Indeed, this seemed to be the only reasonable method of accounting for the renewed presence in the world of a man known to be dead.  This was his status, he argued.  He was a dead man, and this was his captive.  The Cherokee nation could not pretend to follow with its control the actions of a dead man.  They themselves had pronounced him dead.  He had no place in the war.  He had been forbidden, on account of his official death, to compete for the honors of the campaign.  Apart from his former status as a Cherokee, merely as a supernatural being, a spirit, an ada-wehi, he had captured this British soldier, who was therefore the property of a dead man.  And the Cherokee law of all things and before all things forbade interference with the effects of the dead.

Despite the curling contempt on the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the details of this choice argument.  There was an illogical inversion of values in the experience of the tribe, and while they could not now accept the worthless figments of long ago, it was not vouchsafed to them to enjoy the substantial merits of the new order of things.  Reason, powder, diplomacy, had brought the Cherokee nation to a point of humiliation to which superstition, savagery, and the simplicities of the tomahawk had never descended in “the good old times.”  Reason was never so befuddled of aspect, civilization never so undesired as now.  In their own expanded outlook at life, however, they could not afford to ignore the views of Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the advocate of all the newer methods, in so important a matter as the release of a British prisoner of war on the strange pretext that his captor was a ghost of a peculiar spectral power, an ada-wehi, although this course would have been more agreeable to the “old beloved” theories of their halcyon days of eld, when the Cherokee name was a terror and a threat.

Therefore, averse as they were to subscribe to the modern methods which had wrought them such woe and humiliation and defeat, the dominant superstition of the race now fell far short of the fantasy of liberating a British prisoner at this crisis under the influence of any spectral manifestation whatsoever.  The council was obviously steeled against this proposition, as MacVintie shortly perceived, and equally determined that the ada-wehi must needs exert phenomenal and magical powers indeed to avoid yet making good the nation’s pledge of his death to the British government, and becoming a ghost in serious earnest.  MacVintie’s heart sank within him as he noted the hardening of the lines of their grave harsh faces and the affirmative nodding of the feather-crested heads, conferring together, as the decision was reached.