The Story of Old Fort Loudon

by Charles Egbert Craddock

The sequestered, remote situation of each post developed a certain mutual interest and the exchange of much soldierly chaff; the names and disposition of even the subalterns were elicited in this transmitted gossip of the forts; in default of news, details of trivial happenings were given, unconsciously fertile in character-drawing; jokes, caricatures, good stories,—and thus at arm's length sprung up a friendship between men who had never seen one another and who were possibly destined never to meet. Of course all this gayety of heart vanished from the paper when serious tidings or despondent prospects were at hand, but even in the succinct official statements an undertone of sympathy was perceptible, and the slightest nerve of thought, of danger, of joy, of dissatisfaction touched at Fort Loudon thrilled in kind at Fort Prince George.

The attention of the group about the fire of the officers' mess-hall had seldom been brought to themes so grave as the news of the recent massacre, holding so definite and possible a personal concern, and after the evening of the Christmas ball life at Fort Loudon began to seem more serious and the current event to be scanned and questioned as to a probable bearing on the future.

Even Odalie's optimistic mind, forever alert to hope and fair presage, felt the influence of the atmospheric change of the moral conditions. But the fact was revealed to her in an incident sufficiently startling.

That morning after the festivity, when gayly rowing down the bleak river to MacLeod's Station, as the bend had begun to be called, she looked blithely enough over the stream's gray stretches of ruffled steel to the snowy slopes of the banks, and to the brown woods, and beyond to the dark bronze and dusky blue mountains as they stretched away in varying distance. The dull suffusive flare of carmine beginning to show above them seemed a spell to drive the day-star out of the sky, to bid the weird mists hie home with the fancies of the night, to set a wind keenly astir in a new dawn. All this she watched with eyes as clear, as soft, as confiding as if it were a May morning coming over the mountains, scattering the largesse of the spring—new life, new hopes, new strength, and all the glad inspiration of success that has a rarer, finer flavor than the actual consummation of the triumph.

The stationers landed at the bend, and she was glad of her home as she took her way within the enclosure of the high stockade. She looked around at it, still leading the sleepy Fifine by one hand and only half hearing Hamish's enthusiastic sketches of the boys and girls in the settlement, with whom he had made fast friends. The snow was heavy on the roofs of the two log cabins and the shanty of poles that served as a barn, and lay in fluffy masses between the sharp points of the palisades and on the bare boughs of sundry great trees that Odalie had insisted should not be cut away with the rest in the enclosure or "girdled" like those outside in the field. The smoke still curled up lazily from the chimneys, and after she had uncovered the embers and donned her rough homespun dress and housewifely apron and cap, and had the preparations for breakfast well under way, she went to the door and called aloud in the crisp, chill air to "Dill," as Gilfillan was christened by Fifine,—the name being adopted by all the family,—insisting that he should not cook his own breakfast but join them.

"There are going to be 'flim-flams,'" she shouted triumphantly. Then with a toss of the head—"Short eating!"

It had chanced that one day when the lonely pioneer had dined with his fellow-stationers he had remarked approvingly of certain dishes of French cookery acquired from her Grand'maman's receipts—"I dunno what ye might call them flim-flams, Mrs. MacLeod, but they make powerful short eatin'."

He and she and Fifine had become fast friends, and it was indeed a happy chance that had thrown the lonely man into this cordial and welcoming atmosphere of home. Even his terribly ghastly head Odalie had begun to forget, so deeply did she pity him for other things,—for the loss of wife and children and friends in the terrible Yadkin massacre; for the near approach of age,—and stalwart as he was, it was surely coming on; for the distortions of his queer religion, which was so uncouth as to be rendered hardly the comfort it might have been otherwise.

"I can't see how you can mention it," she said one day, with wincing eyes, when he was telling Hamish, who manifested that blood-thirsty imagination peculiar to boys, how he was conscious throughout the whole ordeal of scalping; how the tomahawk hit him a clip; how the Indian, one whom he had trusted, put his foot on his breast for a better purchase on the knife.

"Why, Mrs. MacLeod," Dill replied, "it makes me thankful to think he took nothing but the scalp. If he had mended his holt a little he could have took my whole head, and where would I have been now!"