bove the brown, shadowy woods, seem strangely intense of
color, and in the melancholy radiation from its weird, gibbous disk to
show the officer's calm, impassive face; his attitude, with his arms
folded, the rejected hand withdrawn; even the gold lace on his red coat
and the color of his hair in the thick braid that hung down under his
cocked hat. Even the latent expectation might be discerned in his eyes
that the interval of silence would prove too irksome to the hot impulse,
which had nerved the rush on the gates, to be long continued, and that
the moment would reveal the leader and the purpose of the demonstration.

A Cherokee stepped suddenly forward--a man with a tuft of eagle feathers
on his scalp-lock quivering with angry agitation, his face smeared with
vermilion, clad in the buckskin shirt and leggings that the settlers had
copied from the Indians, with pistols at his belt as well as a firelock
in one hand--the barrel sawed off short to aid its efficacy. The air was
bitterly cold, but the blood blazed hot in his face; in Cherokee he
spoke and he paused for no interpreter; if the _unaka_ Captain did not
understand him, so much the worse for the _unaka_ Captain. Through his
teeth the tense swift utterances came in half-suppressed breathless
tones, save when a sudden loud exclamation now and again whizzed out on
the air like the ascent of a bursting rocket. His fury was such that
even without the disguise of the paint on his face, Stuart might hardly
have recognized him were it not for his peculiarly sinewy, slight
elegance of shape. He had advanced one foot and he brandished his
tomahawk--a furious gesture, but without immediate intention, for now
and again he thrust the weapon into his belt.

"The white captain calls on his friends--and where are they? Not on the
outside of these great guns that bar us from our own. The fort is ours!
_To-e-u-hah!_ It is our own. _To-e-u-hah!_[E] Did we not bargain for it
in solemn treaty! Did we not make our peace and smoke our pipe and give
our belts of white wampum and sign names to the treaty we made with the
white English? _Wahkane?_[F] Did we not join his cause and fight his
battles and shed our blood in his wars against the French? _Wahkane_,
John Stuart, _wahkane_? And for what? That the great King George should
build us some forts in our nation to protect our women and children,
our old men and our young boys while the Cherokee braves are away
fighting the battles of th