the fair adjustment
of the throw in the score. The backers of Wyejah claimed the accidental
hit as genuine and closing the game. The backers of Otasite protested
that it could not be thus held, since Wyejah's defective cast of the
chungke-stone debarred their champion from the possibility of first
scoring the eleventh point, which chance was his by right, it being his
turn to play; they met the argument caviling at Otasite's lack of aim by
the counter-argument that one does not aim at a moving object where it
is at the moment, but with an intuitive calculation of distance and
speed where it will be when reached by the projectile hurled after it,
illustrating cleverly by the example of shooting with bow and arrow at a
bird on the wing.

Otasite and Wyejah both, preserved an appearance of joyous indifference.
With their lances poised high in the right hand they were together
running swiftly up the long alley again to the starting-point, Otasite
commenting on the evident lack of intention in Wyejah's lucky cast with
a loud, jocosely satiric cry, "_Hala! Hala_!" (signifying, "You are too
many for me!")

"Lord! how the boy does yell!" Abram Varney exclaimed, a smile pervading
the wrinkles wrought about his eyes by much pondering on the problems of
the Indian trade, feeling incongruously a sort of elation in the youth's
noisy shouts, which echoed blatantly from the rocky banks of the
Tennessee River, and with reduced arrogance and in softer tones from the
cliffs of towering Chilhowee.

A sympathetic sentiment glowed in the dark eyes of an Indian chief on
the slope hard by, the great Colannah Gigagei. He was fast aging now;
the difficulties of diplomacy constantly increasing in view of
individual aggressions and encroachments of the Carolina colonists on
the east, and the ever specious wiles and suave allurements of the
French on the west, to win the Cherokees from their British alliance;
the impossibility, in the gentle patriarchal methods of the Cherokee
government, to control the wild young men of the tribe, who, as the
half-king, Atta-Kulla-Kulla said, "often acted like madmen rather than
people of sense" (and it is respectfully submitted that this peculiarity
has been observed in other young men elsewhere); the prophetic vision,
doubtless, of the eventual crushing of his people in the collisions of
the great international struggle of the Europeans for the possession of
this country,--all fostered tokens of time in the