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It was somewhat as a prelude to the siege of Fort Loudon by the Cherokees in 1760 that they stormed and triumphantly carried several minor stations to the southeast. Although Blue Lick sustained the attack, still, in view of the loss of a number of its gallant defenders, the settlers retreated at the first opportunity to the more sheltered frontier beyond Fort Prince George, living from hand to mouth, some at Long Cane and some at Ninety-Six, through those years when first Montgomerie and then Grant made their furious forays through the Cherokee country. Emsden, having served in the provincial regiment, eagerly coveted a commission, of which Richard Mivane had feigned to speak. Now that the Cherokees were ostensibly pacified,–that is, exhausted, decimated, their towns burned, their best and bravest slain, their hearts broken,–the fugitives from this settlement on the Eupharsee River, as the Hiwassee was then called, gathered their household gods and journeyed back to Blue Lick, to cry out in the wilderness that they were “home” once more, and clasp each other’s hands in joyful gratulation to witness the roofs and stockade rise again, rebuilt as of yore. Strangely enough, there were old Cherokee friends to greet them anew and to be welcomed into the stockade; for even the rigid rule of war and hate must needs be proved by its exceptions. And there were one or two pensive philosophers among the English settlers vaguely sad to see all the Cherokee traditions and prestige, and remnants of prehistoric pseudo-civilization, shattered in the dust, and the tremulous, foreign, unaccustomed effort–half-hearted, half-believing, half-understanding–to put on the habitude of a new civilization.

“The white man’s religion permits poverty, but the Indian divides his store with the needy, and there are none suffered to be poor,” said Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the famous chief. “The white men wrangle and quarrel together, even brother with brother; with us the inner tribal peace is ever unbroken. The white men slay and rob and oppress the poor, and with many cunning treaties take now our lands and now our lives; then they offer us their religion;–why does it seem so like an empty bowl?”

“Atta-Kulla-Kulla, you know that I am deaf,” said Richard Mivane, “and you ask me such hard questions that I am not able to hear them.”

It is more than probable that these stationers in the vanguard of the irrepressible march of western emigration had been trespassers, and thus earned their misfortunes, in some sort, by their encroachment on Indian territory; although since the war the Cherokee boundaries had become more vague than heretofore, it being considered that Grant’s operations had extended the frontier by some seventy miles. It may be, too, that the Blue Lick settlers held their own by right of private purchase; for the inhibition to the acquisition of land in this way from the Indians was not enacted till the following year, 1763, after the events to be herein detailed, and, indeed, such purchases even further west and of an earlier date are of record, albeit of doubtful legality.

Now that peace in whatever maimed sort had come to this stricken land and these adventurous settlers, who held their lives, their all, by such precarious tenure, internecine strife must needs arise among them; not the hand of brother against brother,–they were spared that grief,–but one tender, struggling community against another.

And it came about in this wise.

One day Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane, watching from the “port-hole” of the blockhouse, where the muzzle of that dog of war the little swivel gun had once been wont to look forth, beheld Ralph Emsden ride out from the stockade gate for a week’s absence with a party of hunters; with bluff but tender assurance he waved his hat and hand to her in farewell.

“Before all the men!” she said to herself, half in prudish dismay at his effrontery, and yet pleased that he did not sheepishly seek to conceal his preference. And although the men (there were but two or three and not half the province, as her horror of this publicity would seem to imply) said with a grin “Command me!” they said it sotto voce and only to each other.