It was a little thing,—­the displeasure of such men—­mere savages,—­but it cut him to the heart.  So long they had been his friends, his associates, as the chief furniture of the world!

He busied himself with the affairs of his firm at Charlestown, but for a time he was much changed, much cast down, for he had a sense of responsibility, and his conscience was involved, and although he had sought to do good he had only wrought harm, and irreparable harm.  He grew old very fast, racked as he was by rheumatism, a continual reminder of the stern experiences of his flight.  He had other reminders in his unquiet thoughts, but he grew garrulous at a much later date.  Years intervened before he was wont to sit in front of the warehouse, with his stick between his knees, his hands clasped on the round knob at its top, his chin on his hands, and cheerily chirp of his days in “the Nation.”  The softening touch of time brought inevitably its glamours and its peace; his bleared old eyes, fixed on the glittering expanse of the harbor, beheld with pleasure, instead of the sea, the billowy reaches of that mighty main of mist-crested mountains known as the Great Smoky Range, and through all his talk, and continually through his mind, flitted the bright animated presence of the victor at chungke.

THE CAPTIVE OF THE ADA-WEHI

Attusah was obviously an impostor.  Many, however, had full faith in his supernatural power, and often he seemed to believe in his own spectral account of himself.

“Tsida-wei-yu!” (I am a great ada-wehi![6]) the young warrior would cry with his joyous grandiloquent gesture, waving his many braceleted right arm at full length as he held himself proudly erect. “Akee-o-hoosa!  Akee-o-hoosa!" (I am dead).  Then triumphantly, “And behold I am still here.”

Attusah had gone unscathed through that bloody campaign of 1761 in which the Cherokees suffered such incredible rigors.  After their total defeat at Etchoee the Indians could offer no further resistance to the troops of Colonel Grant, who triumphantly bore the authority of the British king from one end of the Cherokee country to the other, for there was no more powder to be had in the tribe.  The French, from whom they had hoped a supply, failed them at their utmost need, and now those massive crags of the Great Smoky Mountains, overhanging the Tennessee River, no longer echoed the “whoo-whoop!” of the braves, the wild cry of the Highlanders, “Claymore!  Claymore!” the nerve-thrilling report of the volleys of musketry from the Royal Scots, the hissing of the hand grenades flung bursting into the jungles of the laurel.  Instead, all the clifty defiles of the ranges were filled with the roar of flames and the crackling of burning timbers as town after town was given to the firebrand, and the homeless, helpless Cherokees frantically fleeing to the densest coverts of the wilderness,—­that powerful truculent tribe!—­sought for shelter like those “feeble folk the conies” in the hollows of the rocks.