It was not to be presumed that with these postulants Mr. Morton had delved very deeply into sacerdotal mysteries and fine and abstruse doctrines of theology, but Captain Howard was so obviously relieved when his interpreter, standing very straight and stiff outside his booth,—a man whom he had employed as a scout,—repeated the words flung at him by the interpreter of Rolloweh, who stood very straight and stiff outside the “holy cabin,” that Raymond, despite his surprise, and agitation, and anxiety could have laughed aloud.
“Did you ever hear of a man called Noah?”
“Yes—oh, yes, indeed,” said Captain Howard, so plumply affirmative and familiar that they might have expected to hear him add that he had served with Noah in the Hastenbeck campaign.
All the eyes of the Cherokees around the vacant square were fixed first upon the questioner, Rolloweh, and then upon Captain Howard, in the incongruous rôle of catechumen. The space was not so large as in the “beloved squares” of towns of greater population, comprising perhaps not more than one acre. Every word could be heard—every facial change discriminated. Mr. Morton stood as if half amused, one thumb thrust in his fob, his grizzled eye-brows elevated, his thin wisps of hair tossed about his bare poll, a smile on his face, listening with an indulgent meditative air to the inquiries of Rolloweh propounded in Cherokee, which, of course, he understood, and the sturdy cautious response of the British commandant. Captain Howard had not thought so much about Biblical matters since he sat and swung his feet in his callow days to be catechised by the nursery governess.
“Did he have a house that could float?” demanded the interrogator.
“Oh, he did,—he did indeed,” declared Captain Howard, freely.
There was a certain satisfaction perceptible on the face of Rolloweh, despite the enigmatical cast given it by the loss of his eye. The other head-men, too, assisting at this unique literary exercise, showed an animation, a gleam of triumph, at every confirmation of the ancient Biblical stories found by the early missionaries to be curiously, mysteriously familiar to all the pagan Cherokees, distorted in detail sometimes, and sometimes in pristine proportions. When a sudden blight fell upon the smooth progress of this comparative theology and the question awoke from Captain Howard no responsive assurance of knowledge, Raymond was more sensibly impressed by the gloom, the disappointment that settled upon the faces of the head-men on the “great white seat.” He could not understand it. The Indians were very subtle—or did they really desire the verification of what they had been taught by the missionary.
The “beloved square” was absolutely silent. The shadow of a white cloud high in the blue zenith crossed the smooth sanded space; they could hear the Tugaloo River fretting on the rocks a mile down-stream. The bare branches of the encompassing forests, with no sign that the spring of the year pulsed in their fibres, that the sap was rising, clashed lightly together in a vagrant gust and fell still again.
Captain Howard knitted a puzzled brow, and his men, ranged in tiers of seats back of him, who had been startled and amazed beyond expression by the unexpected developments, gazed down upon him with a ludicrous anxiety lest he fail to acquit himself smartly and do himself and the command credit, and with an esprit de corps wholly at variance with the subject-matter of the examination.
“Why, no,” the officer said at last, “I don’t think I ever before heard of the dogs.”