The Frontiersmen written by Charles Egbert Craddock

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THE FRONTIERSMEN

by

CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK

Author of _A Spectre of Power_, _The Prophet of the Great Smoky
Mountains_, _In the Tennessee Mountains_, etc.

1904

CONTENTS

THE LINGUISTER

A VICTOR AT CHUNGKE

THE CAPTIVE OF THE ADA-WEHI

THE FATE OF THE CHEERA-TAGHE

THE BEWITCHED BALL-STICKS

THE VISIT OF THE TURBULENT GRANDFATHER

NOTES

THE LINGUISTER

The mental image of the world is of individual and varying compass. It
may be likened to one of those curious Chinese balls of quaintly carved
ivory, containing other balls, one within another, the proportions ever
dwindling with each successive inclosure, yet each a more minute
duplicate of the external sphere. This might seem the least world of
all,--the restricted limits of the quadrangle of this primitive
stockade,--but Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane had known no other than
such as this. It was large enough for her, for a fairy-like face, very
fair, with golden brown hair, that seemed to have entangled the
sunshine, and lustrous brown eyes, looked out of an embrasure (locally
called "port-hole") of the blockhouse, more formidable than the swivel
gun once mounted there, commanding the entrance to the stockade gate.
Her aspect might have suggested that Titania herself had resorted to
military methods and was ensconced in primitive defenses. It was even
large enough for her name, which must have been conferred upon her, as
the wits of the Blue Lick Station jocularly averred, in the hope of
adding some size to her. It was large enough also for the drama of
battle and the tragedy of bloody death--both had befallen within its
limits.

There had been a night, glooming very dark in the past, an unwary night
when the row of log houses, all connected by the palisades from one to
the other, presenting a blank wall without, broken only by loopholes for
musketry, had been scaled by the crafty Cherokees, swarming over the
roofs, and attacking the English settlers through the easy access of the
unglazed windows and flimsy batten doors that opened upon the
quadrangle. Although finally beaten off, the Indians had inflicted great
loss. Her father had been one of the slain settlers who thus paid
penalty for the false sense of security, fostered by long immunity. Even
more troublous times came later,--the tumult of open war was rife in all
the land; the station was repeatedly attacked, and although it held out
stanchly, fear and suspense and grief filled the stockade,--yet still
there was space for Cupid to go swaggering hither and thither within the
guarded gates, and aim his arrows with his old-time dainty skill, albeit
his bow and quiver might seem somewhat archaic in these days of powder
and lead. For Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane spent much of her time in
the moulding of bullets. Perhaps it was appropriate, since both she and
her young pioneer lover dealt so largely in missiles, that it was thus
the sentimental dart was sped. Lead was precious in those days, but
sundry bullets, that she had moulded, Ralph Emsden never rammed down
into the long barrel of his flintlock rifle. Some question as to whether
the balls had cooled, or perhaps some mere meditative pause, had carried
the bits of lead in her fingers to her lips, as they sat together on the
hearth and talked and worked in the fire-lit dusk for their common
defense. He was wont to watch, lynx-eyed, the spot where these
consecrated bullets were placed, and afterward carried them in a
separate buckskin bag over his heart, and mentally called them his
"kisses;" for the youths of those days were even such fools as now,
although in the lapse of time they have come to pose successfully in the
dignified guise of the "wise patriots of the pioneer period." More than
once when the station was attacked and the women loaded the guns of the
men to expedite the shooting, she kept stanchly at his elbow throughout
the thunderous conflict, and charged and primed the alternate rifles
which he fired.[1] Over the trigger, in fact, the fateful word was
spoken.

"Oh, Nan," he exclaimed, looking down at her while taking the weapon
from her hand in the vague dusk where she knelt beside him,--he stood on
the shelf that served as banquette to bring him within reach of the
loophole, placed so high in the hope that a chance shot entering might
range only among the rafters,--"How quick you are! How you help me!"

The thunderous crash of the double volley of the settlers firing twice,
by the aid of their feminine auxiliaries, to every volley of the
Indians, overwhelmed for the moment the tumult of the fiendish whoops in
the wild darkness outside, and then the fusillade of the return fire,
like leaden hail, rattled against the tough log walls of the station.

"Are you afraid, Nan?" he asked, as he received again the loaded weapon
from her hand.

"_Afraid?_--No!" exclaimed Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane--hardly taller
than the ramrod with which she was once more driving the charge home.

He saw her face, delicate and blonde, in the vivid white flare from the
rifle as he thrust it through the loophole and fired. "You think I can
take care of you?" he demanded, while the echo died away, and a lull
ensued.

"I know you can," she replied, adjusting with the steady hand of an
expert the patching over the muzzle of the discharged weapon in the
semi-obscurity.

A blood-curdling shout came from the Cherokees in the woods with a
deeper roar of musketry at closer quarters; and a hollow groan within
the blockhouse, where there was a sudden commotion in the dim light,
told that some bullet had found its billet.

"They are coming to the attack again--Hand me the
rifle--quick--quick--Oh, Nan, how you help me! How brave you are--I love
you! I love you!"

"Look out now for a flash in the pan!" Peninnah Penelope Anne merely
admonished him.

Being susceptible to superstition and a ponderer on omens, Ralph Emsden
often thought fretfully afterward on the double meaning of these words,
and sought to displace them in their possible evil influence on his
future by some assurance more cheerful and confident. With this view he
often earnestly beset her, but could secure nothing more pleasing than a
reference to the will of her grandfather and a protestation to abide by
his decision in the matter.

Now Peninnah Penelope Anne's grandfather was deaf. His was that hopeless
variety of the infirmity which heard no more than he desired. His
memory, however, was unimpaired, and it may be that certain
recollections of his own experiences in the past remained with him,
making him a fine judge of the signs of the present. Emsden, appalled by
the necessity of shrieking out his love within the acute and
well-applied hearing facilities of the families of some ten
"stationers," to use the phrase of the day, diligently sought to decoy,
on successive occasions, Richard Mivane out to the comparative solitudes
of the hunting, the fishing, the cropping. In vain. Richard Mivane
displayed sudden extreme prudential care against surprise and capture by
Indians, when this was possible, and when impossible he developed
unexpected and unexampled resources of protective rheumatism. The young
lover was equally precluded from setting forth the state of his
affections and the prospects of his future in writing. Apart from the
absurdity of thus approaching a man whom he saw twenty times a day, old
Mivane would permit no such intimation of the extent of his
affliction,--it being a point of pride with him that he was merely
slightly hard of hearing, and suffered only from the indistinctness of
the enunciation of people in general. And indeed, it was variously
contended that he was so deaf that he could not hear a gun fired at his
elbow; and yet that he heard all manner of secrets which chanced to be
detailed in his presence, in inadvertent reliance on his incapacity, and
had not the smallest hesitation afterward in their disclosure, being
entitled to them by right of discovery, as it were.

Emsden, in keen anxiety, doubtful if his suit were seriously
disapproved, or if these demonstrations were only prompted by old
Mivane's selfish aversion to give away his granddaughter, finally
summoned all his courage, and in a stentorian roar proclaimed to the old
gentleman his sentiments.

Richard Mivane was a man of many punctilious habitudes, who wore cloth
instead of buckskin, however hard it might be to come by, and silver
knee-buckles and well-knit hose on his still shapely calves, and a
peruke carefully powdered and tended. He had a keen, wrinkled, bloodless
face, discerning, clever, gray eyes, heavy, overhanging, grizzled
eyebrows, and a gentlemanly mouth of a diplomatic, well-bred,
conservative expression.

It was said at Blue Lick Station that he had fled from his own country,
the north of England, on account of an affair of honor,--a duel in early
life,--and that however distasteful the hardships and comparative
poverty of this new home, it was far safer for him than the land of his
birth. His worldly position there gave him sundry claims of superiority,
for all of which his hardy pioneer son had had scant sympathy; and Ralph
Emsden, in the difficult crisis of the disclosure of the state of his
affections, heaved many a sigh for this simple manly soul's untimely
fate.

The elder Mivane, with his head bent forward, his hand behind his ear,
sat in his arm-chair while he hearkened blandly to the sentimental
statements which Emsden was obliged to shout forth twice. Then Richard
Mivane cleared his throat with a sort of preliminary gentlemanly
embarrassment, and went fluently on with that suave low voice so common
to the very deaf. "Command me, sir, command me! It will give me much
pleasure to use my influence on your behalf to obtain an ensigncy. I
will myself write at the first opportunity, the first express, to
Lieutenant-Governor Bull, who is acquainted with my family connections
in England. It is very praiseworthy, very laudable indeed, that you
should aspire to a commission in the military service,--the provincial
forces. I honor you for your readiness to fight--although, to be sure,
being Irish, you can't help it. Still, it is to your credit that you are
Irish. I am very partial to the Irish traits of character--was once in
Ireland myself--visited an uncle there"--and so forth and so forth.

And thus poor Ralph Emsden, who was only Irish by descent, and could not
have found Ireland on the map were he to hang for his ignorance, and had
been born and bred in the Royal province of South Carolina,--which
country he considered the crown and glory of the world,--was constrained
to listen to all the doings and sayings of Richard Mivane in Ireland
from the time that he embarked on the wild Irish Sea, which scrupled not
to take unprecedented liberties with so untried a sailor, till the
entrance of other pioneers cut short a beguiling account of his first
meeting with potheen in its native haunts, and the bewildering pranks
that he and that tricksy sprite played together in those the
irresponsible days of his youth.

Emsden told no one, not even Peninnah Penelope Anne, of his
discomfiture; but alack, there were youngsters in the family of
unaffected minds and unimpaired hearing. This was made amply manifest a
day or so afterward, when he chanced to pause at the door of the log
cabin and glance in, hoping that, perhaps, the queen of his dreams might
materialize in this humble domicile.

The old gentleman slept in his chair, with dreams of his own, perchance,
for his early life might have furnished a myriad gay fancies for his
later years. The glare of noonday lay on the unshaded spaces of the
quadrangle without; for all trees had been felled, even far around the
inclosure, lest thence they might afford vantage and ambush for musketry
fire or a flight of arrows into the stockade. Through rifts in the
foliage at considerable distance one could see the dark mountain looming
high above, and catch glimpses of the further reaches of the Great Smoky
Range, blue and shimmering far away, and even distinguish the crest of
"Big Injun Mountain" on the skyline. The several cabins, all connected
by that row of protective palisades from one to another like a visible
expression of the chord of sympathy and mutual helpful neighborliness,
were quiet, their denizens dining within. At the blockhouse a guard was
mounted--doubtless a watchful and stanch lookout, but unconforming to
military methods, for he sang, to speed the time, a metrical psalm of
David's; the awkward collocation of the words of this version would
forever distort the royal poet's meaning if he had no other vehicle of
his inspiration. There were long waits between the drowsy lines, and in
the intervals certain callow voices, with the penetrating timbre of
youth, came to Emsden's ear. His eyes followed the sound quickly.

The little sisters of Peninnah Penelope Anne were on the floor before a
playhouse, outlined by stones and sticks, and with rapt faces and
competent fancies, saw whatsoever they would. In these riches of
imagination a little brother also partook. A stick, accoutred in such
wise with scraps of buckskin as to imitate a gallant of the place and
period, was bowing respectfully before another stick, vested in the
affabilities of age and the simulacrum of a dressing-gown.

"I love your granddaughter, sir, and wish to make her my wife," said the
bowing stick.

"Command me, sir; command me!" suavely replied the stick stricken in
years.

The scene had been an eye-opener to the tender youth of the little
Mivanes; the pomp and circumstance of a sentimental disclosure they
would never forget.

Emsden, as hardy a pioneer as ever drew a bead on a panther or an
Indian, passed on, quaking at the thought of the wits of the Station as
he had never yet feared man, and his respected Irish blood ran cold. And
when it waxed warm with wrath once more it came to pass that to utter
the simple phrase "Command me" was as much as a man's life was worth at
Blue Lick Station.

Emsden thought ruefully of the girl's mother and wondered if her
intercession would avail aught with the old autocrat. But he had not yet
ventured upon this. There was nothing certain about Mrs. Mivane but her
uncertainty. She never gave a positive opinion. Her attitude of mind was
only to be divined by inference. She never gave a categorical answer.
And indeed he would not have been encouraged to learn that Richard
Mivane himself had already consulted his daughter-in-law, as in this
highhanded evasion of any decision he felt the need of support. For once
the old gentleman was not displeased with her reply, comprehensive,
although glancing aside from the point. Since there were so many young
men in the country, said Mrs. Mivane, she saw no reason for despair!
With this approval of his temporizing policy Richard Mivane left the
matter to the development of the future.

Emsden's depression would have been more serious had he not fortunately
sundry tokens of the old man's favor to cherish in his memory, which
seemed to intimate that this elusiveness was only a shrewd scheme to
delay and thwart him rather than a positive and reasonable disposition
to deny his suit. In short, Emsden began to realize that instead of a
damsel of eighteen he had to court a coquette rising sixty, of the
sterner sex, and deafer than an adder when he chose. His artful quirks
were destined to try the young lover's diplomacy to the utmost, and
Emsden appreciated this, but he reassured himself with the reflection
that it was better thus than if it were the girl who vacillated and
delighted to torture him with all the arts of a first-class jilt. He was
constantly in and out of the house almost as familiarly as if he were
already betrothed, for in the troublous period that seemed now closing,
with its sudden flights, its panics, its desperate conflicts with the
Indians, he had been able to give an almost filial aid to Richard Mivane
in the stead of the son whom the old man had lost.

Richard Mivane had always felt himself an alien, a sojourner in this new
land, and perchance he might not have been able even partially to
reconcile himself to the ruder conditions of his later life if the
bursting of a financial bubble had not swept away all hope of returning
to the status of his earlier home in England when the tragedy of the
duel had been sunk in oblivion. The frontier was a fine place to hide
one's poverty and fading graces, he had once remarked, and thereafter
had seemed to resign himself to its hardships,--indeed, sometimes he
consigned his negro body-servant, Caesar, to other duties than his
exclusive attendance. He had even been known to breakfast with his head
tied up in a handkerchief when some domestic crisis had supervened, such
as the escape of all the horses from the pinfold, to call away his
barber. As this functionary was of an active temperament and not at all
averse to the labor in the fields, he proved of more value thus utilized
than in merely furnishing covert amusement to the stationers by his
pompous duplication of his master's attitude of being too cultured,
traveled, and polished for his surroundings. He was a trained valet,
however, expert in all the details of dressing hair, powdering, curling,
pomatuming, and other intricacies of the toilet of a man of fashion of
that day. Caesar had many arts at command touching the burnishing of
buckles and buttons, and even in clear-starching steinkirks and the
cambric ruffles of shirts. As he ploughed he was wont to tell of his
wonderful experiences while in his master's service in London (although
he had never crossed the seas); and these being accepted with seeming
seriousness, he carried his travels a step farther and described the
life he remembered in the interior of Guinea (although he had never seen
the shores of Africa). This life so closely resembled that of London
that it was often difficult to distinguish the locality of the
incidents, an incongruity that enchanted the wags of the settlement, who
continually incited him to prodigies of narration. The hairbreadth
escapes that he and his fellow-servants, as well as the white people,
had had from the wrath of the Indians, whom the negroes feared beyond
measure, and their swift flights from one stockade to another in those
sudden panics during the troubled period preceding the Cherokee War,
might have seemed more exciting material for romancing for a venturesome
Munchausen, but perhaps these realities were too stern to afford any
interest in the present or glamour in the past.

It was somewhat as a prelude to the siege of Fort Loudon by the
Cherokees in 1760 that they stormed and triumphantly carried several
minor stations to the southeast. Although Blue Lick sustained the
attack, still, in view of the loss of a number of its gallant defenders,
the settlers retreated at the first opportunity to the more sheltered
frontier beyond Fort Prince George, living from hand to mouth, some at
Long Cane and some at Ninety-Six, through those years when first
Montgomerie and then Grant made their furious forays through the
Cherokee country. Emsden, having served in the provincial regiment,
eagerly coveted a commission, of which Richard Mivane had feigned to
speak. Now that the Cherokees were ostensibly pacified,--that is,
exhausted, decimated, their towns burned, their best and bravest slain,
their hearts broken,--the fugitives from this settlement on the
Eupharsee River, as the Hiwassee was then called, gathered their
household gods and journeyed back to Blue Lick, to cry out in the
wilderness that they were "home" once more, and clasp each other's hands
in joyful gratulation to witness the roofs and stockade rise again,
rebuilt as of yore. Strangely enough, there were old Cherokee friends to
greet them anew and to be welcomed into the stockade; for even the rigid
rule of war and hate must needs be proved by its exceptions. And there
were one or two pensive philosophers among the English settlers vaguely
sad to see all the Cherokee traditions and prestige, and remnants of
prehistoric pseudo-civilization, shattered in the dust, and the
tremulous, foreign, unaccustomed effort--half-hearted, half-believing,
half-understanding--to put on the habitude of a new civilization.

"The white man's religion permits poverty, but the Indian divides his
store with the needy, and there are none suffered to be poor," said
Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the famous chief. "The white men wrangle and quarrel
together, even brother with brother; with us the inner tribal peace is
ever unbroken. The white men slay and rob and oppress the poor, and with
many cunning treaties take now our lands and now our lives; then they
offer us their religion;--why does it seem so like an empty bowl?"

"Atta-Kulla-Kulla, you know that I am deaf," said Richard Mivane, "and
you ask me such hard questions that I am not able to hear them."

It is more than probable that these stationers in the vanguard of the
irrepressible march of western emigration had been trespassers, and thus
earned their misfortunes, in some sort, by their encroachment on Indian
territory; although since the war the Cherokee boundaries had become
more vague than heretofore, it being considered that Grant's operations
had extended the frontier by some seventy miles. It may be, too, that
the Blue Lick settlers held their own by right of private purchase; for
the inhibition to the acquisition of land in this way from the Indians
was not enacted till the following year, 1763, after the events to be
herein detailed, and, indeed, such purchases even further west and of an
earlier date are of record, albeit of doubtful legality.

Now that peace in whatever maimed sort had come to this stricken land
and these adventurous settlers, who held their lives, their all, by such
precarious tenure, internecine strife must needs arise among them; not
the hand of brother against brother,--they were spared that grief,--but
one tender, struggling community against another.

And it came about in this wise.

One day Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane, watching from the "port-hole" of
the blockhouse, where the muzzle of that dog of war the little swivel
gun had once been wont to look forth, beheld Ralph Emsden ride out from
the stockade gate for a week's absence with a party of hunters; with
bluff but tender assurance he waved his hat and hand to her in farewell.

"Before all the men!" she said to herself, half in prudish dismay at his
effrontery, and yet pleased that he did not sheepishly seek to conceal
his preference. And although the men (there were but two or three and
not half the province, as her horror of this publicity would seem to
imply) said with a grin "Command me!" they said it _sotto voce_ and only
to each other.

Spring was once more afoot in the land. They daily marked her advance as
they went. Halfway up the mountains she had climbed: for the maples were
blooming in rich dark reds that made the nearer slopes even more
splendid of garb than the velvet azure of the distant ranges, the elms
had put forth delicate sprays of emerald tint, and the pines all bore
great wax-like tapers amidst their evergreen boughs, as if ready for
kindling for some great festival. It is a wonderful thing to hear a wind
singing in myriads of their branches at once. The surging tones of this
oratorio of nature resounded for miles along the deep indented ravines
and the rocky slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains. Now and again the
flow of a torrent or the dash of a cataract added fugue-like effects.
The men were constantly impressed by these paeans of the forests; the
tuft of violets abloom beneath a horse's hoofs might be crushed
unnoticed, but the acoustic conditions of the air and the high floating
of the tenuous white clouds against a dense blue sky, promising rain in
due season, evoked a throb of satisfaction in the farmer's heart not
less sincere because unaesthetic. The farmer's toil had hardly yet
begun, the winter's hunt being just concluded, and each of the
stationers with a string of led horses was bound for his camps and
caches to bring in the skins that made the profit of the season.

One of this group of three was the psalm-singer of the blockhouse. His
name was Xerxes Alexander Anxley, and he was unceremoniously called by
the community "X," and by Mivane "the unknown quantity," for he was
something of an enigma, and his predilections provoked much speculation.
He was a religionist of ascetic, extreme views,--a type rare in this
region,--coming originally from the colony of the Salzburgers
established in Georgia.

We are less disposed to be tolerant of individual persuasions which
imply a personal and unpleasant reflection. Xerxes Alexander Anxley
disapproved of dancing, and the community questioned his sanity; for
these early pioneers in the region of the Great Smoky Range carried the
rifle over one shoulder and the fiddle over the other. He disapproved of
secular songs and idle stories, and the settlement questioned his taste;
for it was the delight of the stationers, old and young, to gather
around the hearth, and, while the chestnuts roasted in the fire for the
juniors, and the jovial horn, as it was called, circulated among the
elders, the oft-told story was rehearsed and the old song sung anew. He
even disapproved of the jovial horn--and the settlement questioned his
sincerity.

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