illustrated virtues so stanch that they seemed the complement of his physical endowment and a part of his resolute personality, the old trader thought of the boy’s father, and thought of him daily—­how the sturdy Cumbrian yeoman would have rejoiced in so stalwart a son!  Thus, with this vague bond of sympathy with a man whom he had never seen, never known, so long ago, so cruelly dead, this intuitive divination of his paternal sentiment, Varney’s fatherly attitude grew more definite daily and became accustomed, and he was jealous of the influence of Colannah, who in turn was jealous of his influence.

Now as Varney stood in the dusky trading-house among the kegs and bags and bales of goods, the high peak of the interior of the roof lost in the lofty shadows, he felt that he had been much in default in long-past years, and he experienced a very definite pang of conscience as Otasite swung abruptly around a stack of arms, a new rifle in his hand, the flint and pan of which he had been keenly examining.

He lifted his eyes suddenly with that long-lashed dreary look of his childhood.

“Did you hear of any Queetlees in Charlestown?” he asked.

“It is you who should seek your kindred, Jan Queetlee!” Varney said impulsively, calling him by his unaccustomed English name.  “It is you who should go to Charlestown to find the Queetlees!”

Otasite’s face showed suddenly the unwonted expression of fear.  He recoiled abruptly, and Abram Varney was sensible of a deep depression.  It was as he had thought.  The wish for restoration to those of his name and his kindred which had animated the boy’s earlier years had now dwindled to a mere abstract sentiment of loyalty as of clanship, but was devoid of expectation, of intention.  All the members of his immediate family had perished in the massacre, and he had been trained to regard this as the fortunes of war, cherishing no personal antagonism, as elsewhere among civilized people reconciliations are frequent between the victors and the friends of the slain in battle.  Moreover, he was not brought close to it.  The participators in the affray were of the distant Ayrate settlements of the tribe, southeast of the mountains, and not individualized.  The Indians of Tennessee Town, which was then one of the most remote of the Cherokee villages of the Ottare division, and this perhaps was the reason it was selected as his home, were not concerned in the foray, nor were any others of the Overhill towns.  Thus he had grown up without the thirst for vengeance, which showed how little the methods of his Cherokee environment had influenced his heart.  And truly the far-away Queetlees, if any such were cognizant of his existence, had troubled themselves nothing about it, and had infinitely less claim on his gratitude and filial affection than Colannah.  They had left him to be as a waif, a slave.  He had been reared as a son, nursed and tended, fed and fostered, bedecked in splendor, armed in costly and formidable wise, given command and station, carefully trained in all that the Indian knew.