h he had been keenly examining.

He lifted his eyes suddenly with that long-lashed dreary look of his
childhood.

"Did you hear of any Queetlees in Charlestown?" he asked.

"It is _you_ who should seek your kindred, Jan Queetlee!" Varney said
impulsively, calling him by his unaccustomed English name. "It is _you_
who should go to Charlestown to find the Queetlees!"

Otasite's face showed suddenly the unwonted expression of fear. He
recoiled abruptly, and Abram Varney was sensible of a deep depression.
It was as he had thought. The wish for restoration to those of his name
and his kindred which had animated the boy's earlier years had now
dwindled to a mere abstract sentiment of loyalty as of clanship, 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 re