An Irishman rarely stops to count the odds.  With the thought O’Kimmon, heavy, muscular, yet alert, threw himself upon Oo-koo-koo, and in an instant he had almost wrenched the knife from the Indian’s belt.

The other Cherokee cried warningly, “Akee-rooka!  Akee-rooka!” (I will shoot!) Then drew his pistol and fired.

The next moment, perhaps for many moments thereafter, none of them knew very definitely what had happened.  There was a cloud of dust, a terrific detonation, a sudden absolute darkness, as in some revulsion of nature, a stifling sensation.  They were penned within the grotto by a great fragment of the beetling cliff.  Doubtless it had been previously fractured by the action of continuous freezes, and the concussion of the pistol shot in the restricted space of the cave below had brought it down.

The days went on.  The men were missed after a time, but a considerable interval had elapsed.  The two strangers had of late kept themselves much apart, owing to their absorption and their covert methods of seeking for gold.  It was an ill-ordered, roaming, sylvan life they led at best.  The cheera-taghe, although “beloved men” and priests of their strange and savage religion, were but wild Indians, and their temporary absence created no surprise.  In fact, until sought with anxiety when the drought had become excessive and threatened the later crops, and the services of the cheera-taghe were necessary to invoke and with wild barbaric ceremonials bring down the lightning and thunder to clear the atmosphere and the rain to refresh the soil, it was not ascertained that the prophets had definitely disappeared.

Then it was that excitement supervened, search, anxiety, grief, fear.  There began to be vague rumors of untoward sounds, remembered rather than noticed at the time.  Faint explosions had been heard in the night as if under the ground, and again in broad daylight as if in the air.  None could imagine that the doomed men had sought to attract the attention of the town by firing off their pistols, thus utilizing their scanty ammunition.  The strain grew intense; superstitious fancies supplemented the real mystery; the place was finally abandoned, and thus Nilaque Great became a “waste town.”

It was ten years, perhaps, after this blight had fallen upon it, that one day as the pack-train came down the valley of the Little Tennessee, on its autumnal return trip to Charlestown, the snow began to sift down.  An unseasonable storm it was, for the winter had hardly set in.  A north wind sprang up; the snow was soon heavily driving; within an hour the woods, still in the red leafage of autumn, were covered with snow and encased in ice.  Only by a strenuous effort would the train be able to pass the old “waste town” before the early dusk,—­a mile or two at most; but it was hoped that this might suffice to keep the ghosts out of the bounds of visibility.  The roaring bacchanalian glees with which the pack-men set the melancholy sheeted woods aquiver might well send the ghosts out of earshot, presuming them endowed with volition.