“You cannot be serious,” he said.  “It would break old Colannah’s heart, who has been like a father to me.”

Abram Varney too had the British bulldog tenacity.  “What will you do, then,” he asked slowly and significantly, “when Colannah takes up arms against the British government?  Will you fight men of your own blood?”

He was reinforced in this argument by the habit of thought of the Indians—­the absolute absence of tribal dissensions, of internecine strife, so marked among the Cherokees:  here no man’s hand was lifted against his brother.

Jan Queetlee palpably winced.  Come what might, he could never fight for the Cherokees against the British—­his father’s people, his mother’s people—­no more than he could fight for the British against his adopted tribe—­the Cherokee—­and he the “Man-killer!”

“They will fight each other,” said Varney weightily, “and the day is not far—­the day is not far!”

For in 1753 the cumulative discontents of the tribe were near the crisis, earnestly fostered by the French on the western boundaries, that vast domain then known as Louisiana, toward whose siren voice the Cherokees had ever lent a willing ear.  The building by the British government, two or three years later, of those great defensive works, Fort Prince George and Fort Loudon, situated respectively at the eastern and western extremities of the Cherokee territory, mounted with cannon and garrisoned by British forces, served to hold them in check and quieted them for a time, but only for a time.  Jan Queetlee, by reason of his close association with the chiefs, knew far more than Varney dreamed of the bitterness roused in the hearts of the Indians by friction with the government, the aggressions of the individual colonist, the infringements of their privileges in the treaty, and in opposition the influence of the ever seductive suavity of the French.

As with a sudden hurt, Jan Queetlee cried out with a poignant voice against the government and its patent unfaith, striking his clinched fist so heavily on the head of a keg of powder that the stout fibres of the wood burst beneath the passionate blow, and in a moment he was covered with the flying particles of the black dust.  Realizing the possibility of an explosion should a candle or a pipe be lighted here, Varney did not wait for the return of one of the brawny packmen to remove the keg to a cave beneath the trading-house, which he utilized for storage as a cellar, but addressed himself to the job.  Jan Queetlee silently assisted, his face darker, more lowering with the thought in his mind than with the smears of the powder.