"Mais, M'sieur!" grimaced Willinawaugh, in mimicry. Then "Mais M'sieur!" he threw up both hands. "Mais, M'sieur!" he shrieked in harsh derision to the unresponsive skies.
Alexander knew that the Baron Des Johnnes had been taken to Charlestown and examined, and although nothing could be proved against him, it had been deemed expedient to ship him off to England. Perhaps the authorities were of opinion that a man with such conversational facilities as eight or ten languages had best be kept where "least said, soonest mended."
But for the repeated harsh treatment that the Cherokees sustained from the English settlers, the ingratiating arts of the French might have failed to find so ready a response. Sedate of manner and of a grave cast of mind themselves, the Indians could ill tolerate the levity, the gaieté de cœur, of the French, whom they pronounced "light as a feather, fickle as the wind, and deceitful as serpents."
With this intimation of Willinawaugh's reserves of irritability the pioneers journeyed on, a trifle more ill at ease in mind, which was an added hardship, since their physical sufferings were intensifying with every long mile of continued effort. They began to wonder how they, supposed to be French, would fare when they should meet other Cherokees, perhaps more disposed than Willinawaugh to adhere to the terms of their treaty to kill or make prisoner every Frenchman who should venture into the Cherokee Nation, yet on the other hand perhaps more competent by virtue of a familiarity with the language to detect and resent the fact that they were not of the French nationality. Already Willinawaugh had counseled that they should go further than Choté, to ply their trade in furs, for Choté was dangerously near the English fort for a Frenchman; one of the Tuckaleechee towns on the Canot River was a preferable location, and he promised to contrive to slip them past Fort Loudon without the commandant's knowledge.
They restrained all expression of objection or discomfort and bore their growing distresses with a fortitude that might rival the stoicism of a savage. Only when an aside was possible, MacLeod besought his wife to loose the burden of one of the packhorses and mount the animal herself. She shook her head resolutely. She had already suffered grief enough for the household stores she had left behind. To these precious remaining possessions she clung desperately. "When I can no longer walk," she said, with a flash in her eye which admonished him to desist.
They offered no comment on their route, although it seemed that they had climbed the mountain two days ago for the express purpose of descending it again, but on the eastern side. MacLeod, however, at length realized that the Indian was following some faint trace, well distinguishable to his skilled eye, and the difficulties of the steep descent were rendered more tolerable by his faith in the competence of his guide. The packhorses found it hard work filing down the sharp declivities and sustaining the equilibrium of their burden. The chief, with his lordly impatience and superiority to domestic concerns, evidently fumed because of the delay they occasioned, and had he not supposed that the contents of the bales of goods were merchandise and trinkets to be bartered with the Indians for peltry, instead of Odalie's slim resources of housekeeping wares,—sheets, and table-linen and garments, and frugal supplies of flax and seeds,—he would not have suffered the slow progress.
Through the new country below, that they had watched from the heights, they went now, the mountains standing sentinel all around the horizon—east and west, and north and south, sometimes nearer, sometimes more distant; always mountains in sight, like some everlastingly uplifting thought, luring a life to a higher plane of being. Now and again the way wended along the bank of a river, with the steeps showing in the waters below as well as against the sky above, and one day when they had but recently broken their camp on its shores there shot out from beneath an overhanging boscage of papaw trees a swift, arrowy thing akin to a fish, akin to a bird—an Indian canoe, in which were three braves.
The poor pioneers were exhausted with their long and swift journey; their hearts, which had been stanch within them, could but fail with the failure of physical strength. Their courage only sufficed to hold them to a mute endurance of a dreadful expectation, and a suspense that set every nerve a-quiver. The boatmen had cried out with a wild, fierce note of surprise on perceiving the party, and the canoe was coming straight across to the bank as fast as the winglike paddles could propel it. Willinawaugh rode slowly down to meet them, and in contrast to the usual impassive manners of the Indians he replied to the agitated hail in a tone of tense and eager excitement. There ensued evidently an exchange of news, of a nature which boded little good to the settlers. Dark anger gathered on the brow of the chieftain as he listened when the braves had bounded upon the bank, and more than once he cried out inarticulately like a wild beast in pain and rage. Perhaps it is rare that a man has such a moment in his life as Alexander experienced when one of the savages, a ferocious brute, turned with a wild, untamed, indigenous fury kindling in his eyes, and drawing his tomahawk from his belt smiled fiercely upon the silent, motionless little band, his deadly racial hatred reinforced by a thousand bitter grudges and wrongs.
Hamish's fingers trembled on his gun, but ostensibly no one moved. Willinawaugh hastily interposed, speaking but the magic words—"Flanzy—Flinch!" Then still in English, as if to reassure the pioneers—"Go Choté—Old Town—buy fur!"
The hatred died out of the fierce Indian faces. The French in the South, as has been said, had always used every art to detach the Cherokees from the British interest, and even now the men who had abandoned Fort Duquesne, escaping down the Ohio River, were sending emissaries up the Tsullakee, to the Lower Towns, there finding fruitful soil in which to sow the seeds of dissension against the English. The assertion that these travelers were French, and the fact that by receiving persons of this nation the Cherokees could requite with even a trivial and diplomatic injury some faint degree of the wrong which they considered they had sustained from the Virginians, was more than adequate to nullify for the time the rage they felt against these pioneers as of the white race.