“Why come?” Oo-koo-koo demanded sternly.

“Tell the truth, for God’s sake!” L’Epine adjured O’Kimmon in a low voice.

“I’m not used to it!  ‘T would give me me death o’ cold!” quavered the Irishman, in sad sincerity, at a grievous loss.

“Asgaya uneka (White man), but no Ingliss,” said the astute Indian, touching the breast of each with the bowl of his pipe, still in his hand and still alight as it was when the interruption of their advent had occurred.

“No, by the powers,—­not English!” exclaimed the Irishman impulsively, seeing he was already discovered.  “I’m me own glorious nation!—­the pride o’ the worruld,—­I was born in the Emerald Isle, the gem o’ the say!  I’m an Oirishman from the tip o’ me scalp—­in the name o’ pity why should I mintion the contrivance” (dropping his voice to an appalled muffled tone)—­“may the saints purtect ut!  But surely, Mister Injun, I’ve no part nor lot with the bloody bastes o’ Englishers either over the say or in the provinces.  If I were the brother-in-law o’ the Governor o’ South Carolina I’d hev a divorce from the murtherin’ Englisher before he could cry, ‘Quarter!’”

Oo-koo-koo, the wise Owl, made no direct answer.

“Asgaya uneka (White man), but no Ingliss,” he only said, now indicating L’Epine.

“Frinch in the mornin’, plaze yer worship, an’ only a bit o’ English late in the afternoon o’ the day,” cried O’Kimmon, officiously, himself once more.

“French father, English mother,” explained L’Epine, feeling that the Indian was hardly a safe subject for the pleasantries of conundrums.

“But his mother was but a wee bit of a woman,” urged O’Kimmon; “the most of him is Frinch,—­look at the size of him!”

For O’Kimmon was now bidding as high against the English aegis as earlier he had been disposed to claim its protection, when he had protested his familiarity with the Royal Governor of South Carolina.  In an instant he was once more gay, impudent, confident of carrying everything before him.  He divined that some recent friction had supervened in the ever-clashing interests subsisting between the Cherokee nation and the British government, and was relying on the recurrent inclination of this tribe to fraternize with the French.  Their influence from their increasing western settlements was exerted antagonistically to the British colonists, by whom it was dreaded in anticipation of the war against a French and Cherokee alliance which came later.  Oo-koo-koo, complacent in his own sagacity in having detected a difference in the speech of the new-comers from the English which he had been accustomed to hear in Charlestown, and animated by a wish to believe, hearkened with the more credulity to an expansive fiction detailed by the specious Irishman as to their mission here.