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A Victor At Chungke
by
The crowds of Indian gamblers, with much money and goods at hazard upon the event, some, indeed, having staked the clothes upon their backs, the rifles and powder for their winter hunt that should furnish them with food, were at once in a clamor of discussion as to the fair adjustment of the throw in the score. The backers of Wyejah claimed the accidental hit as genuine and closing the game. The backers of Otasite protested that it could not be thus held, since Wyejah’s defective cast of the chungke-stone debarred their champion from the possibility of first scoring the eleventh point, which chance was his by right, it being his turn to play; they met the argument caviling at Otasite’s lack of aim by the counter-argument that one does not aim at a moving object where it is at the moment, but with an intuitive calculation of distance and speed where it will be when reached by the projectile hurled after it, illustrating cleverly by the example of shooting with bow and arrow at a bird on the wing.
Otasite and Wyejah both, preserved an appearance of joyous indifference. With their lances poised high in the right hand they were together running swiftly up the long alley again to the starting-point, Otasite commenting on the evident lack of intention in Wyejah’s lucky cast with a loud, jocosely satiric cry, “Hala! Hala!” (signifying, “You are too many for me!”)
“Lord! how the boy does yell!” Abram Varney exclaimed, a smile pervading the wrinkles wrought about his eyes by much pondering on the problems of the Indian trade, feeling incongruously a sort of elation in the youth’s noisy shouts, which echoed blatantly from the rocky banks of the Tennessee River, and with reduced arrogance and in softer tones from the cliffs of towering Chilhowee.
A sympathetic sentiment glowed in the dark eyes of an Indian chief on the slope hard by, the great Colannah Gigagei. He was fast aging now; the difficulties of diplomacy constantly increasing in view of individual aggressions and encroachments of the Carolina colonists on the east, and the ever specious wiles and suave allurements of the French on the west, to win the Cherokees from their British alliance; the impossibility, in the gentle patriarchal methods of the Cherokee government, to control the wild young men of the tribe, who, as the half-king, Atta-Kulla-Kulla said, “often acted like madmen rather than people of sense” (and it is respectfully submitted that this peculiarity has been observed in other young men elsewhere); the prophetic vision, doubtless, of the eventual crushing of his people in the collisions of the great international struggle of the Europeans for the possession of this country,–all fostered tokens of time in the face of Colannah, and bowed his straight back, and set an unwonted quiver in the nerves of his old hand that had been firm in his heyday, and strong and crafty and cruelly bloody. But his face now was softened with pleasure, and the pride it expressed was almost tender.
“When a few years ago the Governor of South Carolina,” he said majestically, speaking in the Cherokee tongue but for the English names (he pronounced the title “Goweno”), “offered to take some Cherokee youths to train in his schools and make scholars of them, I thanked him with affection, for his thought was kind. But I told him that if he would send some South Carolina youths to the Cherokee nation to be trained, we would make men of them!”
His blanket, curiously woven of feathers and wild hemp, requiring years of labor in its intricate manufacture, fell away from one gaunt arm as he lifted it to point with a kingly gesture at the young white man as the illustration of his training. Every muscle of strength was on parade in the splendid pose of hurling the great chungke-spear through the air, as Otasite thus passed the interval while waiting the decision of the umpire of the game. Then, with a laugh, oddly blent of affection and pride, Colannah took his way down the slope and toward the council-house: the council sat there much in these days of 1753, clouded with smoke and perplexity.