The Story of Old Fort Loudon

by Charles Egbert Craddock

The elder woman pointed at the girl, who laughed and tucked down her head like a child. She was obviously solicitous that Odalie should observe the many strings of red beads about her neck; these she now and again caught in her fingers and drew forward, and then looked down at them with her head askew like a bird's. Odalie, with ready tact, let her eyes rest attentively on them, and smiled again. Her instinct of hospitality was so strong that it was no effort to simulate the gracious hostess. It was one of Hamish's stock complaints, often preferred in their former home when visitors were an intrusion and their long lingering a bore, that if the Enemy of Mankind himself should call, Odalie would be able to muster a smile, and request him to be seated, and offer him a fan of her best turkey feathers, and civilly hope that the climate of his residence was not oppressive to him!

"And how do you know that I am French?" she asked, with a delightful expression of her fascinating eyes.

The soldier had told her,—the handsome young brave who talked to her one day at Choté,—the girl said in fairly good English. Odalie asked her name, and, as it was given, exclaimed that it was a whole sentence. Both the Cherokee women laughed at this in the pleasure of camaraderie, and the elder translated the name as the "Wing of the flying Whip-poor-will." The young Indian girl came to be known afterward at MacLeod's Station as Choo-qualee-qualoo, the Cherokee word which imitates the note of the bird. Recurring to the subject, she attempted to describe the soldier, by way of identification, as having hair the color of the lace on the Captain's red coat. Odalie was able to recollect a certain smart young soldier, who as orderly had one day accompanied Captain Stuart on a visit of ceremony to Oconostota, at his seat of government at Choté—old town. While the young orderly had led the horse of the English Captain up and down before the door of the chief's great council-house, Choo-qualee-qualoo had been set to ask him some questions, and as she told this the little minx laughed with her sharp white teeth shining, and looked like some sly little animal, malevolent, yet merry, and of much grace. Willinawaugh, she continued, believed that he had been duped by MacLeod into affording him and his family safe conduct on his journey hither, under the pretext that he was French, and therefore an enemy to the English, whom Willinawaugh hated; for the newcomer, MacLeod, and his brother, had been suffered to build a house and settle here among the English, while if Frenchmen they would have been hung as spies at the great gate of the fort or sent direct to Charlestown as prisoners. So Willinawaugh had set her to weave her toils about the young soldier and discover the truth from him, as he walked the officer's fine horse up and down, and the tall English Captain and the great warrior, Oconostota, smoked their pipes in the council chamber. Thus it had chanced that the unsuspicious orderly, free with his tongue, as a young man is apt to be in the presence of a pretty girl, told all that Choo-qualee-qualoo asked to know, as far as he knew it himself, and sooth to say, a trifle further. He gave forth the fact that MacLeod was English—that is Scotch, which he made as one of the same tribe, and so was the brother. But the wife was French—he himself had overheard her talking the frog-eaters' lingo—and, by George, she was a stunner! The baby was hers, and thus a mixture of English and French; as for the cat, he could not undertake to pronounce upon the animal's nationality, for he had not the pleasure of the acquaintance of its parents.

Choo-qualee-qualoo laid down this last proposition with a doubting gravity, for the young man had promulgated it as if with a sense of its importance and a weighty soberness, although he laughed at most that he said himself and at everything that any one else said.

He saw fit to remark that he did not understand how that sober-minded Sawney—meaning the Scotchman—had ever contrived to capture such a fine woman, but that was always the way with these dull prigs. Now as for such rattling blades as himself and his Captain—who would have been disposed to lay the flat of his sword smartly across the shoulders of the orderly, could he have dreamed of mention in such irreverent fellowship—they had no chance with the women, and for his own part this made him very sad. And he contrived to look so for about a minute, as he led the Captain's horse up and down before the door of the council-house, while Choo-qualee-qualoo, at one end of his beat, stood among a clump of laurel and talked to him as he came and went, and Willinawaugh, in the shadowy recesses of a neighboring hut, watched through the open door how his scheme took effect.

It made him very sad, the soldier said, mournfully, for the girls to like other fellows better than him—as they generally did!

And Choo-qualee-qualoo broke off to say here that she did not discern why such preference should be, for this soldier's hair was the color of the Captain's gold lace on his red coat (the orderly was called "Carrots" by his comrades), and he had a face with—and at a loss she dabbled the tips of her fingers delicately about the bridge of her nose and her eyes to intimate the freckles on his fair skin, which beauty-spots she evidently admired.

The Scotchman's French wife was a stunner, the orderly was good enough to declare again, and everybody else thought so too. But he had overheard Captain Demeré say to Captain Stuart that her husband had no right to bring her to this western wilderness, and that that terrible journey of so many hundred miles, keeping up on foot with men, was enough to have killed her; and Captain Stuart had replied that she would make a fine pace-setter for infantry in heavy marching order. The orderly protested that for his part, if he were a condemned fine woman like that, he wouldn't live in a wilderness—he would run away from the Scotchman and go back to wherever she came from. Handsomest eyes he ever saw—except two eyes!

Here Choo-qualee-qualoo gave Odalie a broadside glance which left no doubt as to whose eyes this exception was supposed to refer, and put two or three strands of the red beads into her mouth, showing her narrow sharp teeth as she laughed with pleasure and pride.

Thus it was that Odalie was apprised of the fact that she was regarded by the Indians as a French prisoner in the hands of the English, and that the young soldier's use of the idea of capture by her husband, figuratively, as in the toils of matrimony, was literally construed. Her first impulse was to repudiate this suggestion of captivity, of detention against her will. Then her strong instinct of wisdom,—for she had no foresight in the matter,—that made Hamish sometimes charge her with being as politic as Captain Stuart himself, moved her to reserve this detail for the consideration of the commandant of the fort, as every matter, however trivial, that bore upon the growing enmity of the Cherokees toward the English amongst them, and their disposition to fraternize with the French, was important.