English face painted vermilion, would be placed in a sitting posture in front of his house, and there in the sunlit afternoon remain for a space, looking in, as it were, at the open door.  Presently sounded the wild lamentations and melancholy cadences of the funeral song; the tones rose successively from a deep bass to a tenor, then to a shrill treble, falling again to a full bass chorus, with the progression of the mystic syllables, “Yah!  Yo-he-wah!  Yah!  Yo-he-wah!" (said to signify “Jehovah").  This announced that the funeral procession, bearing the body, was going thrice around the house of the dead, where he had lived in familiar happiness these many years, and beneath which he would rest in solemn silence in his deep, deep grave, covered with heavy timbers and many layers of bark, and the stanch red clay, maintaining a sitting posture, and facing the east, while the domestic life of homely cheer would go on over his unheeding head as he awaited the distant and universal resurrection of the body, in which the Cherokee religion inculcated a full and firm faith.

The sun went down, and through all the night sounded the plaints of grief.  Late the moon rose, striking aslant on the melancholy Tennessee River, full of deep shadows and vaguely pathetic pallid glimmers.  A wind sprang up for a time, then suddenly sank to silence and stillness.  A frost fell with a keen icy chill.  Mists gathered, and the day did not break,—­it seemed as if it might never dawn again; only a pallid visibility came gradually upon clouds that had enshrouded all the world.  The earth and the sky were alike indistinguishable; the mountains were as valleys, the valleys as plains.  One might scarcely make shift to see a hand before the face.  Through this white pall, this cloud of nullity, came ever the dolorous chant, “Yo-he-ta-wah!  Yo-he-ta-weh!  Yo-he-ta-hah!  Yo-he-ta-heh!” as in their grief and poignant bereavement the ignorant and barbarous Indians called upon the God who made them, and He who made them savages doubtless heard them.

Creeping out into the invisibility of the clouded day, Abram Varney had not great fear of detection.  The mists that shielded him from view furthered still his flight, for his footsteps were hardly to be distinguished amidst the continual dripping of the moisture from the leaves of the dank autumnal woods.  At night he knew the savages would be most on the alert.  They would scarcely suspect his flight in the broad day.  Moreover, their suspicions of his presence here were lulled; craftily enough he followed after the horsemen who fancied they were pursuing him—­they would scarcely look for their quarry hard on their own heels.  He experienced no sentiment but one of intense satisfaction when, as invisible as a spirit, he passed his own trading-house, and divined from the sounds within that the Indians were busy in sacking it, albeit a greater financial loss than seems probable at the present day; for the Indian trade was a very considerable commerce, as the accounts of those times will show.  The English and French governments did not disdain to compete for its monopoly with various nations of Indians, for the sake of gaining control of the savages thereby, in view of supplies furnished by the white traders vending these commodities and resident in the tribes.