“Thou that wast a brother,
Thou art nothing now,
The young warriors of Yemassee,
They know thee no more.”
And the crowd cried with them, “They know thee no more.”
“Is no hatchet sharp for Occonestoga?” moaned forth the suffering savage. But his trials were only then begun. Enoree-Mattee now approached him with the words, with which, as the representative of the good Manneyto, he renounced him,—with which he denied him access to the Indian heaven, and left him a slave and an outcast, a miserable wanderer amid the shadows and the swamps, and liable to all the doom and terrors which come with the service of Opitchi-Manneyto.
“Thou wast the child of Manneyto,”
sung the high priest in a solemn chant, and with a deep-toned voice that thrilled strangely amid the silence of the scene,
“Thou wast the child of Manneyto
He gave thee arrows and an eye,—
Thou wast the strong son of Manneyto,
He gave thee feathers and a wing,—
Thou wast a young brave of Manneyto,
He gave thee scalps and a war-song,—
But he knows thee no more—he knows thee no more.”
And the clustering multitude again gave back the last line in wild chorus. The prophet continued his chant:
“That Opitchi-Manneyto!—
He commands thee for his slave—
And the Yemassee must hear him,
Hear, and give thee for his slave—
They will take from thee the arrow,
The broad arrow of thy people,—
Thou shalt see no blessed valley,
Where the plum-groves always bloom—
Thou shalt hear no songs of valour,
From the ancient Yemassee—
Father, mother, name, and people,
Thou shalt lose with that broad arrow,
Thou art lost to the Manneyto,—
He knows thee no more—he knows thee no more.”
The despair of hell was in the face of the victim, and he howled forth, in a cry of agony that for a moment silenced the wild chorus of the crowd around, the terrible consciousness in his mind of that privation which the doom entailed upon him. Every feature was convulsed with emotion; and the terrors of Opitchi-Manneyto’s dominion seemed already in strong exercise upon the muscles of his heart, when Sanutee, the father, silently approached him, and with a pause of a few moments, stood gazing upon the son from whom he was to be separated eternally— . . .
. . . . .