Otasite, however, was all unaware of the spell cast upon him when he came into the chungke-yard the next day, arrayed in his finest garb, the white dressed doeskin glittering in the sun, his necklaces of beads, his belt of wolf fangs, his flying feet in their white moccasins—all catching the light with a differing effect of brilliancy.
Varney watched him;—with the two eagle feathers stiff and erect on his proud head, his two incongruous long auburn curls, that did duty as a "war-lock," floating backward in the breeze, he ran so deftly, so swiftly, with so assured and so graceful a gait that the mere observation of such symmetrical motion was a pleasure. The trader had scarcely a pulse of anxiety. Indeed, disingenuously profiting by the tip afforded by Herbert's Spring, he was heavily backing Wyejah as a winner!
A windy day it was; the clouds raced through the sky, and their shadows skimming over the valleys and slopes challenged their speed. The Tennessee River was singing, singing! The mountains were as clearly and definitely blue as the heavens. That revelation of ranges on the far horizon unaccustomed to the view, only vouchsafed by some necromancy of the clarified autumnal air, never before seemed so distinct, so alluring—new lands, new hopes, new life they suggested. Wyejah's scarlet attire, its fringes tasseled with the spurs of the wild turkey, rendered his lithe figure strongly marked against these illusory ethereal tints as he sped abreast with Otasite along the level sandy stretch of the chungke-yard. And how well he played! Varney realized this with a satisfaction as of having already won his wagers, many and large, for Otasite would leave the nation should he be victorious, and having drunk unwittingly of Herbert's Spring, he could not quit the Cherokee country, although he himself was still unaware of having quaffed of those mystic waters. Therefore defeat was obviously his portion. Whenever the trader thought anew of his secret knowledge of this fact he offered odds on Wyejah, and glanced at him with approbation—at the young Indian warrior's face fiercely, eagerly smiling, his great flattened ears distended on their wire hoops, his dark eyes full of sombre brilliance. How well he played! and how hard the skill of his opponent pressed him! How accurate was the aim of the long lance of Otasite as he poised his weight on the supple tips of his white moccasins and hurled the missile through the air; how strong and firm his grasp that sent the circular, quartz chungke-stone, whirling along the sand; how tirelessly his long sinewy steps sped back and forth in the swift dashes up and down the smooth spaces of the chungke-yard; how faithfully he was doing his best, regardless of his own preference in the interests that he had adventured on the result! How like a Briton born it was, Abram Varney thought, for he alone knew of Otasite's resolution, and the significance of the game to him, that the boy could thus see fair play between the factions that warred within him for his future. He had staked the future on the event,—and suddenly it was the present!
A wild clamor of excitement, of applause, rose up from the throats of the crowd in the natural amphitheatre, clanging and clattering in long guttural cries,—all intensified by a relish of the unexpected, a joy in a new sensation, for Wyejah had never before been beaten, and Otasite was the victor at chungke.
Abram Varney felt his heart leap into his throat, then sink like lead; Colannah, triumphant, knowing naught of the subtler significance of the contest, joyful, aglow with pride, rose up in his splendid feathered mantle, standing high on the slope, to sign to the boy his pleasure in the victory. The sunlight fell, glittering very white, on the young fellow's doeskin garb, his prickly belt of fangs, his bare chest with the blue warrior's marks, the curls of his auburn scalp-lock tossing in the wind. He had seemed hitherto stoical, unmoved by victory as he would have appeared in defeat; but Varney, eager to get at him, to combat his resolution, knew that he was stunned by the complications presented by this falling out of the event. He visibly faltered as his eye met the triumph and affection expressed in Colannah's quivering old face. He could not respond to its congratulation. He dropped on one knee suddenly, bending low, affecting to find something amiss with one of his moccasins.
Wyejah, too, could seem unmoved by victory, but indifference to defeat was more difficult to simulate. He had in the first moment of its realization felt the blood rush to his head; despite his strong nerve his hand trembled; the smile of placidity which it was a point of honor to preserve became a fixed grin. Several other young braves had come into the yard, and were idly tossing the lance at the great chungke-pole—as a billiardist of the civilized life of that day might pocket the balls with a purposeless cue after a match. Wyejah, too, had cast his lance aslant; then he idly hurled the chungke-stone with a muscular fling along the spaces of the white sand. His nerve was shaken, his aim amiss, his great strength deflected. The heavy discoidal quartz stone skimmed through the air above the stretch of sand, and striking with its beveled edge the kneeling figure on the temple, the future of the victor at chungke became in one moment the past.
The trader could only have likened the scene that ensued to the moment of an earthquake or some other stupendous convulsion of nature. In the midst of the confusion, the wild cries, the swift running figures, the surging of the crowds into the chungke-yard that obliterated the wide glare of the sun on the white sand, he made good his escape. He knew enough of the trend of Cherokee thought to be prescient of the fate of the scapegoat. Colannah in the first burst of grief he knew would blame himself that he should have tempted fate by the mystic draught from Herbert's Spring to hold here that bright young form for seven years longer. How sadly true!—for seven years Otasite would remain, and seven to that, and, alack, seven more, and forever! Soon, however, the natural impulses of the Indian's temper, intensified by long cultivation, would be reasserted. He would cast about for revenge, remembering the first suggestion of the departure of Otasite, and from whom it had emanated. But for the English trader and his specious wiles, the old chief would argue, would Otasite have thought of forsaking his foster nation, his adopted father, for the selfish, indifferent British, the "Goweno" at Charlestown, who cared for him nothing? The trader it was who had brought this calamity upon them, who had in effect, by the hand of another, administered the fatal draught. Seek for him!—hale him forth! —wreak upon him the just, unappeasable vengeance of the forever bereaved!
The old trader had evinced an instinct in flight and concealment that an animal might envy. No probable hiding-place he selected, such as might be known or divined—a cave, the attic of his trading-house, the cellar beneath—all obvious, all instantly explored. Instead, he slipped into a rift in the rocks along the river-bank. Myriads of such crevices there were in the tilted strata—unheeded, unremarked, too strait and restricted to suggest the idea of refuge, too infinitely numerous for search. There, unable in the narrow compass to turn, even to shift a numbing muscle of his lean old body, in all the constraint of a standing posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its fossils,—as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed hence,—or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds. He listened to the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing party went out to overtake him, presumably on his way to Charlestown, maintaining a very high rate of speed, for the Cherokees of that period had some famously fine horses.
Straining his senses—all unnaturally alert—he distinguished, as the afternoon wore on, the details of the preparations for the barbarous sepulture of the young Briton. Now and then the cracking of rifle-shots betokened the shooting of his horses and cattle and all the living things among his possessions—a practice already in its decadence among the Cherokees, and later, influenced by the utilitarian methods of civilization, altogether abandoned. Swift steps here and there throughout the town intimated errands to gather all his choicest effects to be buried with him, for his future use. To this custom, it is said, and the great security of the fashioning of the sepulchres of the Cherokees, may be attributed the fact that little of their pottery, arms, beads, medals, the more indestructible of their personal possessions, can be found in this region where so lately they were a numerous people; for the effects of the dead, however valued, were never removed or the graves robbed, even by an Indian enemy. The Cherokees rarely permitted the presence of an alien at the ceremonies of the interment of one of the tribe; but Varney in times past had seen and heard enough to realize, without any definite effort of the imagination, how Otasite, arrayed in his most gorgeous apparel, his beautiful English face painted vermilion, would be placed in a sitting posture in front of his house, and there in the sunlit afternoon remain for a space, looking in, as it were, at the open door. Presently sounded the wild lamentations and melancholy cadences of the funeral song; the tones rose successively from a deep bass to a tenor, then to a shrill treble, falling again to a full bass chorus, with the progression of the mystic syllables, "Yah! Yo-he-wah! Yah! Yo-he-wah!" (said to signify "Jehovah"). This announced that the funeral procession, bearing the body, was going thrice around the house of the dead, where he had lived in familiar happiness these many years, and beneath which he would rest in solemn silence in his deep, deep grave, covered with heavy timbers and many layers of bark, and the stanch red clay, maintaining a sitting posture, and facing the east, while the domestic life of homely cheer would go on over his unheeding head as he awaited the distant and universal resurrection of the body, in which the Cherokee religion inculcated a full and firm faith.
The sun went down, and through all the night sounded the plaints of grief. Late the moon rose, striking aslant on the melancholy Tennessee River, full of deep shadows and vaguely pathetic pallid glimmers. A wind sprang up for a time, then suddenly sank to silence and stillness. A frost fell with a keen icy chill. Mists gathered, and the day did not break,—it seemed as if it might never dawn again; only a pallid visibility came gradually upon clouds that had enshrouded all the world. The earth and the sky were alike indistinguishable; the mountains were as valleys, the valleys as plains. One might scarcely make shift to see a hand before the face. Through this white pall, this cloud of nullity, came ever the dolorous chant, "Yo-he-ta-wah! Yo-he-ta-weh! Yo-he-ta-hah! Yo-he-ta-heh!" as in their grief and poignant bereavement the ignorant and barbarous Indians called upon the God who made them, and He who made them savages doubtless heard them.