wars which the Cherokees waged against the other Indian tribes.  He had already won the “warrior’s crown” and his “war-name,” a title conferred only upon the bravest of the brave.  He was now Otasite, the “Man-killer” of Tennessee Town.  He was just twenty years of age, and Abram Varney, gazing at him, wondered what the people in Charlestown would think of him could they see him.  For a few days, a week, perhaps, the trader would refer all his thoughts to this civilized standard.

Tall, alert as an Indian, supple too, but heavier and more muscular, Otasite was instantly to be distinguished by his build from among the other young men, although, like the Indians, he wore a garb of dressed deerskin.  His face, albeit no stranger to the use of their pigments and unguents, still showed fair and freckled.  His hair bore no resemblance to their lank black locks; of an auburn hue and resolutely curling, it defied the tonsure to which it had been for years subjected, coming out crisp and ringleted close to his head where he was designed to be bald, and on the top, where the “war-lock” was permitted to grow, it floated backward in two long tangled red curls that gave the lie direct to the Indian similitude affected by the two surmounting tips of eagle feathers.  He was arrayed in much splendor, according to aboriginal standards; the fringed seams of his hunting shirt and leggings, fashioned of fine white dressed doeskin, as pliable as “Canton silk crape,” were hung with fawns’ trotters; his moccasins were white and streaked with parti-colored paint; he had a curious prickly belt of wolves’ teeth, which intimated his moral courage as well as sylvan prowess, for the slaying of these beasts was esteemed unlucky, and shooting at them calculated to spoil the aim of a gun; many glancing, glittering strings of “roanoke” swung around his neck.

Nothing could have been finer, athletically considered, than his attitude at this moment of the trader’s speculative observation.  The discoidal quartz chungke-stone[2] had been hurled with a tremendous fling along the smooth sandy stretch of the yard, its flat edge, two inches wide, and the curiously exact equipoise of its fashioning causing it to bowl swiftly along a great distance, to fall only when the original impetus should fail; his competitor, Wyejah, a sinewy, powerful young brave, his buckskin garb steeped in some red dye that gave him the look when at full speed of the first flying leaf of the falling season, his ears split and barbarically distended on wire hoops[3] and hung with silver rings, his moccasins scarlet, his black hair decorated with cardinal wings, had just sent his heavy lance, twelve feet long, skimming through the air; then Otasite, running swiftly but lightly abreast with him, launched his own long lance with such force and nicety of aim that its point struck the end of Wyejah’s spear, still in flight in mid-air, deflecting its direction, and sending it far afield from the chungke-stone which it was designed in falling to touch.  This fine cast counted one point in the game, which is of eleven points, and the Indian braves among the spectators howled like civilized young men at a horse-race.