and Varney found himself counting "_skoeh
chooke kaiere_" (the old one's hundred) before he ever induced Otasite
to say instead "one thousand."

The boy even ventured on censorship in his turn. "You say 'Cherokee_s_'
and 'Chickasaw_s_' when you speak of the Tsullakee and the Chickasaw;
why don't you then say the English-_es_ and the French-_es_?" For the
plural designation of these tribes was a colonial invention.

His bulldog tenacity, his orderly instincts, his providence, so contrary
to the methods of the wasteful Indian, his cheerful industry, his
indomitable energy and perseverance,--all were so national that in days
gone past Varney used now and again to clap him on the shoulder with a
loud, careless vaunt, "British to the marrow!"

A fact, doubtless--and all of a sudden it had begun to seem a very
serious fact. So very serious, indeed, that the old trader did not
notice the crisis in the chungke-yard, the increasing excitement in the
crowds of spectators, the clamors presently when the game was declared a
draw and the bets off, the stir of the departing groups. It was silence
at last that smote upon his senses with the effect of interruption which
the continuance of sound had not been able to compass. He drew himself
up with a perplexed sigh, and looked drearily over the expanse of the
river. Its long glittering reaches were vacant, a rare circumstance, for
the Cherokees of that date were almost amphibious in habit, reveling in
the many lovely streams of their mountain country; on the banks their
towns were situated, and this fact doubtless contributed to the neatness
of their habitations and personal cleanliness, to which the travelers of
those times bear a surprised testimony. The light upon the water was
aslant now from a westering sun, and glittering on the snowy breasts of
a cluster of swans drifting, dreaming perhaps, on the current. The
scarlet boughs on the summit of Chilhowee were motionless against the
azure zenith. Not even the vaguest tissue of mist now lingered about the
majestic domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, painted clearly and
accurately in fine and minute detail in soft dense velvet blues against
the hard polished mineral blue of the horizon. The atmosphere was so
exquisitely luminous and pellucid that it might have seemed a fit medium
to dispel uncertainty in other than merely material subjects of
contemplation. Nevertheless he did not see his way clearly, and when he
came within view of