There, seated on the step of the closed door which boasted the only lock and key in Tennessee Town, or for the matter of that in all the stretch of the Cherokee country west of the Great Smoky Range, was Otasite, the incongruity of his auburn curls and his Indian headdress seeming a trifle more pronounced than usual, since it had been for a time an unfamiliar sight.  He was awaiting the coming of the trader, and was singing meanwhile in a loud and cheerful voice, “Drink with me a cup of wine,” a ditty which he had heard in his half-forgotten childhood.  The robust full tones gave no token of the draught made upon his endurance by the heavy exercise of the day, but he seemed a bit languid from the heat, and his doeskin shirt was thrown open at the throat, showing his broad white chest, and in its centre the barbarous blue discolorations of the “warrior’s marks.”  These disfigurements, made by the puncturing of the flesh with gars’ teeth and inserting in the wound paint and pitch, indelible testimonials to his deeds of courage and prowess, Otasite valued as he did naught else on earth, and he would have parted with his right hand as readily.  The first had been bestowed upon him after he had gone, a mighty gun-man, against the Muscogees.  The others he had won in the course of a long, furious, and stubborn contest of the tribe with the Chickasaws, who, always impolitic, headlong, and brave, were now reduced by their own valor in their many wars from ten thousand fighting men to a few hundred.  He had attained the “warrior’s crown” when he had shown their kindred Choctaws a mettle as fierce and a craft as keen as their own.  And now he was looking at Abram Varney with kindly English eyes and an expression about the brow, heavily freckled, that almost smote the tears from the elder man.  The trader knew from long experience what was coming, but suddenly he had begun to regard it differently.  Always upon the end of each journey from Charlestown he had been met here within a day or two by Otasite on the same mission.  The long years as they passed had wrought only external changes since, as a slender wistful boy of eleven years, heart-sick, homeless, forlorn, friendless, save for his Indian captors, likely, indeed, to forget all language but theirs, he had first come with his question, always in English, always with a faltering eyelash and a deprecatory lowered voice, “Did you hear anything in Charlestown of any people named ’Queetlee’?”

This was the distorted version of his father’s name that Colannah had preserved.  As to the child himself, his memory had perhaps been shaken by the events of that terrible night of massacre, which he only realized as a frightful awakening from sleep to smoke, flames, screams, the ear-splitting crack of rifle-shots at close quarters, the shock of a sudden hurt—­and then, after an interval of unconsciousness, a transition to a new world of strange habitudes that grew speedily familiar, and of unexpected kindness that became dear to a frank, affectionate heart.  Perhaps in the isolations of the frontier life he had never heard his father addressed by his surname by a stranger; he was called “Jan” by his wife, and her name was “Eelin,” and this Otasite knew, and this was all he knew, save that he himself also had been called “Jan.”