

"Faith, sor," said the repentant O'Flynn, glad of the diversion, "he hits loike an Oirishman,--I don't think he is an impostor. My nose feels rather limber."

O'Flynn having been of great service in the crisis, they were both glad to pass over his breach of discipline as lightly as they might; and he doubtless reaped the benefit of their relief that the matter was less serious than they had feared.

The next day, however, the expected happened. The unruly element, partly of soldiers with a few of the settlers, broke into the smoke-house and discovered there what the commandant was sedulously trying to conceal,--nothing!

It stunned them for the moment. It tamed them. The more prudential souls began now to fear the attitude of the officers, to turn to them, to rely again upon their experience and capacity.

When the two captains came upon the scene, Demere wearing the affronted, averse, dangerous aspect which he always bore upon any breach of discipline, and Stuart his usual cool, off-hand look as if the matter did not greatly concern him, they listened in silence to the clamor of explanations and expostulations, of criminations and recriminations which greeted them. Only a single sentence was spoken by either of them,--a terse low-toned order. Upon the word, Corporal O'Flynn with a squad of soldiers rushed briskly into the crowd, and in less than two minutes the rioters were in irons.

"Jedburgh justice!" said Stuart aside to Demere, as they took their way back across the parade. "Hang 'em first, and try 'em afterward."

The bystanders might argue little from Demere's reticent soldierly dignity, but Stuart's ringing laugh, as he spoke aside to his brother officer, his cheerful, buoyant, composed mien, restored confidence as naught less than the sound of Montgomery's bugles outside the works might have done. Doubtless he was apprised of early relief. Surely he did not look like a man who expected to live on horse-flesh in the midst of a mutinous garrison, with the wild savages outside, and within that terrible strain upon the courage,--the contemplation of the sufferings of non-combatants, the women and children, who had entered into no covenant and received no compensation to endure the varying chances of war.

Yet this prospect seemed close upon him before that day was done. The orderly routine had slipped again into its grooves. The hungry men, brisk, spruce, were going about their various military duties with an alacrity incongruous with their cadaverous aspect. The sentinels were posted as usual, and Captain Stuart, repairing according to his wont to a post of observation in the block-house tower of the northwest bastion, turned his glass upon the country beyond, lowered it suddenly, looking keenly at the lens, as if he could not believe his eyes, and again lifted it. There was no mistake. On the opposite side of the river, looking like some gigantic monkey capering along on a pair of thin bare legs, was a stalwart Indian, arrayed for the upper part of his person in a fine scarlet coat, richly laced, evidently the spoil from some British officer of high rank. Perhaps no apparition so grotesque ever sent a chill to so stout a heart. Stuart was no prophet, quotha. But he could see the worst when it came and stared him in the eyes. _

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