his trading-house he paused as abruptly as if he had
found his path blocked by an obstacle.

There, seated on the step of the closed door which boasted the only lock
and key in Tennessee Town, or for the matter of that in all the stretch
of the Cherokee country west of the Great Smoky Range, was Otasite, the
incongruity of his auburn curls and his Indian headdress seeming a
trifle more pronounced than usual, since it had been for a time an
unfamiliar sight. He was awaiting the coming of the trader, and was
singing meanwhile in a loud and cheerful voice, "Drink with me a cup of
wine," a ditty which he had heard in his half-forgotten childhood. The
robust full tones gave no token of the draught made upon his endurance
by the heavy exercise of the day, but he seemed a bit languid from the
heat, and his doeskin shirt was thrown open at the throat, showing his
broad white chest, and in its centre the barbarous blue discolorations
of the "warrior's marks." These disfigurements, made by the puncturing
of the flesh with gars' teeth and inserting in the wound paint and
pitch, indelible testimonials to his deeds of courage and prowess,
Otasite valued as he did naught else on earth, and he would have parted
with his right hand as readily. The first had been bestowed upon him
after he had gone, a mighty gun-man, against the Muscogees. The others
he had won in the course of a long, furious, and stubborn contest of the
tribe with the Chickasaws, who, always impolitic, headlong, and brave,
were now reduced by their own valor in their many wars from ten thousand
fighting men to a few hundred. He had attained the "warrior's crown"
when he had shown their kindred Choctaws a mettle as fierce and a craft
as keen as their own. And now he was looking at Abram Varney with kindly
English eyes and an expression about the brow, heavily freckled, that
almost smote the tears from the elder man. The trader knew from long
experience what was coming, but suddenly he had begun to regard it
differently. Always upon the end of each journey from Charlestown he had
been met here within a day or two by Otasite on the same mission. The
long years as they passed had wrought only external changes since, as a
slender wistful boy of eleven years, heart-sick, homeless, forlorn,
friendless, save for his Indian captors, likely, indeed, to forget all
language but theirs, he had first come with his question, always in
English, always with a faltering eyelash and a d