And suddenly it was shining in his face, as it came up over the Great Smoky Mountains, sending its first long slanting wintry beams through the narrow portal to the hearth where he had lain asleep before the ashes of the once "sacred fire," covered with the fresh ashes of last night's vigil, for they too were dead. He staggered to his feet and went out into the glistening dawn of this snowy sunlit day, hardly able to reconcile its aspect with the summer-tide scene he had just quitted. Now and again he paused, half-bewildered, as if unfamiliar with the pathetic miseries of the old "waste town"—the scene in his mind savored far more of reality.
The necessity of caring for the pack-horse, perhaps better than aught else, served to restore his faculties. He found it easy now to climb down the jagged face of the bluffs of the river bank, whence the snow had vanished, for in the changeable southern climate a sudden thaw had begun in the earlier hours and now the warm sun was setting all the trees and eaves adrip. As he stood below the cliff on the sandy slope whence the snow had slipped down into the river, the volume of which the storm of last night would much increase after the long drought of the summer, he carefully examined the horse to ascertain what injuries he might have sustained; a few abrasions on the right flank seemed to be all, until the animal moved, a bit stiffly with the near fore leg. This attracted Barnett's attention to a gash on the knee received doubtless when the horse first fell on the ground,—a queer gash, long, jagged, unaccountable, as if it had been made by a dull blade. Glancing down to search the gravel, the pack-man discerned, half-imbedded in the sand, the edge of a fragment of a knife, a scalping-knife, broken half in two; and there, lying not three yards away, was a handle attached to a belt heavily wrought with roanoke,—only a bit of the belt,—and the other half of the knife.
The pack-man's hand trembled and his florid cheek went pale, for these lay just under the sharp edge of a huge fragment of rock that had evidently fallen from the cliff above, breaking the blade and holding the belt fast.
How long he stood and stared he did not know. For a time he heard without realizing the significance of the sounds the whoops and shouts of his comrades, wildly racing back through the old "waste town" in search of him; but although in the strenuous duty of his rescue they would venture to pass it in broad daylight, no ardor of persuasion could induce them to linger there to investigate the locality of his find, or to aid in moving the rock and exploring the grotto that had evidently proved a sepulchre.
On the contrary, they deemed the discovery might be resented by the Indians as intrusive, and, keeping the secret, they made haste to get out of the country with even more speed than their wont. Cuthbert Barnett, however, carried his information to the authorities in Charlestown, who, promptly acting upon it, solved the mystery of the fate of the cheera-taghe.
Since peace with the Cherokees was becoming more and more precarious, some satisfaction was experienced by the Royal Governor of South Carolina, James Glen, at that time, in being able to urge upon the attention of the head-men of the tribe the fact that, although the two white strangers had obviously been captured in the act of robbing Cherokee soil of its gold, they had as evidently been unarmed, and the Irishman, a British subject, had been shot down by one of the cheera-taghe, for there was the bullet still imbedded firmly in the sternum of his broad chest. Thus a political crisis, which the event had threatened, was averted.
Despite the evil chance that had befallen the gold-seekers, now widely bruited abroad, stealthy efforts were ever and anon made by the hardy frontier prospectors of those days, already busy in the richer deposits of the Ayrate division of the Cherokee country, to pan also the sands of the banks of the Tennessee; but the yield here was never again worth the work, and the interest in the possibility of securing "pay gravel" in this region died out, until the later excitements of the discovery of the precious metal in a neighboring locality, Coca Creek, during the last century.
The old "waste town" long remained a ruin, and at last fell away to a mere memory.