As if Gi-en-gwa-tah’s curse had fulfilled itself, the settlement at Seneca Lake had atoned for the massacre of Wyoming, and now lay desolated; the beautiful grounds were black with ruin, the charred trunks of the dead trees rose in black groups where life and greenness had been. Heaps of stone lay where the houses had stood, and a few bark wigwams, in which the broken remnants of Queen Esther’s followers still sheltered themselves, were all that Sullivan’s avenging troops had left to the old queen.
The mansion which she had called her palace was a heap of ruins, but some of the walls remained, and one of the largest rooms had been roofed over with plank and slabs, thus giving shelter to that terrible woman, who lay like a sick lioness on a buffalo skin in the centre, smitten by her son’s curse, and struggling with that dogged old age which chains the passions it cannot quench.
On the broken door-step sat a group of savages, looking gloomily into the yawning hall. They dared not intrude on the sick woman without a summons; but sat listening, not for moans or complaints—those they never could expect—but for a sound of the death rattle, which must soon follow the appalling stillness in which she rested.
As she lay thus, picking perpetually at the fur on the buffalo robe, with a keen glare of the eyes, as if that work must be done before she could enter eternity, a figure glided past the Indians on the door-step and entered that death-chamber. It was Tahmeroo, her grandchild, but so haggard and lifeless that the Indians, whom she passed, had not known her.
The old woman turned her eyes that way, but kept picking, picking, picking at the fur.
All at once she seemed to comprehend that one of her own kindred stood beside her. She raised herself up on one hand; the snow-white hair swept back from her face, leaving it stony and ashen. Up and up, inch by inch, she struggled, shaking like a naked tree in the winter, till she stood upright.
“Tell him that you saw his mother die upon her feet. He struck her with a curse, but death is not so strong. I grapple with him, face to face, tooth and tooth; but a child’s curse who can bear!”
She reeled heavily, flung out her clenched hands, striving to balance herself, but fell with a dull crash. There was a sound in her throat, like the muffled rattle of chains in a dungeon, and the old queen lay across her buffalo robe stiff and dead.
All that day and night a death-chant rose and swelled through those ruins. The blackened trees, dead, like their owner, shivered as the wind passed them burdened with that mournful wail. That little group of Indians, broken off from the great tribe by the curse of their chief, buried their queen among the blackened ruins, covered her grave with ashes, and sat down by it in patient desolation.
Then Tahmeroo glided among them like a ghost. “Old men,” she said, in the gentleness of solemn grief, “sit no longer in the ashes of my father’s curse. Gi-en-gwa-tah will listen to Catharine Montour’s child when she tells him all the sweet words which her mother left behind. Gather up the dried fruit and corn in your wigwams, and follow me to the great-waters, where the tribe are planting young trees and building new lodges.”