characterized him, and indeed he had
never seemed quite the same since he died. He had been much too
reckless, however, even previous to that event. Impetuous, hasty,
tumultuously hating the British colonists, he had participated several
years earlier in a massacre of an outlying station, when the Cherokees
were at peace, without warrant of tribal authority, and with so little
caution as to be recognized. For this breach of the treaty his execution
was demanded by the Royal Governor of South Carolina, and reluctantly
conceded by the Cherokees to avert a war for the chastisement of the
tribe. Powder must have been exceedingly scarce!

Attusah was allowed to choose his method of departure to the happy
hunting-grounds, and thus was duly stabbed to death. He was left
weltering in his blood to be buried by his kindred. The half king,
Atta-Kulla-Kulla, satisfied of his death, himself reported the execution
to the Carolina authorities, and as in his long and complicated
diplomatic relations with the colonial government this Cherokee chief
had never broken faith, he was implicitly believed.

Whether the extraordinary vitality and vigor of the young warrior were
reasserted after life had been pronounced wholly extinct, and thus his
relations were induced to defer the obsequies, or that he was enabled to
exert supernatural powers and in the spirit reappear in his former
semblance of flesh,--both theories being freely advanced,--certain it is
that after a time he returned to his old haunts as gay, as reckless, as
impetuous as ever. He bore no token of his strange experience save
sundry healed-over scars of deep gashes in his breast, which he seemed
at times to seek to shield from observation; and this he might have
accomplished but for his solicitude that a very smart shirt, much
embroidered and bedizened with roanoke, should not suffer by exposure to
water; wherefore he took it off when it rained, and in swimming, and on
the war-path. He manifested, too, a less puerile anxiety to escape the
notice of Atta-Kulla-Kulla and other head men, who were supposed to be
well affected at that time to the British government. This he was the
better enabled to do as his habitat, Kanootare, was the most remote of
the Cherokee towns, his name, Attusah, signifying the "Northward
Warrior."

After the capitulation of Fort Loudon and the massacre of the garrison
the previous year, and the organized resistance the Cherokees had made
in the field o