stanch within them, could but fail with the
failure of physical strength. Their courage only sufficed to hold them
to a mute endurance of a dreadful expectation, and a suspense that set
every nerve a-quiver. The boatmen had cried out with a wild, fierce note
of surprise on perceiving the party, and the canoe was coming straight
across to the bank as fast as the winglike paddles could propel it.
Willinawaugh rode slowly down to meet them, and in contrast to the usual
impassive manners of the Indians he replied to the agitated hail in a
tone of tense and eager excitement. There ensued evidently an exchange
of news, of a nature which boded little good to the settlers. Dark anger
gathered on the brow of the chieftain as he listened when the braves had
bounded upon the bank, and more than once he cried out inarticulately
like a wild beast in pain and rage. Perhaps it is rare that a man has
such a moment in his life as Alexander experienced when one of the
savages, a ferocious brute, turned with a wild, untamed, indigenous
fury kindling in his eyes, and drawing his tomahawk from his belt smiled
fiercely upon the silent, motionless little band, his deadly racial
hatred reinforced by a thousand bitter grudges and wrongs.

Hamish's fingers trembled on his gun, but ostensibly no one moved.
Willinawaugh hastily interposed, speaking but the magic
words--"Flanzy--Flinch!" Then still in English, as if to reassure the
pioneers--"Go Chote--Old Town--buy fur!"

The hatred died out of the fierce Indian faces. The French in the South,
as has been said, had always used every art to detach the Cherokees from
the British interest, and even now the men who had abandoned Fort
Duquesne, escaping down the Ohio River, were sending emissaries up the
Tsullakee, to the Lower Towns, there finding fruitful soil in which to
sow the seeds of dissension against the English. The assertion that
these travelers were French, and the fact that by receiving persons of
this nation the Cherokees could requite with even a trivial and
diplomatic injury some faint degree of the wrong which they considered
they had sustained from the Virginians, was more than adequate to
nullify for the time the rage they felt against these pioneers as of the
white race.

With the instinct of hospitality, which is a very marked element of the
Cherokee nature, one of them signed with a free and open gesture to the
boat.

"_Beaucoup marchez!_" he said, smiling with an innocent sua