The amulet: A novel

by Charles Egbert Craddock

Cannon in the Cherokee country!

Naught could so extend the power of the Indians. Always they had longed for artillery. How many times had the crafty delegations sought to represent to him that “one little piece” would do much to strengthen them against the advance of the perfidious French,—whom, in truth, they loved, and they rallied continually to the standard of the “great French father.” But even though the French were in their aggressions successful beyond all precedent in detaching the Cherokees from their compact with Great Britain, and setting them in arms against the government, they never dared to trust the tribe with cannon. So easily is a swivel gun turned, and with the fickle Indians it might be against the foe to-day and the friend to-morrow. With the comparative long range of the arm of that time, a few pieces, well placed in commanding situations, might hold the defiles of the Great Smoky Mountains against all comers.

Cannon in the Cherokee country!

How could Walasi’s words be true! Captain Howard meditated on the difficulty of their transportation amidst the stupendous upheavals that made up the face of the country,—the steep slopes, the tremendous heights, the cuplike valleys, hardly a plot of twenty acres of level ground in the whole vast region. For his own part in expectation of the evacuation of Fort Prince George he was thankful that the currents of the Keowee and the broad Savannah would serve to bear its armament to the forts in the lower country. He continued to canvass this theme with a soldier’s interest in a problem of transportation. To the civilian the glories and honors of war are won or lost on the fenced field of battle, but to the military expert the secret of victory or defeat is often discovered in the mobilization of the force. He was returning with unappeased wonder to the problem,—and to this day it is a matter of conjecture,—how the twelve cannon of Fort Loudon, more than one hundred miles to the northwest, had ever been conveyed to that remote inaccessible post. The blockade of the fort, its capitulation, and the massacre of its starveling garrison were events that befell before his detail to Fort Prince George, and much of mystery still environed the catastrophe. He knew that after the Cherokees were punished, and subdued, and practically disarmed by the British force sent into the country to reduce them to submission, the treaty of peace provided for the return of the cannon which the Indians had seized. They brought them as far as they could on the Tennessee River, then with infinite labor dragged them through the wilderness, an incredible portage, to the Keowee. Suddenly Captain Howard sprang to his feet; his glass of rich old port, falling from his hand and shivering into a thousand fragments on the hearth, sent up a vinous white flame from the coals that received the libation.

For the Indians had brought eight guns only! One piece was known to have burst, overcharged and mishandled by the Cherokees in their experiments in gunnery after the reduction of the fort. The others, it was declared, had been spiked, or otherwise demolished, by the defenders, in violation of the terms of their capitulation—it was claimed that they had sunk each piece as they could in the river. The fact which had been established that they had hidden large stores of powder, in the hope and expectation that the government might soon again reoccupy the works, was not consistent with this story of the destruction of the guns and might serve in a degree to discredit the statement of the Indians that all the cannon they had captured were delivered to the British authorities. And now this boast of cannon in the Cherokee country! He well believed it! He would have taken his oath that there were three pieces—all part of the armament of the ill-fated Fort Loudon, withheld by the Cherokees, awaiting an opportunity and the long-delayed day of vengeance for the slaughter and the conflagrations that marked the track of the British forays through their devastated land, when for lack of powder they could oppose no effective resistance, and were fain to submit to the bullet, the knife, the torch, till the conquerors were tired out with their orgies of blood and fire.

He became suddenly conscious of his daughter’s hazel eyes, wide and lustrous with amazement, lifted to his, as he stood, alert, triumphant, tingling with excitement, on the hearth, and heard in mingled embarrassment and laughter his sister’s sarcastic recommendation that he should throw the decanter into the fire after his bumper of port wine.

“Upon my word you frontier fanfarons are mighty lavish. In England we picture you as going sadly all the day wrapped in a greasy blanket, eating Indian meal, and drinking ‘fire-water,’—and we come here to find you all lace ruffles, and powdered wigs, and prancing in your silk hose, and throwing your port wine into the fire to see it blaze!”

“The goblet slipped from my hand—it was a mischance, Sister.”

“My certie! it shows you’ve had too much already; ’twas ever the fault of a soldier. Had I my way in the old times you should have been none.”

“I would seem more temperate under a table, after a meet, like one of your home-staying, fox-hunting squires,” suggested the captain.