The amulet: A novel

by Charles Egbert Craddock

“Where?” he asked in Cherokee, for the British officer spoke the language with enough facility to enable them in casual conversation to dispense with an interpreter.

The impression was of a deep indentation in the centre, surrounded at the distance of some inches by a ring, plainly marked but less deep, and this had an outer circular imprint very symmetrical but still more shallow. Raymond saw that for one moment the eyes of the Indian rested upon it, but still saying, “Where?” he stepped about, looking now in every direction but the one indicated; all at once, as if inadvertently, he pressed his foot deeply into the marshy soil, and the water rushing up obliterated forever the impression of the deep indentation and the two concentric circles.

Raymond called out to him pettishly that he had spoiled the opportunity of discovering the cause of so strange a mark.

“’Twas the track of a snake, perhaps, or a tortoise,” the Wolf suggested.

When he was assured that this was something circular and symmetrical, he said he did not know what it could have been, but some things had big hoofs. Perhaps it might have been Mr. Morton’s Big Devil, whom he was so fond of preaching about!

“In Choté?” asked Raymond.

“Oh no—not in Choté,” the Wolf made haste to say—“Mr. Morton could not preach in Choté. Cunigacatgoah has a sacred stone, an amulet, that belongs to the Cherokee people, and it would not suffer a word about Mr. Morton’s very wicked Big Devil in the city of refuge.”

“An amulet against evil,” said Raymond sarcastically—“and yet the Devil walks along the river-bank of the ‘ever-sacred’ soil and leaves his big footprint in defiance!”

“True,—true,”—said the Wolf, doubling like his own prey, “then it couldn’t have been the Devil. It must have been a buffalo,—just a big bull buffalo.”

“A big bull buffalo with one foot,” sneered Raymond, logically, “there is no other track near it,—except,” he continued looking narrowly at the earth, “the imprint of a number of moccasins of several sizes.” He was merely irritated at the balking of his natural curiosity, but he noticed with surprise that Wolf-with-two-feet was very eager to quit the subject, and digressed with some skill and by an imperceptible gradation from the character of this spongy soil, so plastic to impressions, to the alluvial richness of the whole belt along the watercourses and thence to the large yield of the public fields that lay to the southwest of Choté, and which were even now, early as it was, in process of being planted. And then, as if suddenly bethinking himself, he changed the direction of their stroll to give Raymond an exhibition of the primitive methods of agriculture practised with such signal success at Choté Great. At this hour the laborers had quitted the fields, leaving, however, ample token of their industry. For in the whole stretch of the cultivated land the fresh, rich, black loam had been turned, but with never a plough, and daily large numbers of women and girls repaired thither under the guidance of the “second men” of the town to drop the corn. Though the world was so full of provender elsewhere, the birds took great account of this proceeding, and thronged the air twittering and chattering together as if discussing the crop prospects. Now and again a bluejay flew across the wide expanse of the fields, clanging a wild woodsy cry with a peculiarly saucy intonation, as though to say, “I’ll have my share! I’ll have my share!”