The Story of Old Fort Loudon

by Charles Egbert Craddock

This minuet was a splendid maze to Hamish's limited experience, as the firelight glowed and flashed on the scarlet uniforms and the delicate, dainty tints of the gowns of the ladies, giving out the gloss of satin and now and again showing the soft whiteness of a bare arm held upward to the clasp of a partner's hand in a lace ruffle and a red sleeve in the graceful attitudes prescribed by the dance. The measured and stately step, the slow, smooth whirl, the swinging changing postures, the fair smiling faces and shining eyes, all seemed curiously enhanced by the environment—the background of boughs of holly on the walls, and the military suggestions of the metallic flashing of the arms resting on the line of deer antlers that encircled the room—it was like a bird singing its roundelay perched in a cannon's mouth.

Hamish himself stood against the wall, and for a time it may be doubted if any one saw how very handsomely his "lovely locks" were plaited, so did he court the shadows. Sandy noted with secret amusement how persistently the boy's eyes followed the beautiful Miss Rush, for it was evident that she was nineteen or twenty years of age, at least three years older than her latest admirer.

Despite his sudden infatuation, however, Hamish was a person of excellent good sense, and he soon saw the fatuity of this worship from afar. "Let the ensign and the lieutenants pine to death," he thought—then with the rough old frontier joke, "I'm saving my scalp for the Injuns." Nevertheless he was acutely glad that his hair was like a gentleman's, and when he finally ventured out of the crowd he secured, to his great elation, a partner for one of the contra-dances that succeeded the minuet, for the men so greatly outnumbered the women that this argued considerable enterprise on a newcomer's part. Hamish had determined to dance, if with nobody but Mrs. Halsing; but there were other girlish flowers, somewhat overshadowed by the queens of the parterre, whom he found when his eyes had lost their dazing gloat upon the beauty of the belle of the settlement—mere little daisies or violets, as near half wild as himself, knowing hardly more of civilized society than he did. Most of these were clad in bright homespun; one or two were so very young that they found it amazing sport, and in truth so did he, although he had the style of patronizing the enterprise, to plunge out of the great hall and scamper across the snowy parade to a room, emptied by the gradual exhaustion of the munitions it had contained, and now devoted to the entertainment of the children of the settlers, who it is needless to say had come necessarily with the elder members of the pioneer families to participate in the gayeties of the fort. It was a danger not to be contemplated to leave them in the wholly deserted settlement; so, sequestered here in this big room, bare of all but holly boughs upon the wall and a great fire and a bench or two about the chimney corner, they added éclat to the occasion of the officers' ball by reason of the enthusiastic spirit that pervaded the Christmas games under the direction of Corporal O'Flynn. He had been delegated to supervise and control the juvenile contingent, being constituted master of the revels. With his wild Irish spirit aflame he was in his element. A finer looking Bruin than he was when enveloped in a great bearskin never came out of the woods, and certainly none more active as he chased the youthful pioneers, who were screaming shrilly, from one side of the hall to the other. As "Poor Puss" he struggled frantically for a corner, failing, however, when a settler of the advanced age of four, but mighty enterprising, made in swiftly between his knees, gave him a tremendous fall, and gained the coveted goal. "Mily, mily bright" was infinitely enlivened by the presence of the recruits from the ball-room, and the romp became tumultuous when Hamish undertook the rôle of one of the witches that waited by the way to intercept those—among whom was the corporal—who sought to get there by "candle-light," and who were assured that they could do this if their "legs were long enough." When he pursued the soldier and his juvenile party from one side of the room to the other, winding and doubling and almost tumbling into the fire, the delighted screams of the children were as loud and shrill as if they were all being scalped, and caused the sentries in the block-house towers to look in surprise and doubt in that direction more than once, and finally brought Captain Stuart from the officers' quarters to see for himself what was going on. As he stood in the door with his imperious face, his bluff manner, his military dress, and his great muscular height, the children, inspired by that love of the incongruous which always characterizes childhood, swarmed about him with the insistence that he should be blindfolded in Blindman's Buff. And surely he proved the champion blind man of the world! After one benighted stumbling rush half across the room, amidst a storm of squealing ecstasy, he plunged among his pygmy enemies with such startling success as to have caught two or three by the hair of their heads with one hand, while with the other he was laying about him with such discrimination that his craft became apparent. He was not playing fair!—he could see!—he peeped! he peeped! and his laugh being much resented, he was put to the door by his small enemies, who evidently expected him to feel such repentance as he might experience if he were to be court-martialed.

O'Flynn, watching him go off across the snowy shadowy parade, noticed that he did not at once return to the open door of the great hall where the swirl of the dance could be seen in a kaleidoscopic glow of color, and whence the glad music came forth in a mellow gush of sound; but stood at some little distance watching the progress of the corporal of the guard, who with the relief was on his way to the posts of the sentinels; then Stuart disappeared within one of the block-houses, evidently ascending to the tower; after an interval he came out and again traversed the parade, going diagonally across the whole enclosure without doubt to the block-house at the further bastion; thus from these two coigns of vantage he could survey the whole of the region on the four sides of the fort.

"I'll go bail, ould Foxy," said Corporal O'Flynn, apostrophizing his superior officer under his breath, "that there's nothin' that your sharp eyes doesn't see—if it's just a snake takin' advantage o' the privacy o' the dark hour to slough his skin. But I'd give ye," he hesitated, "me blessin', if you'd tell me what 'tis ye're lookin' for. I want to know, not from a meddlesome sphirit, but jist from sheer curiosity—because my mother was a woman an' not a witch."

For Captain Stuart had encountered a difficulty in these simple backwoods Christmas festivities which was altogether unexpected. He had diligently considered the odds against success, in which, however, the chief seemed the lack of appropriate refreshment, for one could not serve venison and buffalo and wild fowl to hunters as luxuries, and the limited compass and utilitarian character of the goods sent from the base of supplies over the mountains rendered even the accumulation of the requisite materials for the punch-bowl a matter of forethought and skilled strategy. After the wheat-bread had been secured to make the ramequins this feature came near to being dropped because of the difficulty of obtaining the simple ingredients of eggs and cheese to compound the farce wherewith they should be spread. But this too had been accomplished. The method of providing for the safety and entertainment of the children of the settlers, without whom they could not leave home yet whose presence would have hindered if not destroyed the enjoyment of the elders, seemed a stroke of genius. The soldiers and non-commissioned officers were satisfactorily assigned a share in the entertainment appropriate to their military rank and in consonance with their taste, and were even now carousing gayly in their quarters, where there was more Christmas spirit in circulation than spirituous liquor, for the commandant's orders were niggardly indeed as to serving out the portions of tafia, not in the interests of temperance so much as of discipline in view of their perilous situation so far from help, so alone in the midst of hordes of inimical savages; his parsimony in this regard passed with them as necessity, since they knew that rum was hard to come by, and even this meager dole was infrequent and a luxury. Therefore they drank their thimbleful with warm hearts and cool heads; the riotous roared out wild songs and vied with one another in wrestling matches or boxing encounters; the more sedate played cards or dominoes close in to the light of the flaring fire, or listened with ever fresh interest to the great stories often told by the gray-headed drum-major who had served under the Duke of Cumberland in foreign lands, and promptly smote upon the mouth any man who spoke of his royal highness as "Billy the Butcher";[8] for there were Scotchmen in the garrison intolerant of the title of "Hero of Culloden," having more or less remote associations with an experience delicately mentioned in Scotland as "being out in the Forty-five." With each fresh narration the drum-major produced new historical details of the duke's famous fields and added a few to the sum of the enemies killed and wounded, till it seemed that if the years should spare him, it would one day be demonstrated that the warlike William Augustus had in any specified battle slain more men by sword and bayonet and good leaden ball than were ever mustered into any army on the face of the earth. All the soldiers were in their spruce parade trim, and every man had a bunch of holly in his hat.

Even the Indians had been considered. In response to the invitation, they had sent the previous day their symbolic white swan's wings painted with streaks of white clay, and these were conspicuously placed in the decorated hall. The gates of the fort that morning had been flung wide open to all who would come. Tafia—in judiciously small quantities, it is true—was served to the tribesmen about the parade, but the head-men, Atta-Kulla-Kulla, Willinawaugh, Rayetaeh, Otacite, more than all, Oconostota, the king of the Cherokee nation, were escorted to the great hall of the officers' quarters, the latter on the arm of Captain Stuart himself; the Indian king, being a trifle lame of one leg,—he was known among the soldiers as "Old Hop,"—was evidently pleased by the exceptional attention and made the most of his infirmity, leaning heavily on the officer's arm. Arrayed in their finest fur robes with beautiful broad collars of white swan's down about their necks, with their faces mild and devoid of paint, seated in state before the great fire, the head-men were regaled with French brandy, duly diluted, and the best Virginia tobacco, offered in very curious pipes, which, with some medals and gorgets imported for the purpose, were presented as gifts when the ceremony was concluded, and which the Cherokees accepted with a show of much pleasure; indeed, they conducted themselves always under such circumstances with a very good grace and a certain dignity and propriety of feeling which almost amounted to good breeding.

This was maintained when, invited by the commandant, they witnessed the dress parade, especially elaborate in honor of the occasion, and they listened attentively when Captain Stuart made a short address to the troops on the subject of the sacred character of the day and adjured them in a frank and soldierly fashion to have a care that they maintained the moral discipline in which they had all been drilled and gave no advantage to the Enemy because they were here, cut off from the main body of Christianity, so far from the ministrations of a chaplain and the beneficent usages of civilization. "Every soldier learns command from obedience," he said. "And if I should send a detail from the ranks on some special duty, the file-leader would know how to command it, although he had never given an order in his life. You are each, with all your spiritual forces, detached on special duty. You are veteran soldiers of the Cross and under marching orders!"

Oconostota, with a kingly gesture, signified that the interpreter should repeat in his ear this discourse, and now and again nodded his head during its translation with cogitation and interest, and as if he understood and approved it. He watched too, as if with sympathy, the ranks go suddenly down upon their knees, as the commandant read the collect for the day followed by the unanimous delivery of the Lord's prayer, in their hearty, martial voices.

After the tap of the drum had given a resonant "Amen!" they marched off upon the word and broke ranks; and such little observance as the fort could offer in commemoration of the event was over.