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“I will not advise him to quit the nation–never again!” cried Varney, suddenly enlightened, fervently repudiating his interference. “Since you disapprove, he shall not return to Carolina. He cannot go without me–my help; he could not find a place–a home. Bold and fine as he is here, he would be strange there; he knows naught of the ways of the colonists. He would be poor, despised, while here he has been like the first, the best. His pride could never stoop to a life like a slave’s; his pride would break his heart. Let me undo the mischief I have wrought; let me unsay the unthinking, foolish words I have spoken.”

It was perhaps with the faith that the artful trader could best turn the young fellow’s mind back to its wonted content, as his crafty arguments had already so potently aroused this wild, new dissatisfaction, that Colannah at last consented to liberate Varney for this essay, not without a cogent reminder that he would be held responsible for its failure. And indeed in recanting his former urgency, when he sought out Otasite, Varney exerted himself to the utmost.

“You are satisfied here. You know the life. Like me, you love it. If I, who can choose, prefer it, why not you?”

But Otasite shook his head.

“When I talk to you of the colonies I speak as a man does of a dream,” Varney continued. “It is something true and something false. I add here and I let slip there to make out the connection, and give the symmetry of truth to the picture. But did I ever tell you how they love money in the colonies, how they cheat and strive and slave their lives away to add to their store; how they reverence and worship the wealth of others till it seems that a rich man can do no wrong–if he is rich enough? Did I ever tell you this? The poor, they are despised for being poor, and they are let to suffer. Here poverty is not permitted. If a man lose his dwelling by fire, the town builds him another house. You know this. If a man fail in his winter hunt, the others give of their abundance. Here one is rated by his personal worth. Here the deed is held to be fine, not the mere thing. Here you are valued as the great Otasite, and all men give you honor for your courage. There you are Jan Queetlee, a penniless clod, and all men despise you and pass you by.”[4]

But again Otasite shook his head.

It was no spurious flare of ambition, ineffectual, illusory; no discontented yearning for a different, a wider life that the trader’s ill-advised words had roused. That sentiment of loyalty to the British government, which had never sought to claim Jan Queetlee as a subject, seemed bred in his bone and born in his blood. Perhaps it was the stuff of which long afterward the Tories of the Revolution were made. He could not lift his hand against this aloof, indifferent fetich. And yet take part against the Cherokees, whom he loved as they loved him! For with his facilities for understanding the trend of the politics of the day he could no longer blind himself to the approach of the war of the tribe with the British government, which, indeed, came within the decade. The sons of Colannah, slain in the cruel wars with other Indians, had been to him like brothers, and in their loss he had felt his full and bitter share of the grief of a common household. Even yet he and Colannah were wont to sadly talk of them with that painful elimination of their names, a mark of Indian reverence to the dead, substituting the euphemism “the one who is gone,” and linger for hours over the fire at night or on the shady river-bank in sunlit afternoons, rehearsing their deeds and recalling their traits, and repeating their sayings with that blending of affectionate pride and sorrow that is the consolation of bereavement when time has somewhat softened its pangs and made memory so dear. And Colannah had been like a father–it seemed to Jan Queetlee as if he had had no other father. He could not leave Colannah, old, desolate, and alone. Yet the war was surely coming apace, as they both knew, a war which already tore his heart in sunder, in which he could evade taking part against his own–his own of both factions–only by going at once and going far. He could decide no such weighty matter.