"Yes," said Odalie in content and pride, surveying her treasures, as she conducted him about the place, for he had not been here since the completion of the improvements; "I often say that this is home!"
"But never in French," put in Hamish at her elbow.
Nevertheless, this did not contribute to alter Captain Demeré's opinion that the frontier was no place for women, though that would imply, with his later conclusions, no place for home. He went away wearing in his buttonhole a sprig of sweetbrier, which he declared again reminded him so of home. He had not thought to find it here, and memory fell upon him unprepared and at a disadvantage. The moon was up when he stepped into his boat, and the orderly, bending to the oars, shot straight out into the river. Long, burnished white lines lay upon its gleaming surface, and looking back Demeré could see beyond the shadow and sheen of the sloping bank the cleared space, where the moonbeams fell in unbroken splendor before the stockade, and through its open gate the log-cabin with its primitive porch, where, young and beautiful, she sat in her white dress in the bright light beside the silent little flax-wheel. Home undoubtedly! As the boat headed up the river he looked moodily at the ripples, glancing in the moonbeams, and noted with a keen new sensitiveness the fragrance of the eglantine, reminiscent of summers dead and gone, and life as fleeting and frail as the transitory flower.
For the news that came in these days from over the mountains was always heavy news,—rumors of massacres, now of a single individual in some exposed and dangerous situation, and again of settlers surprised and overcome by numbers within the defenses of their own stanch stockade.
All along the frontier the spirit seemed to extend, first toward the north and then southward, and it was apparently only a question of time when the quiet and peace that encircled Fort Loudon should be summarily broken. Many of the pioneers, could they now have returned to Virginia or the Carolinas without danger, would have forever relinquished their new homes, and have set forth on their long journey without delay. But the Cherokees about them, personally known to them and apparently without individual animosity, seemed a slighter menace than the probable encounter with wild wandering bands, glutted with blood yet thirsting still for vengeance. In one of Demeré's reports about this time, early in the year 1759, he says: "We are living in great harmony here—no 'bad talks' at all."
Again and again he and Captain Stuart, accompanied only by an orderly to mark their sense of confidence, went to Choté to confer in a friendly way with the king and half-king, and seek to induce them to take some order with these depredators, and restore the peace of the border.
The great council-house at Choté was a curious circular structure, formed of withes and willows and wand-like timbers, woven together in a dome-like shape to the height of twenty feet, with a diameter of thirty feet at the base; the whole was covered over with a thick coating within and without of the deeply and richly tinted red clay of that region, and pierced by no window or chimney or other outlet than the tall and narrow doorway. The last time the two officers together sought the presence of the kings in the Ottare district, as the mountainous region was called,—the towns designated as the Ayrate settlements signified the lower country,—they were received here, and Stuart, from the moment of their entrance, knew that their mission was hopeless.
They had recently been ordered to demand the surrender to them of certain notable Cherokees, for having been concerned in the distant border murders, and who lived in the towns of Citico and Tellico hard by, close at hand to both Choté and Fort Loudon. They realized that this measure was at once displeasing and impracticable to the kings, whose authority could not compass the surrender of their tribesmen to the justice of the gibbet, after the expiatory methods of the English, and who foresaw that such compliance would but provoke reprisal on the paleface and further outbreaks.
Sitting motionless on buffalo rugs, a number of which were spread over the floor of the room, on which the two officers were also invited to be seated, the Indians advanced none of the equivocal statements and doubtful promises and fallacious expectations of peace as heretofore, but kept their eyes fixed upon the ground, while the officers once more expressed their earnest remonstrances and made their summary demand, implicitly obeying their orders, although this extreme and impolitic measure was secretly deprecated by both.
The "talk" was conducted by means of the services of an interpreter, an Indian, who stood behind the great chiefs and recited, now in Cherokee and now in English, and always with a wooden, expressionless accent, as if he were a talking machine and understood not a word for which he furnished the equivalent, in deference to the great company not permitting his mind to take part in the deeper significance of the ideas they interchanged. He kept his eyes fixed upon the blank wall opposite, and effaced his individuality as far as possible. But after the first sentences of merely formal greeting, the wooden clapper of the interpreter's tongue vibrated back and forth with Cherokee only, for the Indian chiefs said nothing to be rendered into English. Silent and stony they sat, looking neither to the right nor left, unmoved by urgency, stolid to remonstrance, and only when Demeré with a flash of fire suggested that Governor Lyttleton of South Carolina, or General Amherst the new "head-man," who was now commander-in-chief of the army, would soon take fierce measures to retaliate these enormities, there was a momentary twinkle in the crafty eyes of Oconostota, and he spoke briefly. The interpreter woodenly repeated:—