but was devoid of expectation, of intention. All the members of his immediate family had perished in the massacre, and he had been trained to regard this as the fortunes of war, cherishing no personal antagonism, as elsewhere among civilized people reconciliations are frequent between the victors and the friends of the slain in battle. Moreover, he was not brought close to it. The participators in the affray were of the distant Ayrate settlements of the tribe, southeast of the mountains, and not individualized. The Indians of Tennessee Town, which was then one of the most remote of the Cherokee villages of the Ottare division, and this perhaps was the reason it was selected as his home, were not concerned in the foray, nor were any others of the Overhill towns. Thus he had grown up without the thirst for vengeance, which showed how little the methods of his Cherokee environment had influenced his heart. And truly the far-away Queetlees, if any such were cognizant of his existence, had troubled themselves nothing about it, and had infinitely less claim on his gratitude and filial affection than Colannah. They had left him to be as a waif, a slave. He had been reared as a son, nursed and tended, fed and fostered, bedecked in splendor, armed in costly and formidable wise, given command and station, carefully trained in all that the Indian knew.

"Colannah would never consent!" he said at last.

Abram Varney afterward wondered why he should then have had a vision—oh, so futile, so fleeting, so fantastic!—of the twenty, the forty, nay, the sixty years that this man, so munificently endowed by nature, might pass here among the grotesque, uncouth barbarities of the savage Cherokee, while his heritage—his religion, the religion into which he was born of Christian parents, his name and nation, his tongue and station, his opportunity—doubtless some fair, valid, valuable future—all lay there to the eastward but scant five hundred miles away on the Carolina coast. He said as much, and the retort came succinctly, "You live here!"

Otasite's English speech was as simple as a child's, but he thought as diplomatically as Colannah himself, whom he esteemed the greatest man in all the world, and he could argue in the strategic Cherokee method. Nevertheless, to give him full sway, that everything possible might be said in contravention of the proposition, the old trader lapsed into the Indian speech, that was indeed from long usage like a mother tongue to them both. He stayed here, he said, from choice,