Willinawaugh had the air of deigning much to consider the plea that the other Indians preferred. He only argued astutely that they all spoke French among themselves—man, boy, squaw, and pappoose. They showed gratitude when he had promised them that they should not be obliged to pass the English fort and risk the chance of detection. He intended to slip them up the Tellico River where it flows into the Tennessee a mile on the hither side of the fort and thence make their way to a remoter Indian town than Choté.
The skeptical Cherokee, Savanukah, immediately asserted boastfully that he spoke "Flinch" himself and would test the nationality of the boy.
Hamish had never had great scholastic advantages and had sturdily resisted those that Odalie would have given him. He remembered with despair the long lines of French verbs in the little dog's-eared green book that all her prettiest sisterly arts could never induce him to learn to conjugate. Why should he ever need more talking appliance than he already possessed, he used to argue. He could tell all he knew, and more besides, in the somewhat limited English vocabulary at his command. "Parlez vous? Parlez, fou!" he was wont to exclaim, feeling very clever. How should he have dreamed that Odalie's little Vocabulaire Français would be more efficacious to save his life than his rifle and his deadly aim?
He looked toward her once more in his despair. The boats were now among a series of obstructions formed by floating débris of a recent storm—many branches of trees, here and there a bole itself, uprooted and flung into the river by the violence of the tempest—which necessitated careful steering and paddling and watching the current to take them through safely. It threw the two boats apart for a space, prolonging Hamish's suspense, yet serving as a reprieve to the ordeal of his examination as to his proficiency in the French language by the erudite Cherokee. The canoe rocked in the swirls, and although Willinawaugh sat still in stately impassiveness, Odalie and Fifine clung to the gunwale. Hamish's eyes met Odalie's, which were clear, liquidly bright, as if fired with some delightful anticipation, and yet weary and feverishly eager. Oh, this was delirium! She did not realize her surroundings; her intelligence was gone! His poor young heart swelled nearly to bursting as he turned back with aching arms and dazzled eyes and throbbing, feverish pulses to the careful balancing of the paddle, for Willinawaugh was an exacting coxswain. Hamish could not know what vision had been vouchsafed to Odalie in the midst of the gloomy woods while the other Indians and Willinawaugh had wrangled and he had hung absorbed upon their words as on the decrees of fate. Even she at first had deemed it but hallucination, the figment of some fever of the brain—this had been a day of dreams! Yet there it had stood on the river bank with the primeval woods around it, with the red sunset amongst the clouds above it, with the sunset below it, reflected in the current of the river, full of sheen and full of shadow—a figure, a hunter, looking out at the boats; a white man—a man she had never before seen.
How he stared! She dared make no signal of distress. She only turned her head that she might look back covertly with a face full of meaning. The next moment she saw him mount his horse in the buffalo path in the cane-brake and gallop off at a breakneck speed.
But was she sure—had she seen aught, she asked herself, tremulously. For it had been a day of dreams—it had been a day of dreams! And the confluence of the Tellico River with the Tennessee might be so hopelessly near!
The progress of both boats was very slow now, upstream against the current and the débris of the storm; even the crew of Indian braves needed to pull with vigor to make the clear water again. When this was reached they rested motionless, the duplication of the pettiaugre and the feather headdress of the Cherokees as clearly pictured in the bright, still reaches of the river as above in the medium of the air between sunset and dusk.
They were all looking back, all commenting on Hamish's slow progress. He had the current and his exhaustion both against him, and the most earnest and well-equipped postulant of culture would hardly be eager to go to an examination in the French language when his life was to be the forfeit of failure. The sound of the river was loud on the evening air; a wind was astir on either bank—a pillaging force, rifling the forest of the few leaves it might still treasure; now and then a scurrying cloud of them fled before the blast against the sky; the evening had grown chill; the boy felt its dank depression in every nerve despite the drops of perspiration that stood upon his brow as he too paddled into the clear water. He held the boat stationary by a great effort.
He had come to the end. He could strive no more. He saw Savanukah rise up in the pettiaugre, looking toward him. The next moment the savage turned his head. There was an alien sound upon the air, so close at hand that despite the fret and turmoil of the water, the blare of the wild wind, the tumultuous clashing together of the bare boughs in the black forest, it arrested the attention. Once more it asserted itself against the tumult, and then Hamish, his head spinning around until he thought that the canoe had broken loose from his mechanical plying of the paddle, recognized the regular rhythmical dash of oars.
CHAPTER III
In the next instant from beyond a curve in the river a boat shot into the current—a large row-boat, manned by twelve red-coated soldiers, bending to the oars, whose steady strokes sent the craft down the stream with the speed, it seemed, of a meteor.
They were alongside and a non-commissioned officer was in diplomatic converse with Willinawaugh before Hamish had regained possession of his faculties. Very diplomatic was the conference, for the corporal had his pacific orders and Willinawaugh was burdened with the grave anxiety to make the facts conform at once to the probabilities, yet sustain the impeccability of his own conduct. A little network of wrinkles, almost like a visible mesh, gathered at the corners of his eyes and gave token of his grave cogitation.
The corporal, a dark-haired, blue-eyed, florid young Irishman, looking very stanch and direct and steady, but not without a twinkle of humor which betokened some histrionic capacity to support the situation, speaking partly in English and partly, glibly enough, in very tolerable Cherokee, although incongruously embellished with an Irish brogue, detailed that Captain Stuart had been apprised that there was a band of Indians on the river who had some white people with them, and he wished to know if these white people were French, in which case, according to the treaty made with the Cherokees, they must be arrested and delivered up to the commandant of the fort, or if English, he wished to be assured that they were at liberty to go where they pleased, and were under no restraint.
As the officer concluded, having bowed to Odalie with much politeness, considering he was not yet informed as to whether she were of a party of French emissaries, forever sowing dissension amongst the Cherokee allies of the English, he drew himself up very erect, with a complacent mien. He was conscious of being a fine-looking fellow, and he had not seen so handsome a young woman of her evident position in life for a month of Sundays. Nevertheless he kept one eye on Willinawaugh, who was also eminently worthy of his respectful attention.
"Ingliss—all Ingliss," said the chief, unexpectedly.
The Indians in the pettiaugre, listening attentively, gave no sign of surprise upon this statement, so at variance with the warrior's previous representations. His ruse to shield the travelers now by declaring them English shielded himself as well, for being a chief and head-man he could hardly find a plausible subterfuge to cloak his playing the rôle of guide, philosopher, and friend to people of a nation so obnoxious to his English allies, and establishing them in the very heart of the Cherokee nation, contrary to its many solemn obligations and treaties.
After