he
"choo-choo train." Yes, indeed, he was assured, and he seemed to
experience a sort of gratified pride in the prospect. With this fiction
in mind, he presently fell into a deep and refreshing slumber.

Suddenly the child was all himself again, glad, hopeful, expectant, with
the sense of being once more under a roof, touched by a woman's hand.
Then he looked keenly into the face before him--such a strange face! He
was tempted to cry out in terror; but the mind is plastic in early youth:
he had learned the lesson that now his protests and shrieks availed
naught. A strange face, of a copper hue, with lank black hair hanging
straight on both sides, a high nose, a wide, flat, thin-lipped mouth, and
great, dark, soft eyes amidst many wrinkles. He could not have thus
enumerated its characteristics, nor even described its impression on his
mind; but he realized its fundamental difference from all the faces he
had ever seen, and its unaccustomed aspect appalled him. He was petrified
by his uncomprehending amazement and an intensity of grief that was not
meet for his tender years in this extreme. He could hardly realize his
own identity. He did not seem himself, this child on the floor in front
of a dull wood fire, squalid, wrapped in an old horse-blanket, facing
this queer woman, sitting opposite him on the uneven flagging of the
hearth.

All at once his fortitude gave way. He broke forth into sobs and cries;
his heart was heavy with the sense of desertion, for he wept not for his
home, his mother, his kind friends, Ned and Gad-ish--on these blessings
he had lost all hold, all hope. He mourned for his late companions,
forsooth!--the big men, the boat, the river, the star. They had so
cruelly forsaken him, and here he was so poignantly unfamiliar and
helpless. When the woman held out a finger to him and smiled, he bowed
his head as he wept and shook it to and fro that he might not see her,
for her yellow teeth had great gaps among them, and as she laughed a
strange light came into her eyes, and he was woe--woe!--for his comrades
of the rowlocks and the Tennessee River.

It would have seemed a strange face to others as well as to the poor
baby. For this was indeed an Indian woman. A late day, certainly, for a
captive among the Cherokees, but the moonshiners felt that they had
scored a final victory when they left the little creature within the
Qualla Boundary, the reservation where still lingers a remnant of that
tribe, the "