red save by time itself. It was rather an
instinct, in pursuance of this revival of his resolution, to seek to rid
himself of his own thoughts, the constant canvass of his despair; this
had necessarily a resilient effect, benumbing to the possibilities of new
inspiration. He sought to freshen his faculties, to find some diversion
in the passing moment that might react favorably on the plan nearest his
heart. He forced himself to listen, at first in dull preoccupation, to
the talk of a group in the smoker; it glanced from one subject to
another--the surroundings, the soil, the timber, the mining
interests--and presently concentrated on a quaint corner of the region,
near the scene of the stoppage, the Qualla Boundary. This was the
reservation of a portion of the tribe of Cherokee Indians, the Eastern
Band, who nearly a century earlier had evaded, in the dense fastnesses of
these ranges, removal with their brethren to the west, and had finally
succeeded in buying this mountainous tract of fifty thousand acres.

As Bayne looked out of the window, urging his mind to appraise the human
interest of the entourage, to apprehend its significance, he bethought
himself of a certain old Cherokee phrase that used to baffle him in his
philological studies. He remembered in a sort of dreary wonder that he
had once felt enough curiosity concerning this ancient locution to
maintain a correspondence with the Ethnological Bureau of the Smithsonian
Institution as to its precise signification--and now he could scarcely
make shift to recollect it.

He had then been hard on the track of the vanishing past; his wish was to
verify, solely for the sake of scholastic accuracy, these words of the
ancient Cherokee tongue, the Ayrate dialect, which was formerly the
language of their lowland settlements in this region, but which, since
the exodus of the majority of these Indians to the west and the fusion of
the lingering remnant of their upper and lower towns into this tribal
reservation east of the Great Smoky Mountains, has become lost, merged
with the Ottare (Atali) dialect, once distinctively the speech of their
highland villages only, but now practically modern Cherokee.

As Bayne recalled the circumstances, he noted one of the Qualla Indians
loitering about the scene of the wreck. He put a question to him from out
the window of the coach, and discovered that he spoke English with some
facility. The old habit reasserted itself with inherent en