The Frontiersmen

by Charles Egbert Craddock

And here he was protesting that he was dead and a ghost. "Akee-o-hoosa! Akee-o-hoosa! Tsida-wei-yu!" he cried continually.

Indeed, this seemed to be the only reasonable method of accounting for the renewed presence in the world of a man known to be dead. This was his status, he argued. He was a dead man, and this was his captive. The Cherokee nation could not pretend to follow with its control the actions of a dead man. They themselves had pronounced him dead. He had no place in the war. He had been forbidden, on account of his official death, to compete for the honors of the campaign. Apart from his former status as a Cherokee, merely as a supernatural being, a spirit, an ada-wehi, he had captured this British soldier, who was therefore the property of a dead man. And the Cherokee law of all things and before all things forbade interference with the effects of the dead.

Despite the curling contempt on the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the details of this choice argument. There was an illogical inversion of values in the experience of the tribe, and while they could not now accept the worthless figments of long ago, it was not vouchsafed to them to enjoy the substantial merits of the new order of things. Reason, powder, diplomacy, had brought the Cherokee nation to a point of humiliation to which superstition, savagery, and the simplicities of the tomahawk had never descended in "the good old times." Reason was never so befuddled of aspect, civilization never so undesired as now. In their own expanded outlook at life, however, they could not afford to ignore the views of Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the advocate of all the newer methods, in so important a matter as the release of a British prisoner of war on the strange pretext that his captor was a ghost of a peculiar spectral power, an ada-wehi, although this course would have been more agreeable to the "old beloved" theories of their halcyon days of eld, when the Cherokee name was a terror and a threat.

Therefore, averse as they were to subscribe to the modern methods which had wrought them such woe and humiliation and defeat, the dominant superstition of the race now fell far short of the fantasy of liberating a British prisoner at this crisis under the influence of any spectral manifestation whatsoever. The council was obviously steeled against this proposition, as MacVintie shortly perceived, and equally determined that the ada-wehi must needs exert phenomenal and magical powers indeed to avoid yet making good the nation's pledge of his death to the British government, and becoming a ghost in serious earnest. MacVintie's heart sank within him as he noted the hardening of the lines of their grave harsh faces and the affirmative nodding of the feather-crested heads, conferring together, as the decision was reached.

It accorded, however, with their ancient custom to postpone over a night the execution of any sentence of special weight, and therefore the council adjourned to the next day, the two prisoners being left in the deserted building, each securely bound with a rope to a pillar of the series which upheld the roof of the strange circular edifice. This colonnade stood about four feet from the wall, and the interval between was occupied by a divan, fashioned of dexterously woven cane, extending around the room; and as the prisoners could seat themselves here, or lie at full length, they were subjected to no greater hardship than was consistent with their safe custody.

A sentinel with his musket on his shoulder stood at the door, and the sun was going down. Kenneth MacVintie could see through the open portal the red glow in the waters of the Tennessee River. Now and then a flake of a glittering white density glided through it, which his eyes, accustomed to long distances, discriminated as a swan. Thunder-heads, however, were gathering above the eastern slopes and the mountains were a lowering slate-toned purple, save when a sudden flash of lightning roused them to a vivid show of green.

The dull red hue of the interior of the council-house darkened gradually; the embers of the council-fire faded into the gray ash, and the night came sullen and threatening before its time.

The young Highlander sought to bend his mind to the realization that his days on earth were well-nigh ended, and that it behooved him to think on the morrow elsewhere. He had an old-fashioned religious faith presumed to be fitted for any emergency, but in seeking to recall its dogmas and find such consolation in its theories as might sustain a martyr at the stake, he was continually distracted with the momentous present.

The two prisoners could no longer see each other, and the little gestures and significant glances which had supplemented their few words, and made up for the lack of better conversational facilities were impracticable in the darkness.

The silent obscurity was strangely lonely. MacVintie began to doubt if the other still lived.