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“Ha-tsida-wei-yu!” he proclaimed. “I am a great ada-wehi! I see him! Of a surety I see him!”

Attusah gazed at the sombre night with an expression as definitely perceptive as if the figure in his thoughts were actually before his eyes.

“And he is not dead?” cried Digatiski, in despair.

Some such wild rumor, as of hope gone mad, had pervaded the groups of Cherokee fugitives.

“He would be if I could get close enough with a bare pinch of powder that might charge my gun!” declared Attusah disconsolately. Then himself again, “But I will tell you this! He is waiting for my poisoned arrow! And when he dies he will come back no more. He is not like me.”

He paused to throw out his hand with his splendid pompous gesture. “Akee-o-hoo-sa! Tsida-wei-yu!” (I am dead! I am a great ada-wehi!)

Digatiski groaned. It mattered not to him whether Colonel Grant came back or abode in his proper place when dead. The grievous dispensation lay in the fact that he was here now, in the midst of the wreck he was so zealously wreaking.

There were three women in the niche. One with her head muffled in her mantle of fringed deerskin sat against the wall, silently weeping, bemoaning her dead slain in the recent battle, or the national calamities, or perhaps the mere personal afflictions of fatigue and fear and hunger and suspense. Another crouched by the fire and gazed dolorously upon it with dreary tear-filled eyes, and swollen, reddened eyelids. The sorrowful aspect of a third was oddly incongruous with her gay attire, a garb of scarlet cloth trimmed with silver tinsel tassels, a fabric introduced among the Cherokees by an English trader of the name of Jeffreys, and which met with great favor. Her anklets, garters, and bracelets of silver “bell-buttons” tinkled merrily as she moved, for she had postponed her tears in the effort to concoct some supper from the various scraps left from the day’s scanty food. The prefatory scraping of the coals together caused a sudden babbling of pleasure to issue from the wall, where, suspended on a projection of rock, was one of the curious upright cradles of the people, from which a pappoose, stiff and perpendicular, gazed down at the culinary preparations, evidently in the habit of participating to a limited extent in the result, having attained some ten months of age.

The mother glanced up, and despite the tear stains about her eyes, dimpled and laughed in response. Griefs may come and pleasures go, nations rise and fall, the world wag on as it will, but this old joy of mother and child, each in the other, is ever new and yet ever the same.

Resuming her occupation, the woman hesitated for a moment as she was about to lay the meat on the coals, the half of a wood duck, fortunately killed by an arrow, for larger game was not attainable, the wild beasts of the country being in flight as never heretofore. The conflagration of the towns of a whole district, the turmoils of the heady victorious troops, hitherto held together, but now sent through the region in separate detachments, each within reach of support, however, had stripped the tribe of this last means of subsistence. Years and years afterward the grim dismantled fragments of these buildings were still to be seen, the charred walls and rafters mere skeletons against the sky, standing, melancholy memorials of war, on the hillsides and in the valleys, along the watercourses “transparent as glass,” of that lovely country where these pleasant homes had been.

The Indian woman doubted if the bit of fat could be spared; then poising it in her hand under the watchful eyes of all, she flung it into the fire, the essential burnt-offering according to their old religious custom.

Digatiski, bowing his head still lower, once more groaned aloud. He would not have stayed her hand,–but to hunger even for the offering to the fire! The woman whose head was muffled had only to repeat her sobs anew; she could not sorrow more! But the pappoose in its primitive cradle on the wall babbled out its simple pleasure, and now and again the tearful little mother must needs lift smiling eyes.