“And why not?” Otasite would demand, full of faith in his own education.  “The Chickasaw will say ’pokoole toogalo’—­ten twos”—­and he would smile superior.  This was his world, and these his standards—­the Cherokees and the Chickasaws!

He was not to be easily influenced or turned save by some spontaneous acquiescence of his own mind, and Varney found himself counting “skoeh chooke kaiere” (the old one’s hundred) before he ever induced Otasite to say instead “one thousand.”

The boy even ventured on censorship in his turn.  “You say ‘Cherokee_s_’ and ‘Chickasaw_s_’ when you speak of the Tsullakee and the Chickasaw; why don’t you then say the English-es and the French-es?” For the plural designation of these tribes was a colonial invention.

His bulldog tenacity, his orderly instincts, his providence, so contrary to the methods of the wasteful Indian, his cheerful industry, his indomitable energy and perseverance,—­all were so national that in days gone past Varney used now and again to clap him on the shoulder with a loud, careless vaunt, “British to the marrow!”

A fact, doubtless—­and all of a sudden it had begun to seem a very serious fact.  So very serious, indeed, that the old trader did not notice the crisis in the chungke-yard, the increasing excitement in the crowds of spectators, the clamors presently when the game was declared a draw and the bets off, the stir of the departing groups.  It was silence at last that smote upon his senses with the effect of interruption which the continuance of sound had not been able to compass.  He drew himself up with a perplexed sigh, and looked drearily over the expanse of the river.  Its long glittering reaches were vacant, a rare circumstance, for the Cherokees of that date were almost amphibious in habit, reveling in the many lovely streams of their mountain country; on the banks their towns were situated, and this fact doubtless contributed to the neatness of their habitations and personal cleanliness, to which the travelers of those times bear a surprised testimony.  The light upon the water was aslant now from a westering sun, and glittering on the snowy breasts of a cluster of swans drifting, dreaming perhaps, on the current.  The scarlet boughs on the summit of Chilhowee were motionless against the azure zenith.  Not even the vaguest tissue of mist now lingered about the majestic domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, painted clearly and accurately in fine and minute detail in soft dense velvet blues against the hard polished mineral blue of the horizon.  The atmosphere was so exquisitely luminous and pellucid that it might have seemed a fit medium to dispel uncertainty in other than merely material subjects of contemplation.  Nevertheless he did not see his way clearly, and when he came within view of his trading-house he paused as abruptly as if he had found his path blocked by an obstacle.