“I shall leave here to stop their coming here.”
“If that’s your frame of mind I must make you a prisoner,” regretfully decided McGillivray. “I’m honestly sorry to have to do it. I enjoy your company. I get small opportunity to talk with intelligent men. But you’re meddling with big affairs. You threaten to annoy me, to embarrass me. I would be a fool to permit it.”
“There’s something much larger, much grander, than the schemes you’re planning, Alexander McGillivray. Your little ambitions to pose as ruler of a Creek-Cherokee federation, under the protection of Spain, will never be realized. Shut me up in your stoutest prison or kill me, but don’t be foolish enough to believe that my dropping out will give you a clear trail. Only after you’ve killed the soul of some twenty-five or thirty thousand people west of the mountains can you place your feet on the path leading to a realization of your mad dreams.”
McGillivray picked up the pistols and thrust them under his coat and firmly replied—
“Yet I will enter that path and walk to the end even if it requires the death of every settler this side of the Alleghanies!”
Sevier sprang up and sternly demanded—
“Send for my gaoler.”
McGillivray summoned the servant and directed him to bring Polcher and six warriors. While they waited, the two men stood with the table between them, eying each other in silence. Through the window Sevier glimpsed Red Hajason riding into the forest. Then the door opened to admit the tavern-keeper and the Creeks.
“This man is my prisoner,” McGillivray tersely explained. “He is to be watched closely, but no harm is to come to him unless he is caught outside his cabin. If he manages to get out of his cabin, if only a foot from the door, he is to be killed. You, Polcher, will be responsible for him. You can command what guards you may find necessary. I give him into your charge, and see to it you can produce him when I send for him.”
“Rest easy, your Majesty, that he shall be produced when wanted,” Polcher joyously promised.