ollowed them to their
assigned homes in the barracks, several braves, including Oconostota
himself, had become aware of Stuart's return and gathered around him.

Nothing could have been more acutely malevolent than Oconostota's
twinkling eyes; no words could have shown a keener edge of sarcasm than
his greeting of the officer once more by the title of his dear brother.
Stuart, impolitic for once, disdained to respond, and, grimly silent,
eyed him with a sort of stoical defiance that struck the Indian's
mummery dumb. There was a moment of inaction as they all contemplated
him. His vigor, his fortitude, his rank, the consciousness how his proud
spirit raged in his defeat and despair, all combined to render him a
notable victim and promised a long and a keen extension of the
pleasures of witnessing his torture.

And at that instant of crisis, as if to seal his doom, a great guttural
clamor arose about the southeast bastion, and here was Willinawaugh,
with wild turbulent gesticulations, and starting gleaming eyes, and a
glancing upheaving tomahawk, for in the perspective a dozen hale fellows
were dragging out of the pit beneath the old smoke-house the ten bags of
powder that Stuart had concealed there--only two nights ago, was it?--it
seemed a century! How had they the craft to find them, so securely, so
impenetrably were they hidden! Stuart's store of Cherokee enabled him to
gather the drift of the excited talk. One of the Indians, with the keen
natural senses of the savage, had smelled the freshly turned
clay--_smelled it_ in that assortment of evil odors congregated in the
parade!--and had sought to discover what this might be so recently
buried. Fraud! Fraud! the cry went up on every side. Unmasked fraud, and
Stuart should die the death! He had violated the solemn agreement by
which the garrison was liberated; he had surrendered the spare arms and
the cannon indeed, but only a fraction of the powder of the warlike
stores--and he should die the death and at once. Stuart wondered that he
was not torn to pieces by the infuriated savages, protesting their
indignation because of his violation of the treaty,--while his
garrison, under the Cherokees' solemn agreement of safe-conduct, lay in
all their massacred horrors unburied on the plains of Taliquo. The cant
of the Cherokees, their hypocrisy, and their vaunting clamor of
conscience made them seem, if one were disposed to be cynical, almost
civilized! Doubtless, but for Oco