The Frontiersmen

by Charles Egbert Craddock

At length the fact was divined by MacVintie. More than the ordinary fear of capture animated Attusah of Kanootare. Colonel Grant's treatment of his prisoners was humane as the laws of war require. Moreover, his authority, heavily reinforced by threats of pains and penalties, had sufficed, except in a few instances, to restrain the Chickasaw allies of the British from wreaking their vengeance on the captive Cherokees in the usual tribal method of fire and torture. The inference was obvious. Attusah of Kanootare was particularly obnoxious to the British government, the civil as well as the military authorities, and fleeing from death himself, he intended at all hazards to prevent the escape of his prisoner, who would give the alarm, and inaugurate pursuit from the party of the ensign.

In this connection a new development attracted the attention of MacVintie. As they advanced deeper and deeper into the Cherokee country and the signs and sights of war grew remote,—no sounds of volleys nor even distant dropping shots clanging from the echoes, no wreaths of smoke floating among the hills, no flare of flames flinging crude red and yellow streaks across the luminous velvet azure of distant mountains with their silver haze, viewed through vistas of craggy chasms near at hand,—he observed a lessening of cordiality in the manner of the other two Indians toward the Northward Warrior, and a frequency on his part to protest that he was a great ada-wehi, and was dead although he appeared alive. The truth soon dawned upon the shrewd Scotchman, albeit he understood only so much Cherokee as he had chanced to catch up in his previous campaign in this region with Montgomerie and the present expedition. Attusah was for some reason obnoxious to his own people as well as to the British, and was in effect a fugitive from both factions. Indeed, the other two Indians presently manifested a disposition to avoid him. After much wrangling and obvious discontent and smouldering suspicion, one lagged systematically, and, the pace being speedy, contrived to fairly quit the party. Digatiski accompanied them two more days, then, openly avowing his intent, fell away from the line of march. It was instantly diverted toward the Little Tennessee River, on the western side of the Great Smoky Mountains; and as Attusah realized that without his connivance his captive's escape had become impossible, MacVintie found himself unbound, ungagged, and the society of the ada-wehi as pleasant as that of a savage ghost can well be.

There was now no effort to escape. MacVintie's obvious policy was to await with what patience he might the appearance of the British vanguard, who in the sheer vaunt of victory would march from one end of the unresisting territory to the other, that all might witness and bow before the triumph of the royal authority. As yet remote from the advance of the troops, he dared not quit his captor in these sequestered regions lest he fall into the power of more inimical Cherokees, maddened by disaster, overwhelmed in ruin, furious, and thirsting for revenge for the slaughter of their nearest and dearest, and the ashes of their homes.

Attusah made known his reason for his own uncharacteristic leniency to a soldier of this ruthless army, as they sat together by the shady river-side. He went through the dumb show of repeatedly offering to his captive guest the fish they had caught, pressing additional portions upon him, laughing significantly and joyously throughout his mimicry. Then suddenly grave, he seized the Highlander's left arm, giving it an earnest grasp about the wrist, the elbow, then close to the shoulder to intimate that he spared him for his gift to the needy and helpless.

But Kenneth MacVintie, remembering his ill-starred generosity, flushed to the eyebrows, so little it became his record as a soldier, he thought, that he should be captured and stand in danger of his life by reason of the unmilitary performance of feeding a babbling pappoose.

Attusah, however, could but love him for it; he loved the soldier for his kind heart, he said. For great as he himself was, the Northward Warrior, he had known how bitter it was to lack kindness.

"It is not happy to be an ada-wehi!" he confessed, "for those who believe fear those who do not!"

And tearing open the throat of his bead-embroidered shirt to reveal the frightful gashes of the wounds in his breast, he told the story of his legal death, with tears in his gay eyes, and a tremor of grief in the proud intonations of his voice, that thus had been requited a feat, the just guerdon of which should have been the warrior's crown,—in the bestowal of which, but for a cowardly fear of the English, all the tribe would have concurred.

"Akee-o-hoosa!" (I am dead!) he said, pointing at the scars. And the Highlander felt that death had obviously been in every stroke, and hardly wondered that they who had seen the blows dealt should now account the appearance of the man a spectral manifestation, his unquiet ghost.

Then, Attusah's mood changing suddenly, "Tsida-wei-yu!" (I am a great ada-wehi!) he boasted airily.