He was puny and ill and white and despised!  You British say the Indian has no pity.  A man’s son or brother or father or mother has claims upon him.  Otasite was naught to me, a mere eeankke!” (a captive).  “I owed the child no duty.  My love was voluntary.  I gave it a free gift; no duty!  And he was little, and drooping, and meagre, and ill all the time!  But he grew; soon no such boy in the Cherokee nation, soon hardly such a warrior in all the land—­not even Otasite of Watauga, nor yet Otasite of Eupharsee; perhaps at his age Oconostota excelled” (Oconostota always was preeminently known as the “Great Warrior").  He paused to shake his head and meditate on difficult comparisons and instances of prowess.  After an interval which, long enough, seemed to the trembling trader illimitable, he recommenced abruptly:  “Says the Goweno long time ago to me, ‘Is not there a white youth among you?’ I say, ‘He is content; he has no white friends, it seems.’  Says the Goweno to me, ‘Ah, ah, we must look into this!’ and says no more.”

Colannah flung back his head and laughed so long and so loud that every echo of the sarcastic guttural tones, striking back from the stone walls of the cavern, smote Varney with as definite a shock as a blow.

“And now,” the Cherokee resumed, with a changed aspect and a pathetic cadence, “I am an old man, and I lean upon Otasite.  My sons are all dead—­one in the wars with the Muscogee and two slain by the Chickasaw.  And the last he said to me, with his lingering latest breath, loath to go and leave me desolate, ’But you have an adopted son, you have the noble Otasite.’  And now,” his voice was firm again, “if I have him not, I go too, and you go.  We go together.”

“I will not advise him to quit the nation—­never again!” cried Varney, suddenly enlightened, fervently repudiating his interference.  “Since you disapprove, he shall not return to Carolina.  He cannot go without me—­my help; he could not find a place—­a home.  Bold and fine as he is here, he would be strange there; he knows naught of the ways of the colonists.  He would be poor, despised, while here he has been like the first, the best.  His pride could never stoop to a life like a slave’s; his pride would break his heart.  Let me undo the mischief I have wrought; let me unsay the unthinking, foolish words I have spoken.”

It was perhaps with the faith that the artful trader could best turn the young fellow’s mind back to its wonted content, as his crafty arguments had already so potently aroused this wild, new dissatisfaction, that Colannah at last consented to liberate Varney for this essay, not without a cogent reminder that he would be held responsible for its failure.  And indeed in recanting his former urgency, when he sought out Otasite, Varney exerted himself to the utmost.

“You are satisfied here.  You know the life.  Like me, you love it.  If I, who can choose, prefer it, why not you?”