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Little did Cuddy Barnett imagine, as he gazed on the deserted and desolate place, that he was yet to behold the smoke of the “sacred fire” flaring up into the blue sky from the portal of the temple, as the cheera-taghe would issue bearing the flame aloft, newly kindled in the opening year, and calling upon many assembled people to light therefrom their hearths, rekindling good resolutions and religious fervor for the future, and letting the faults of the unavailing past die out with the old year’s fire; that he was to mark the clash of arms in the “beloved square,” once more populous with the alert figures of warriors in martial array, making ready for the war-path; that he was to hear the joyful religious songs of greeting to the dawn, and the sonorous trumpeting of the conch-shells, as the vanished Indians of the “old waste town” would troop down at daybreak into the water of that bright stream where long ago they had been wont to plunge in their mystic religious ablutions. All this, however, the pack-men might see and hear, to believe the tradition of the day, in camping but a single night near the old “waste town.”

And so anxious were these gay itinerant companies to see and hear nothing of such ghostly sort that whatever the stress of the weather, the mischances of the journey, the condition of the pack-animals, this vicinity was always distinguished by the longest day’s travel of the whole route, and the camp was pitched at the extreme limit of the endurance of man and horse to compass distance from Nilaque Great. For believe what one might, the fact remained indisputable, that a decade earlier, when the place was inhabited, strange sounds were rife about the locality, the “sacred fire” was unkindled on the great “Sanctified Day,” the two cheera-taghe of the town mysteriously disappeared, and their fate had remained a dark riddle.

One of these men, Oo-koo-koo, was well known in Charlestown. Both were of influence in the tribe, but often he had been specially chosen as one of the delegations of warriors and “beloved men” sent to wait in diplomatic conference on the Governor of South Carolina, to complain of injustice in the dealings of the licensed traders or the encroachments of the frontier settlers, or to crave the extension of some privilege of the treaty which the Cherokee tribe had lately made with the British government.

Two white men, who had become conspicuous in a short stay in the town of Nilaque Great, disappeared simultaneously, and the suspicion of foul dealing on their part against the cheera-taghe, which the Cherokee nation seemed disposed to entertain, threatened at one time the peace that was so precious to the “infant settlements,” as the small, remote, stockaded stations of the Carolina frontiersmen were tenderly called.

Therefore the Governor of South Carolina, now a royal province,–the event occurred during the incumbency of Robert Johnson, who having acted in that capacity for the Lords Proprietors, well understood the menace of the situation,–busied himself with extreme diligence to discover the subsequent movements of the two white men, whose names were Terence O’Kimmon and Adrien L’Epine, in order to ascertain the fate of the cheera-taghe, and if evilly entreated, to bring the perpetrators of the deed to justice.

With a long, unguarded, open frontier such as his province presented to the incursions of the warlike and fierce Cherokees, who, despite their depopulating wars with other tribes, could still bring to the field six thousand braves from their sixty-four towns, the inhabitants of which were estimated at twenty thousand souls, he was by no means disposed to delay or to indulge doubts or to foster compatriot commiseration in meting out the penalty of the malefactors. The united militia of South Carolina and Georgia at this time numbered but thirty-five hundred rank and file, these colonies being so destitute of white men for the common defense that a memorial addressed to his majesty King George II. a little earlier than this event, bearing date April 9, 1734, pathetically states that “money itself cannot here raise a sufficient body of them.” The search for the suspects, however, although long, exhaustive, and of such diligence as to convince the Indians of its sincerity of purpose, resulted fruitlessly. The government presently took occasion to made some valuable presents to the tribe, not as indemnity, for it could recognize no responsibility in the strange disaster, but for the sake of seeming to comply with the form of offering satisfaction for the loss, which otherwise the Indians would retaliate with massacre.