ting roof; futile traces of
vanished homes. Once a deer and fawn were grazing in the weed-grown
fields that used to stand so thick with corn that they laughed and sung;
once--it was close upon winter--he heard a bear humming and humming his
content (the hunters called the sound "singing") from the den where the
animal had bestowed himself among the fallen logs of a dwelling-house,
half covered with great drifts of dead leaves; often an owl would cry
out in alarm from some dark nook as the pack-train clattered past; and
once a wolf with a stealthy and sinister tread was patrolling the
"beloved square." These were but the natural incidents of the time and
the ruins of the old Cherokee town.

Little did Cuddy Barnett imagine, as he gazed on the deserted and
desolate place, that he was yet to behold the smoke of the "sacred fire"
flaring up into the blue sky from the portal of the temple, as the
cheera-taghe would issue bearing the flame aloft, newly kindled in the
opening year, and calling upon many assembled people to light therefrom
their hearths, rekindling good resolutions and religious fervor for the
future, and letting the faults of the unavailing past die out with the
old year's fire; that he was to mark the clash of arms in the "beloved
square," once more populous with the alert figures of warriors in
martial array, making ready for the war-path; that he was to hear the
joyful religious songs of greeting to the dawn, and the sonorous
trumpeting of the conch-shells, as the vanished Indians of the "old
waste town" would troop down at daybreak into the water of that bright
stream where long ago they had been wont to plunge in their mystic
religious ablutions. All this, however, the pack-men might see and hear,
to believe the tradition of the day, in camping but a single night near
the old "waste town."

And so anxious were these gay itinerant companies to see and hear
nothing of such ghostly sort that whatever the stress of the weather,
the mischances of the journey, the condition of the pack-animals, this
vicinity was always distinguished by the longest day's travel of the
whole route, and the camp was pitched at the extreme limit of the
endurance of man and horse to compass distance from Nilaque Great. For
believe what one might, the fact remained indisputable, that a decade
earlier, when the place was inhabited, strange sounds were rife about
the locality, the "sacred fire" was unkindled on the great "Sanctified