The amulet: A novel

by Charles Egbert Craddock

His opening door gave him to view a great gush of firelight and gleam of candles; the room was perfumed with the sweet odors of the burning hickory and pine and cedar in the wide chimney and embellished by the presence of Arabella, whose grace made every place seem a parlor. Her golden-hued shawl hung in silken folds from the back of an arm-chair of the primitive frontier manufacture, and on the table lay her embroidery-frame, whereon roses seemed to bud at her magic touch and expand under the sunshine of her smiling hazel eyes. Her gown of canary sarcenet had a black velvet girdle and many black velvet rosettes for trimming, her golden hair gleamed in the rich glow of the fire, and in her hand was her lute, graced by long streamers of crimson ribbon.

Beside her was the captain-lieutenant, all bedight in the smartest of uniforms, his hair in a long queue of blond plaits, and with precise side-curls heavily powdered, a genteel fashion not always observed on the frontier.

She had been singing to him one of the songs that had become fashionable at Vauxhall during his long absence from London, and the air was still vibrant with the melody of voice and symphony.

And poor Raymond!—Captain Howard’s inconsistent heart rebelled at the sight of their comfort and mirth and security,—out in the snow, and the black night, and the illimitable trackless wilderness on the march to Choté.

With the thought his anxiety and distrust of the subaltern’s discretion were reasserted.

“He will reach Choté if he has a man left! I only hope he won’t harry the town!” he exclaimed in the extravagance of his disaffection.

CHAPTER XVI

When Ensign Raymond encountered the snow-storm he was already advanced some two days’ march on his mission to Choté Great, the “beloved town,” the city of refuge of the whole Cherokee nation. The tempest came first in a succession of capricious flurries; then the whole world seemed a maelstrom of dizzily whirling flakes. The young officer and his force pushed on with mettlesome disregard of its menace, although for days it persistently fell. Afterward it drifted with the wind into great mounds, it obscured the trail, hid the landmarks, set many a pitfall in the deep chasms and over the thin ice of unsuspected watercourses in narrow and steep ravines. Night brought hard freezes; the thaws of the rising temperature at noonday were resolved into ice at dusk, and the trees, ceasing to drip, were hung with icicles on every bough and twig. The great pearly moon, now and again showing above the mountains through gusty clouds, revealed strange endless forests glimmering with crystalline coruscations, despite the obscurity, as if endowed with some inherent source of light. The bivouac fires made scant impression on these chill primeval environments; the flare on the ruddy faces of the young soldiers, with their red coats and their snatches of song and their simple joy in the contents of their unslung haversacks, paled as it ventured out amidst the dense mysterious woods. The snowy vistas would presently grow dim, and shadows thronged adown the perspective. Before the ultimate obscurities were reached, the vanishing point, certain alien green glimmers were often furtively visible,—a signal for the swift replenishing of the fires and a renewed flaring of the flames high into the air, with great showers of sparks and a fierce crackling of boughs. For the number of wolves had hardly been diminished by the Cherokee War with the British, so recently at an end, although the easily affrighted deer and buffalo seemed for a time to have fled the country. The predatory animals had doubtless found their account in the slaughter of the battle-fields, and Raymond’s chief anxiety at night was the maintenance of the vigilance of the fire-guard, whose duty it was to feed the protective flames with fuel. To drive off the beasts with musketry was esteemed a wanton waste of powder, so precious was ammunition always on the frontier. Moreover, the bellicose sound of British muskets was of invidious suggestion in the land of the sullen and smarting Cherokees, so reluctantly pacified, and recently re-embittered by the downfall of secret cherished schemes of the assistance of the French to enable them to regain their independence. Now the French were quitting the country. Canada was ceded; the southern forts were to be evacuated. The “great French father” had been overpowered and forced to leave them to their fate, and their treaties with the British, half-hearted, compulsory, flimsy of intention, were to be kept or broken at the peril of their national existence. They resisted this conviction,—so high had been their hopes. They had long believed that a confederation of the Indian tribes under French commanders would drive the British colonies of the south into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. They had grown heady with this expectation, and prophetically triumphant. They were now desperate with the sudden dissolving of this possibility forever,—vindictively inimical.

There was an incident of the march which might have seemed to an older man than Raymond far more menacing than the wolves that patrolled the camp. Nightly there came visitors to his fire, which was a little apart from the bivouac of the rank and file, as beseemed a commander’s dignity. The soldiers were wont to gaze askance at the guests across the intervening spaces, as the fire threw their long shadows upon the snow. Feather-crested shadows they were, but never the same. Each night certain chiefs from the town nearest the end of the day’s march appeared out of the darkness with protestations of welcome to the vicinity, and sat with the giddy young commander beside his fire and talked with faces of grave import, for the smattering of the Cherokee language that Raymond had picked up was such as might suffice for casual conversation. The soldiers wondered and doubted as they watched, for their lives hung on the discretion of this light-pated youth. They were brave men enough and versed in Indian warfare, but acquainted too with Indian treachery. The war was over, both with the French and the Indian tribes, but that gratuitous sacrifice of life, the death of the few occurring in the interval between the negotiation of a treaty and the slowly pervading news of the consummation of peace, has a peculiar horror for every soldier. They put their own heads together around the fire and questioned much what could these men, holding aloof all day, coming darkly, dubiously with the shadows, have in traffic with their “Babby” Ensign,—what subject of earnest persuasion. The lengthened discourse would be drawn out long after tattoo had sounded, and when the soldiers, constrained to keep to fixed hours, lay around the glowing coals like the spokes of a wheel, they still furtively watched the figure of the gay young commander, erect, alert, very wide awake in his dapper trim uniform, and his blanketed feather-tufted visitors, their eager faces shown by the fitful flicker and flare of the ensign’s fire. An icy bough would wave above them, and so chill was the intervening atmosphere that the leaping flames wrought no change in its glittering pendants. A star would frostily glint high, seen through the snow-laden branches of the pine. Sometimes the clouds would part and the pearly moon would cast a strange supernal lustre on the scene,—the great solitary mountains on every side; the long vacant snowy valleys glimpsed through some clifty defile; the shadowy skulking figures of wolves, primeval denizens of the wilderness; the bivouac of the soldiers; and these incongruously colloguing figures beside the officer’s fire.

The words of the visitors appeared destined to be in vain. For a head which seemed so easily turned Ensign Raymond’s was curiously hard.