his specious wiles, the old chief would argue, would Otasite have thought of forsaking his foster nation, his adopted father, for the selfish, indifferent British, the “Goweno” at Charlestown, who cared for him nothing?  The trader it was who had brought this calamity upon them, who had in effect, by the hand of another, administered the fatal draught.  Seek for him!—­hale him forth! —­wreak upon him the just, unappeasable vengeance of the forever bereaved!

The old trader had evinced an instinct in flight and concealment that an animal might envy.  No probable hiding-place he selected, such as might be known or divined—­a cave, the attic of his trading-house, the cellar beneath—­all obvious, all instantly explored.  Instead, he slipped into a rift in the rocks along the river-bank.  Myriads of such crevices there were in the tilted strata—­unheeded, unremarked, too strait and restricted to suggest the idea of refuge, too infinitely numerous for search.  There, unable in the narrow compass to turn, even to shift a numbing muscle of his lean old body, in all the constraint of a standing posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its fossils,—­as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed hence,—­or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds.  He listened to the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing party went out to overtake him, presumably on his way to Charlestown, maintaining a very high rate of speed, for the Cherokees of that period had some famously fine horses.

Straining his senses—­all unnaturally alert—­he distinguished, as the afternoon wore on, the details of the preparations for the barbarous sepulture of the young Briton.  Now and then the cracking of rifle-shots betokened the shooting of his horses and cattle and all the living things among his possessions—­a practice already in its decadence among the Cherokees, and later, influenced by the utilitarian methods of civilization, altogether abandoned.  Swift steps here and there throughout the town intimated errands to gather all his choicest effects to be buried with him, for his future use.  To this custom, it is said, and the great security of the fashioning of the sepulchres of the Cherokees, may be attributed the fact that little of their pottery, arms, beads, medals, the more indestructible of their personal possessions, can be found in this region where so lately they were a numerous people; for the effects of the dead, however valued, were never removed or the graves robbed, even by an Indian enemy.  The Cherokees rarely permitted the presence of an alien at the ceremonies of the interment of one of the tribe; but Varney in times past had seen and heard enough to realize, without any definite effort of the imagination, how Otasite, arrayed in his most gorgeous apparel, his beautiful