His bulldog tenacity, his orderly instincts, his providence, so contrary to the methods of the wasteful Indian, his cheerful industry, his indomitable energy and perseverance,—all were so national that in days gone past Varney used now and again to clap him on the shoulder with a loud, careless vaunt, "British to the marrow!"
A fact, doubtless—and all of a sudden it had begun to seem a very serious fact. So very serious, indeed, that the old trader did not notice the crisis in the chungke-yard, the increasing excitement in the crowds of spectators, the clamors presently when the game was declared a draw and the bets off, the stir of the departing groups. It was silence at last that smote upon his senses with the effect of interruption which the continuance of sound had not been able to compass. He drew himself up with a perplexed sigh, and looked drearily over the expanse of the river. Its long glittering reaches were vacant, a rare circumstance, for the Cherokees of that date were almost amphibious in habit, reveling in the many lovely streams of their mountain country; on the banks their towns were situated, and this fact doubtless contributed to the neatness of their habitations and personal cleanliness, to which the travelers of those times bear a surprised testimony. The light upon the water was aslant now from a westering sun, and glittering on the snowy breasts of a cluster of swans drifting, dreaming perhaps, on the current. The scarlet boughs on the summit of Chilhowee were motionless against the azure zenith. Not even the vaguest tissue of mist now lingered about the majestic domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, painted clearly and accurately in fine and minute detail in soft dense velvet blues against the hard polished mineral blue of the horizon. The atmosphere was so exquisitely luminous and pellucid that it might have seemed a fit medium to dispel uncertainty in other than merely material subjects of contemplation. Nevertheless he did not see his way clearly, and when he came within view of his trading-house he paused as abruptly as if he had found his path blocked by an obstacle.
There, seated on the step of the closed door which boasted the only lock and key in Tennessee Town, or for the matter of that in all the stretch of the Cherokee country west of the Great Smoky Range, was Otasite, the incongruity of his auburn curls and his Indian headdress seeming a trifle more pronounced than usual, since it had been for a time an unfamiliar sight. He was awaiting the coming of the trader, and was singing meanwhile in a loud and cheerful voice, "Drink with me a cup of wine," a ditty which he had heard in his half-forgotten childhood. The robust full tones gave no token of the draught made upon his endurance by the heavy exercise of the day, but he seemed a bit languid from the heat, and his doeskin shirt was thrown open at the throat, showing his broad white chest, and in its centre the barbarous blue discolorations of the "warrior's marks." These disfigurements, made by the puncturing of the flesh with gars' teeth and inserting in the wound paint and pitch, indelible testimonials to his deeds of courage and prowess, Otasite valued as he did naught else on earth, and he would have parted with his right hand as readily. The first had been bestowed upon him after he had gone, a mighty gun-man, against the Muscogees. The others he had won in the course of a long, furious, and stubborn contest of the tribe with the Chickasaws, who, always impolitic, headlong, and brave, were now reduced by their own valor in their many wars from ten thousand fighting men to a few hundred. He had attained the "warrior's crown" when he had shown their kindred Choctaws a mettle as fierce and a craft as keen as their own. And now he was looking at Abram Varney with kindly English eyes and an expression about the brow, heavily freckled, that almost smote the tears from the elder man. The trader knew from long experience what was coming, but suddenly he had begun to regard it differently. Always upon the end of each journey from Charlestown he had been met here within a day or two by Otasite on the same mission. The long years as they passed had wrought only external changes since, as a slender wistful boy of eleven years, heart-sick, homeless, forlorn, friendless, save for his Indian captors, likely, indeed, to forget all language but theirs, he had first come with his question, always in English, always with a faltering eyelash and a deprecatory lowered voice, "Did you hear anything in Charlestown of any people named 'Queetlee'?"
This was the distorted version of his father's name that Colannah had preserved. As to the child himself, his memory had perhaps been shaken by the events of that terrible night of massacre, which he only realized as a frightful awakening from sleep to smoke, flames, screams, the ear-splitting crack of rifle-shots at close quarters, the shock of a sudden hurt—and then, after an interval of unconsciousness, a transition to a new world of strange habitudes that grew speedily familiar, and of unexpected kindness that became dear to a frank, affectionate heart. Perhaps in the isolations of the frontier life he had never heard his father addressed by his surname by a stranger; he was called "Jan" by his wife, and her name was "Eelin," and this Otasite knew, and this was all he knew, save that he himself also had been called "Jan."
"They don't want you, my buck, or they would have been after you," the trader used to reply, being harder, perhaps when he was younger. Besides, he honestly thought the cadaverous brat, all legs, like a growing colt, and skinny arms, was better off here in the free woodland life which he himself considered no hardship, and affected long after necessity or interest had dictated his environment. The little lad was safe in the care of the powerful chief Colannah Gigagei of Tennessee Town, who had adopted him, and who was a man of great force and influence. Why should the child seek a home among his own people, unwelcome doubtless, to eat the meagre crust of charity, or serve as an overworked drudge somewhere on the precarious frontier? The trader did not greatly deplore the lack of religious training, for in the remote settlements this was often still an unaccustomed luxury, albeit some thirty years had now gone by since Sir Francis Nicholson, then the Governor, declared that no colony could flourish without a wider diffusion of the gospel and education, and forthwith ordered spiritual drill, so to speak, in the way of preaching and schooling. Although himself described as "a profane, passionate, headstrong man, bred a soldier," as if the last fact were an excuse for the former, he contributed largely to the furtherance of these pious objects, "spending liberally all his salary and perquisites of office," for which generous trait of character an early and strait-laced historian is obviously of the opinion that General Nicholson should have been suffered to swear in peace and, as it were, in the odor of sanctity.
More than once, when in Charlestown, Varney, notwithstanding his persuasions on the subject, had been minded to inquire concerning the "Queetlees," who he understood from Colannah had come originally from Cumberland in England. With his mercantile cronies he had canvassed the question whether the queer, evidently distorted name could have been "Peatley" or "Patey" or "Petrie,"—for the Cherokees always substituted "Q" for "P," as the latter letter they could not pronounce,—and after this transient consideration the matter would drop.
As the child, running about the Indian town with his new-found playmates, grew robust and merry-hearted, and happiness, confidence, and strength brought their embellishing influence to the expression of his large dark gray eyes and straightened the nervous droop from his thin little shoulders, the trader noticed casually once or twice how comely the brat had become, and he experienced a fleeting, half-ridiculing pity for his mother—how the woman would have resented and resisted the persistent shearing and shaving of those silken, loosely twining red curls! Then he thought of her no more. But when the child had come to man's estate, when he was encased in a network of muscle like elastic steel wires, when stature and strength had made him alike formidable and splendid, when the development of his temperament illustrated virtues so stanch that they seemed the complement of his physical endowment and a part of his resolute personality, the old trader thought of the boy's father, and thought of him daily—how the sturdy Cumbrian yeoman would have rejoiced in so stalwart a son! Thus, with this vague bond of sympathy with a man whom he had never seen, never known, so long ago, so cruelly dead, this intuitive divination of his paternal sentiment, Varney's fatherly attitude grew more definite daily and became accustomed, and he was jealous of the influence of Colannah, who in turn was jealous of his influence.
Now as Varney stood in the dusky trading-house among the kegs and bags and bales of goods, the high peak of the interior of the roof lost in the lofty shadows, he felt that he had been much in default in long-past years, and he experienced a very definite pang of conscience as Otasite swung abruptly around a stack of arms, a new rifle in his hand, the flint and pan of which he had been keenly examining.
He lifted his eyes suddenly with that long-lashed dreary look of his childhood.
"Did you hear of any Queetlees in Charlestown?" he asked.