The Story of Old Fort Loudon

by Charles Egbert Craddock

Against his will the young sentinel leaned out of the window with a made-to-order smile, and as Choo-qualee-qualoo waved her hand and pointed to the empty path along which Odalie was wont to come, he intimated by signs that she had waited but was obliged to return to the fort and was now within, and he pointed down to the gorge of the bastion. To-morrow when there should be an eastern sky she would come out, and Choo-qualee-qualoo signed that she would meet her. Then she lingered, waving her hand now and again on her own account, and he dutifully flourished his hat.

"Gosh," he exclaimed, "if treachery sticks in the gizzard like this pretense there is no use in cord or shot,—the fellow does for himself!"

He was glad when the lingering twilight slipped down at last and put an end to the long-range flirtation, for however alert an interest he might have developed, were it voluntary, its utility as a military maneuver blunted its zest. Choo-qualee-qualoo had sped away to her home up the river; the stars were in the sky, and in broken glimmers reflected in the ripples of the current. The head-men among the cordon, drawn around Fort Loudon, sat in circles and discussed the possible reasons of the sudden furious cannonade, and the others of minor tribal importance listened and adjusted their own theories to the views advanced; the only stragglers were the spies whom the cannonade had driven from the woods that afternoon, now venturing back into the neighborhood, looking at the lights of the fort, hearing often hilarious voices full of the triumph of Montgomery's foray, and sometimes finding on the ground the spent balls of the cannonade.

It had so cleared the nearer spaces that it had enabled Hamish, in a guise become familiar to them, to gain the little thicket where Choo-qualee-qualoo and Odalie were wont to conclude their talks. Close by was the mouth of the cavernous passage that led to MacLeod's Station, which no Indians knew the white people had discovered. With a sudden plunge the boy was lost to sight in its labyrinthine darkness, and when Hamish MacLeod emerged at the further end five miles away, in his own garb, which he had worn beneath the prim feminine attire,—this he had carefully rolled into a bundle and stowed in a cleft in the rocks of the underground passage,—he issued into a night as sweet, as lonely, and as still, in that vast woodland, as if there were no wars or rumors of wars in all the earth. But, alas! for the sight of Odalie's home that she had loved and made so happy, and where he had been as cherished as Fifine herself,—all grim, charred ashes; and poor Dill's cabin!—he knew by this time that Dill was dead, very dead, or he would have come back to them. The fields, too, that they had sown, and that none would reap, trampled and torn, and singed and burnt! Hamish gave but one sigh, bursting from an overcharged heart; then he was away at full speed in the darkness that was good to him, and the only friend he had in the world with the power to help him and his.

Captain Demeré that night was more truly cheerful than he had been for a long time, despite his usual port of serene, although somewhat austere, dignity.

"The boy has all the homing qualities you desired in an express," he said to Stuart. "He will come back to his brother's family as certainly as a man with wife and children, and yet in quitting them he leaves no duty to devolve on others."

"Moreover," said Stuart, "we have the satisfaction of knowing that he safely reached the mouth of the underground passage without detection. He could not have found the place in a dark night. In the moonlight he would have been seen, and even if we had protected his entrance by a cannonade, and cleared the woods, his exit at the other end of the passage would have been intercepted. Disguised as Mrs. MacLeod, seeking to meet Choo-qualee-qualoo in bold daylight, he passed without a suspicion on the part of the Indians. And we know that the exit of the passage at MacLeod Station is fully three miles in the rear of the Indian line. I feel sure that the other two expresses never got beyond the Indian line. This is the best chance we have had."

"And a very good chance," said Demeré.

Stuart could but laugh a little, remembering that Demeré had thought the plan impracticable, and, although there was no other opportunity possible, had protested against it on the point of danger involved to Mrs. MacLeod. Stuart, himself, had quaked on this score, and had seized on this ingenious device only as a last resort.

"Mrs. MacLeod is fine timber for a forlorn hope," he said reflectively.