moonbeams fell in unbroken
splendor before the stockade, and through its open gate the log-cabin
with its primitive porch, where, young and beautiful, she sat in her
white dress in the bright light beside the silent little flax-wheel.
Home undoubtedly! As the boat headed up the river he looked moodily at
the ripples, glancing in the moonbeams, and noted with a keen new
sensitiveness the fragrance of the eglantine, reminiscent of summers
dead and gone, and life as fleeting and frail as the transitory flower.

For the news that came in these days from over the mountains was always
heavy news,--rumors of massacres, now of a single individual in some
exposed and dangerous situation, and again of settlers surprised and
overcome by numbers within the defenses of their own stanch stockade.

All along the frontier the spirit seemed to extend, first toward the
north and then southward, and it was apparently only a question of time
when the quiet and peace that encircled Fort Loudon should be summarily
broken. Many of the pioneers, could they now have returned to Virginia
or the Carolinas without danger, would have forever relinquished their
new homes, and have set forth on their long journey without delay. But
the Cherokees about them, personally known to them and apparently
without individual animosity, seemed a slighter menace than the probable
encounter with wild wandering bands, glutted with blood yet thirsting
still for vengeance. In one of Demere's reports about this time, early
in the year 1759, he says: "We are living in great harmony here--no 'bad
talks' at all."

Again and again he and Captain Stuart, accompanied only by an orderly to
mark their sense of confidence, went to Chote to confer in a friendly
way with the king and half-king, and seek to induce them to take some
order with these depredators, and restore the peace of the border.

The great council-house at Chote was a curious circular structure,
formed of withes and willows and wand-like timbers, woven together in a
dome-like shape to the height of twenty feet, with a diameter of thirty
feet at the base; the whole was covered over with a thick coating within
and without of the deeply and richly tinted red clay of that region, and
pierced by no window or chimney or other outlet than the tall and narrow
doorway. The last time the two officers together sought the presence of
the kings in the _Ottare_ district, as the mountainous region was
called,--the towns