War Drums (Sass)/Chapter 30
OFTEN, during the days that followed, Jolie sat above the brow of the great precipice at the summit of Sani'gilagi and gazed down at the Cherokee town in the vale of Sequilla far below; and often she heard faintly the throbbing of the war drums there. A feeling of wonder would come to her then, a vague sense of unreality. Around her as far as her eye could see spread the blue and purple panorama of the mountains. Day after day the serene loveliness of it sank into her soul. It was beauty inconceivable; it was peace beyond understanding. Surely it was past belief that this blue and purple paradise swarmed with savage and relentless foes.
Yet she knew that it was so. Morning and midday and evening she heard the war drums throb. On the second day Almayne was gone for hours, not on Nunda the Moon-Face this time, but on foot; and when he returned, he brought word that the forest all around Sani'gilagi was alive with enemies.
From the towns of the Smokies and beyond; from Tellico, from Choti, from Nikwasi and the towns of the Tlanuwa Rock and of War Woman Valley; from Cullowhee and Tanasi and Waginsi and Kanuga and Notteley; from the towns of Ocona Lufta and the place of the Wounded Bears; from the towns of the high Nantahalas and of Ukwuni and Estatoee; from the towns of the Racing River and of Wolf Creek and of Vengeance Creek; from the ancient town of Toxawa, the Town of the Shedding of Tears; from the towns beyond Butting Buffalo Ridge and the Ridge of the Earless Warrior and the Defile of the Wolves; from the towns of the Chopped Oak and the Pretty Fawn and the Daring Horseman; from Nacoochee and Toccoa and Tallulah and Gusti and Tikwalitsi war parties had come and the forest was dotted with their camps, while their hunters roamed the woods in every direction in search of game. Almayne had never before seen so great a concentration of warriors, so ceaseless a movement of war parties along the mountain trails.
It was the same story day after day. Sometimes Almayne went scouting, sometimes Lachlan, but as a rule they relied for this service upon the two Muskogee braves, Striking Hawk and Little Mink. There was one day when Lachlan was gone from dawn to sunset. Toward mid-afternoon Mr. O'Sullivan sat himself down beside Jolie and found her strangely preoccupied, her eyes intent upon an opening between two rocks through which passed the trail leading down the mountain side. She grew more restless as the shadows lengthened, and twice she went to Almayne and questioned him concerning Lachlan's absence. Again and again that afternoon she was aware that Falcon was watching her; and when, just at dusk, she saw Lachlan's buckskin-clad figure framed in the opening between the two rocks, the blood mounted to her face because she knew that Falcon's eyes were fixed upon her.
They had, made for Jolie a palace on their mountain top—a hut of boughs and bark built against a rock; and they had floored this palace with mosses and with hemlock branches over which were spread saddle blankets and the clean-scraped skins of deer, skins made sweet and soft by a process known to the two Muskogee braves. On either side of the hut were the rough shelters in which the others slept; and in front of these they cooked their food over a fire so made that almost no smoke rose from it. Fifty yards away was the brink of the precipice; and it was the rule of the camp that no one should show himself by daylight at the edge of the cliff.
There was another rule strictly observed—that no gun should be fired. Yet they never lacked meat. Within a day of their arrival on Sani'gilagi, the two Muskogees had made for themselves and for Lachlan and Almayne locust bows and hickory arrows that were not of the best but that served their purpose; and thanks to Aganuntsi the Conjurer, who had forbidden his tribesmen to hunt on Sani'gilagi, the mountain swarmed with game.
With their arrows and with traps of deer-sinew which Lachlan constructed, they could kill within a few hundred yards of their camp squirrels, rabbite, turkeys, ruffed grouse and an occasional deer. On these, and on certain roots and vegetables of the woods, in the preparation of which Almayne was marvellously expert, they lived well; while a clear, cold spring bubbling from the mountain side a few hundred yards down the wooded northern slope provided an abundance of water. Near this spring, in a small natural meadow in the woods, the horses grazed.
The days lengthened, and still Almayne and Lachlan were agreed that it would be madness to leave their refuge. Around them buzzed a hornets' nest. In the region about Sani'gilagi the principal strength of the Cherokee nation was assembled. From this part of the mountain country Fort Prince George in the foothills was within easy reach. The Fort had undoubtedly been under siege since the outbreak of the war, Almayne asserted, and the Overhill Cherokees had concentrated here in the southeastern corner of the Blue Mountains to support the warriors of the Lower Towns who were investing the Fort.
There were times when Jolie gew impatient, but she was dimly aware that the edge of her impatience had been dulled. Somehow she did not find this fact a thing to ponder over. Her mood, her environment, the life they led on the mountain did not encourage introspection. It was not only when the war drums throbbed faintly in the valley below that life seemed tinged with unreality. Over her whole existence that tinge of unreality seemed to have spread. Often it deepened until all this that she was living through seemed a dream.
And it was not wholly, or even mainly, an evil dream. There were moments when she was afraid, moments when anxiety gnawed at her, moments when she was obsessed with sudden yearning to resume instantly in the face of all dangers the quest for Gilbert Barradell. But she was aware with a languid surprise that in general she was happy. Her faculty of self-analysis seemed to have vanished and she had neither the will nor the power to examine her mood and seek out causes. She knew only that in after years—if for her there were to be any after years—she would not look back upon those days on Sani'gilagi with horror.
Her contentment was not the contentment of ignorance; she knew all that there was to know. The men kept nothing from her. She knew that perhaps weeks would pass before they could resume their journey towards the place where they believed Barradell to be. She knew that while they might remain for weeks on Sani'gilagi without being discovered by the enemies swarming in the forest below, there was, on the other hand, always the danger of discovery.
Yet, though she was aware of all this, though day after day the distant throbbing of the war drums served as a grim reminder of the peril which surrounded her, her mind refused to dwell upon these things. There was something in her, something profound and elemental, that responded quickly to the spell of the wilderness. She had loved it from the beginning. Though she had learned its deadly ruthlessness, she loved it more than ever now; its beauty, its vastness, its wildness, its teeming, marvellous life. Its magic had conquered many men who, once having known it, could not be content anywhere else. Now that magic was at work upon Jolie Stanwicke; and more and more often, when her thoughts went back to the little fields and the quiet hedgerows of England, she wondered how she could find contentment there again.
And there was something even deeper than this magic of the wilderness. These men with whom her lot was cast in this strange adventure—three of them had become a part of herself, her mind, her soul. O'Sullivan, with his quick humour, his infectious smile, his bird's voice and his stout heart, his sprightly tales of the days when he was a fencing master in Paris, his light love songs, and his beautiful and noble stories of the ancients, of Great Olympus and the golden age of Greece and Rome; Almayne, in appearance a rude wilderness hunter, blunt, hard as flint, irritable at times, pitiless towards his enemies, scornful of all softness, yet a man of fine texture under his rough exterior and—now that she had conquered his antagonism—as tender to her as a kinsman; Lachlan McDonald. . . .
So it was no pale, drooping flower that bloomed on the rocky summit of Sani'gilagi above the miasma of war which was spread over all the wilderness below. The girl who had come so strangely to live for a time on that grim mountain with danger all around her was no sick-hearted, trembling, pitiful creature wringing the hearts of her companions with the spectacle of her distress. Jolie was, or seemed to be, the lightest-hearted of them all. Once, in Marshall's tavern in Charles Town, Almayne had told Lachlan that she was proud and perverse and ill tempered. Perhaps he had found her so in those days when his own dislike of her had been very plain. Now, he was her slave.
Over them all she reigned as a queen. They served her because they loved her—each in his own way, they loved her. Between Falcon's dark burning passion for her and Almayne's deep joy in her lay a vast gulf. Perhaps as great a gulf separated the love that Mr. O'Sullivan bore her and the love that had been born in Lachlan McDonald for this Lady Sanguilla, as he still called her in his thoughts.
She was brave, so brave that her courage was a continuing marvel to them all. She was gay; and they wondered what this gayety must cost her who was like a caged bird unable to fly to the mate she loved. Even to Lance Falcon she was courteous, almost kind, and three of them knew that this cost her much, and they praised her in their thoughts for the spirit that enabled her thus to conquer her loathing.
And she was beautiful. She was more beautiful, they thought, during those days on Sani'gilagi, than she had ever been before. Her buckskin suit was stained and faded now, its bright embroideries obliterated by dust. Her wide hat was spotted and shapeless. Her olive skin had burned almost as brown as the skin of an Indian girl. But these things took nothing from her beauty—indeed the darkening of her skin enhanced her loveliness, enriching the colour of her cheeks, causing her eyes to appear even more brilliant than they had been; and her red-gold hair seemed to them more brilliant, too, as though the bright sunshine of the wilderness had burnished and refined it.
Lachlan McDonald, watching Lance Falcon keenly, saw that the man was drunk with the beauty of this girl; knew that he himself was intoxicated with the same heady wine; knew that he loved Jolie Stanwicke and hated Gilbert Barradell.