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At last he determined he would leave it to fate, to chance, showing how truly a gambler his Indian training had made him. He would stake the crisis on a game at chungke; if he won, as he told Varney, he would go to Carolina, and take sides with neither faction; if he lost, he would cast his future with the Cherokee nation.

Varney, thoroughly uneasy, had come to feel a personal interest involved. If Otasite quitted the country, he felt his life would hardly be safe here, since the craft of Colannah had drawn from the unsuspecting young fellow the details of the plan of removal to Charlestown which he had proposed. And yet Varney himself was averse to any change, unless it was indeed necessary. When put to the test he felt he would rather live in the Cherokee nation than anywhere else in all the world, and he valued his commerce with the tribe and his license from the government, under duly approved bond and security, to conduct that traffic in Tennessee Town and Tellico as naught else on earth. He manifested so earnest and genuine a desire to repair the damage of his ill-starred suggestion that Colannah, showing his age in his haste and his tremulousness and excitement, disclosed to him in a flutter of triumphant glee that he had a spell to work which naught could withstand–a draught from Herbert’s Spring to offer to Otasite. Thither some fifty miles he had dispatched a runner for a jar of the magic water, and after drinking of it Otasite could not quit for seven years the Cherokee nation even if he would.

It was in the council-house that the mystic beverage was quaffed. There had been guests–head men from Great Tellico and Citico–during the afternoon, received in secret conclave, and now that their deliberations were concluded and they were gone, Otasite, not admitted to the council, being one of those warriors who did the fighting of the battles devised by the “beloved men,” strolled into the deserted, dome-like place. Its walls, plastered with red clay, were yet more ruddy for a cast of the westering sun. The building was large enough to accommodate several hundred people, and around the walls were cane seats, deftly constructed and artificially whitened, making, according to an old writer, “very genteel settees or couches.” Tired with the stress of mental depression and anxiety as physical effort could not tame him, and vaguely prescient of evil, Otasite had flung himself down on one of these, which was spread with dressed panther-skins, his hands clasped under his head, his scalp-lock of two auburn curls dangling over them.

Through the tall narrow doorway the autumnal landscape was visible, blazing with all the fervors of summer; the mountains, however, were more softly blue, the sunlight of a richer glister; the river, now steel, now silver, now amber, reflected the atmosphere as a sensitive soul reflects the moods of those most dear; the forests, splendid with color, showed the lavish predominance of the rich reds characteristic of the Chilhowee woods; a dreamlike haze over all added a vague ideality that made the scene like some fondest memory or a glamourous forecast.

“Akoo-e-a!” (summer yet!) said Colannah, his eyes too on the scene, as he sat on a buffalo-rug in the centre of the floor drawing in the last sweet fragrant breaths from his long-stemmed pipe, curiously wrought of stone, for in the manufacture of these pipes the Cherokees of that day were said to excel all other Indians. The young Briton experienced no mawkish pang to note that it was ornamented at one end by a dangling scalp, greatly treasured, the interior of the skin painted red for its preservation. He had, in fact, a pipe of his own with a scalp much like it. Indeed, his trophy was a fine specimen, and it had been a feat to take it, for it had once covered a hot Chickasaw head.