The Frontiersmen

by Charles Egbert Craddock

The other Cherokee cried warningly, "Akee-rooka! Akee-rooka!" (I will shoot!) Then drew his pistol and fired.

The next moment, perhaps for many moments thereafter, none of them knew very definitely what had happened. There was a cloud of dust, a terrific detonation, a sudden absolute darkness, as in some revulsion of nature, a stifling sensation. They were penned within the grotto by a great fragment of the beetling cliff. Doubtless it had been previously fractured by the action of continuous freezes, and the concussion of the pistol shot in the restricted space of the cave below had brought it down.

The days went on. The men were missed after a time, but a considerable interval had elapsed. The two strangers had of late kept themselves much apart, owing to their absorption and their covert methods of seeking for gold. It was an ill-ordered, roaming, sylvan life they led at best. The cheera-taghe, although "beloved men" and priests of their strange and savage religion, were but wild Indians, and their temporary absence created no surprise. In fact, until sought with anxiety when the drought had become excessive and threatened the later crops, and the services of the cheera-taghe were necessary to invoke and with wild barbaric ceremonials bring down the lightning and thunder to clear the atmosphere and the rain to refresh the soil, it was not ascertained that the prophets had definitely disappeared.

Then it was that excitement supervened, search, anxiety, grief, fear. There began to be vague rumors of untoward sounds, remembered rather than noticed at the time. Faint explosions had been heard in the night as if under the ground, and again in broad daylight as if in the air. None could imagine that the doomed men had sought to attract the attention of the town by firing off their pistols, thus utilizing their scanty ammunition. The strain grew intense; superstitious fancies supplemented the real mystery; the place was finally abandoned, and thus Nilaque Great became a "waste town."

It was ten years, perhaps, after this blight had fallen upon it, that one day as the pack-train came down the valley of the Little Tennessee, on its autumnal return trip to Charlestown, the snow began to sift down. An unseasonable storm it was, for the winter had hardly set in. A north wind sprang up; the snow was soon heavily driving; within an hour the woods, still in the red leafage of autumn, were covered with snow and encased in ice. Only by a strenuous effort would the train be able to pass the old "waste town" before the early dusk,—a mile or two at most; but it was hoped that this might suffice to keep the ghosts out of the bounds of visibility. The roaring bacchanalian glees with which the pack-men set the melancholy sheeted woods aquiver might well send the ghosts out of earshot, presuming them endowed with volition.

Suddenly Cuddy Barnett discovered that one of the pack-horses of his own especial charge was missing,—a good bay with a load of fine dressed deerskins to take to Charlestown, then the great mart of all this far region. A recollection of a sharp curve in the trading-path, running dangerously near a bluff bank, came abruptly into his mind. Drifts had lodged in its jagged crevices, and it might well have chanced that here the animal had lost his footing and slipped out of the steadily trotting file along the river bank unnoticed in the blinding snow.

This theory seemed eminently plausible to his comrades, but when they learned that he was of the opinion that the disaster had happened at the old "waste town," as he had there first missed the animal in the file, not one would go back with him to search the locality,—not for the horse, not for the peltry, not even to avert the displeasure of their employer in Charlestown. Barnett besought their aid for a time, urging the project of rescue as they all sat around the roaring camp-fire under the sheltering branches of a cluster of fir trees that, acting as wind-break, served to fend off in some degree the fury of the storm. The ruddy flare illumined far shadowy aisles of the snowy wilderness, all agloom with the early dusk. Despite the falling flakes, they could still see the picketed pack-horses, now freed from their burdens, huddling together and holding down their heads to the icy blast as they munched their forage. The supper of the young pack-men was broiling on the coals; their faces were florid with the keen wind, their coonskin caps all crested with snow; and the fringes of their buckskin raiment had tinkling pendants of icicles; but although they had found good cheer in a chortling jug, uncorked as the first preliminary of encamping, they had not yet imbibed sufficient fictitious courage to set at naught their fears of the old "waste town."

Barnett at last acquiesced in the relinquishment of his desire of rescue. Some losses must needs occur in a great trade, and considering the stress of the weather, the long distances traversed, the dangers of the lonely wildernesses in the territory of savages, the incident would doubtless be leniently overlooked. And then he bethought himself of the horse,—a good horse, stout, swift, kindly disposed; a hard fate the animal had encountered,—abandoned here to starve in these bleak winter woods. Perhaps he might be lying there at the foot of the cliffs with a broken leg, suffering the immeasurable agonies of a dumb beast, for the lack of a merciful pistol-ball to put him at peace. Barnett could not resist the mute appeal of his fancy.

Presently he was trudging alone along the icy path. The flare of the red fire grew dim behind him; the last flicker faded. The woods were all unillumined, ghastly white, with a hovering gray shadow. The song of the bivouac fainted in the distance and failed; the echo grew doubtful and dull; and now in absolute silence that somehow set his nerves aquiver he was coming in with the dreary dusk and the driving snow to the old "waste town," Nilaque Great.

More silent even than the wilderness it seemed with the muffling drifts heavy on the roofs, blocking the dark open doors of the tenantless dwellings, lying in fluffy masses on the boughs of the trees that had once made the desert spaces so pleasantly umbrageous in those sweet summers so long ago. The great circular council-house, shaped like a dome, was whitely aglimmer against the gray twilight and the wintry background of the woods and mountains,—only the vaguest suggestions of heights seen through the ceaseless whirl of the crystalline flakes. No wolf now, although remembering the casual glimpse he had had he was prepared with rifle and pistol, and held his knife in his hand; no bear; no sign of living creature until, as he skirted the jagged bluff of the river where he fancied the horse might have lost his footing, he heard a sudden whinny of welcome, the sound keen and eerie and intrusive in the strange breathless solemnity of the silent place.