ave tempted fate by the mystic draught from
Herbert's Spring to hold here that bright young form for seven years
longer. How sadly true!--for seven years Otasite would remain, and seven
to that, and, alack, seven more, and forever! Soon, however, the natural
impulses of the Indian's temper, intensified by long cultivation, would
be reasserted. He would cast about for revenge, remembering the first
suggestion of the departure of Otasite, and from whom it had emanated.
But for the English trader and his specious wiles, the old chief would
argue, would Otasite have thought of forsaking his foster nation, his
adopted father, for the selfish, indifferent British, the "Goweno" at
Charlestown, who cared for him nothing? The trader it was who had
brought this calamity upon them, who had in effect, by the hand of
another, administered the fatal draught. Seek for him!--hale him forth!
--wreak upon him the just, unappeasable vengeance of the forever
bereaved!

The old trader had evinced an instinct in flight and concealment that an
animal might envy. No probable hiding-place he selected, such as might
be known or divined--a cave, the attic of his trading-house, the cellar
beneath--all obvious, all instantly explored. Instead, he slipped into a
rift in the rocks along the river-bank. Myriads of such crevices there
were in the tilted strata--unheeded, unremarked, too strait and
restricted to suggest the idea of refuge, too infinitely numerous for
search. There, unable in the narrow compass to turn, even to shift a
numbing muscle of his lean old body, in all the constraint of a standing
posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its
fossils,--as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once
been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed
hence,--or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in
the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds. He listened to
the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing
party went out to overtake him, presumably on his way to Charlestown,
maintaining a very high rate of speed, for the Cherokees of that period
had some famously fine horses.

Straining his senses--all unnaturally alert--he distinguished, as the
afternoon wore on, the details of the preparations for the barbarous
sepulture of the young Briton. Now and then the cracking of rifle-shots
betokened the shooting of his horses and cattle and all the li