you how they love money in
the colonies, how they cheat and strive and slave their lives away to
add to their store; how they reverence and worship the wealth of others
till it seems that a rich man can do no wrong--if he is rich enough? Did
I ever tell you this? The poor, they are despised for being poor, and
they are let to suffer. Here poverty is not permitted. If a man lose his
dwelling by fire, the town builds him another house. You know this. If a
man fail in his winter hunt, the others give of their abundance. Here
one is rated by his personal worth. Here the deed is held to be fine,
not the mere thing. Here you are valued as the great Otasite, and all
men give you honor for your courage. There you are Jan Queetlee, a
penniless clod, and all men despise you and pass you by."[5]

But again Otasite shook his head.

It was no spurious flare of ambition, ineffectual, illusory; no
discontented yearning for a different, a wider life that the trader's
ill-advised words had roused. That sentiment of loyalty to the British
government, which had never sought to claim Jan Queetlee as a subject,
seemed bred in his bone and born in his blood. Perhaps it was the stuff
of which long afterward the Tories of the Revolution were made. He could
not lift his hand against this aloof, indifferent fetich. And yet take
part against the Cherokees, whom he loved as they loved him! For with
his facilities for understanding the trend of the politics of the day he
could no longer blind himself to the approach of the war of the tribe
with the British government, which, indeed, came within the decade. The
sons of Colannah, slain in the cruel wars with other Indians, had been
to him like brothers, and in their loss he had felt his full and bitter
share of the grief of a common household. Even yet he and Colannah were
wont to sadly talk of them with that painful elimination of their names,
a mark of Indian reverence to the dead, substituting the euphemism "the
one who is gone," and linger for hours over the fire at night or on the
shady river-bank in sunlit afternoons, rehearsing their deeds and
recalling their traits, and repeating their sayings with that blending
of affectionate pride and sorrow that is the consolation of bereavement
when time has somewhat softened its pangs and made memory so dear. And
Colannah had been like a father--it seemed to Jan Queetlee as if he had
had no other father. He could not leave Colannah, old, desolate, and