inion that General Nicholson should have been suffered to swear in
peace and, as it were, in the odor of sanctity.

More than once, when in Charlestown, Varney, notwithstanding his
persuasions on the subject, had been minded to inquire concerning the
"Queetlees," who he understood from Colannah had come originally from
Cumberland in England. With his mercantile cronies he had canvassed the
question whether the queer, evidently distorted name could have been
"Peatley" or "Patey" or "Petrie,"--for the Cherokees always substituted
"Q" for "P," as the latter letter they could not pronounce,--and after
this transient consideration the matter would drop.

As the child, running about the Indian town with his new-found
playmates, grew robust and merry-hearted, and happiness, confidence, and
strength brought their embellishing influence to the expression of his
large dark gray eyes and straightened the nervous droop from his thin
little shoulders, the trader noticed casually once or twice how comely
the brat had become, and he experienced a fleeting, half-ridiculing pity
for his mother--how the woman would have resented and resisted the
persistent shearing and shaving of those silken, loosely twining red
curls! Then he thought of her no more. But when the child had come to
man's estate, when he was encased in a network of muscle like elastic
steel wires, when stature and strength had made him alike formidable and
splendid, when the development of his temperament illustrated virtues so
stanch that they seemed the complement of his physical endowment and a
part of his resolute personality, the old trader thought of the boy's
father, and thought of him daily--how the sturdy Cumbrian yeoman would
have rejoiced in so stalwart a son! Thus, with this vague bond of
sympathy with a man whom he had never seen, never known, so long ago, so
cruelly dead, this intuitive divination of his paternal sentiment,
Varney's fatherly attitude grew more definite daily and became
accustomed, and he was jealous of the influence of Colannah, who in turn
was jealous of his influence.

Now as Varney stood in the dusky trading-house among the kegs and bags
and bales of goods, the high peak of the interior of the roof lost in
the lofty shadows, he felt that he had been much in default in long-past
years, and he experienced a very definite pang of conscience as Otasite
swung abruptly around a stack of arms, a new rifle in his hand, the
flint and pan of whic