This time he was quicker,—or perhaps accident favored him, for as, half-blinded, his glance returned, he saw the red light disappearing into the ample sleeve of one of the Indians who sat on the opposite side of the fire.
Raymond’s first feeling was an infinite relief. No illness menaced him, no obscure affection of the nerves or brain. Some art of conjuring,—some mechanical contrivance, was it?—they were employing to distract his attention. In their folly and fatuity did they dream that they might thus undermine his purpose, or weaken his intellect, or destroy his sight, or work a spell upon him? He marked how they watched his every motion.
He looked vaguely, uncertainly, about the shadowy place, with its red wall. The decorated buffalo hides suspended on it showed dully against its rich uniform tint. The circle of the seated Indian chiefs in the shifting shadow and the flickering light, with their puerile ornaments of paint and feathers and strings of worthless beads about the barbaric garb of skin and fur, was itself vague, unreal, like a curious poly-tinted daub, some extravagant depiction of aboriginal art. Each face, however, was expressive in a different degree of power, of perspicacity, of subtlety, and many devious mental processes, and he marvelled, as many wiser men have marvelled since, that these endowments of value should fail to compass the essentials of civilization, theorizing dimly that the Indians were a remnant of a different order of being, the conclusion of a period of human development, the final expression of an alien mind, radically of an age and species not to be repeated.
There was absolutely no basis of mutual comprehension, and Raymond was definitely aware of this when he said, “I can cure a disabled cannon,—show me the guns,”—and a sudden silence ensued, the demand evidently being wholly unexpected.
“Tell me,” he urged, his patience growing scant, “where are the guns now?” Then catching the shifty expression of the chief, Cunigacatgoah, he was moved to add, disregarding the interpreter, “Gahusti tsuskadi nigesuna.” (You never tell a lie.)
Now and again his knowledge of the Cherokee language had enabled him to detect the linguister for the British force softening his downright candid soldierly phrases. The interpreter was seeking to mitigate the evident displeasure excited by the commander’s address, which he thought might rebound upon himself, as the medium of such unpleasant communication. There was something so sarcastic in this feigned compliment that it might well have seemed positively unsafe, even more perilous than overt insult, but as Raymond, with a wave of his cocked hat in his left hand and a smiling bow of his heavily powdered and becurled head, demanded, “Haga tsunu iyuta datsi waktuhi?” (Tell me where they are now?) a vague smile played over the features of Cunigacatgoah, and he who was wont to believe so little, found it easy to imagine himself implicitly believed, the model of candor.
He instantly assumed an engaging appearance of extreme frankness, and abruptly said, “Now, I, myself, will tell you the whole truth.”
Raymond looked at him eagerly, breathlessly, full of instant expectation.
“The cannon are not here,—they have all three sickened and died.”
The soldier sat dumbfounded for a moment, realizing that this was no figurative speech, that he was expected to entirely believe this,—so low they rated the intelligence of the English! He experienced the revolt of reason that seizes on the mind amidst the grotesqueries of a dream. He had no words to combat the follies of the proposition. Only with a sarcastic, fleering laugh he cried aloud, “Gahusti tsuskadi nigesuna!” (You never tell a lie.)