alone. Yet the war was surely coming apace, as they both knew, a war
which already tore his heart in sunder, in which he could evade taking
part against his own--his own of both factions--only by going at once
and going far. He could decide no such weighty matter.

At last he determined he would leave it to fate, to chance, showing how
truly a gambler his Indian training had made him. He would stake the
crisis on a game at chungke; if he won, as he told Varney, he would go
to Carolina, and take sides with neither faction; if he lost, he would
cast his future with the Cherokee nation.

Varney, thoroughly uneasy, had come to feel a personal interest
involved. If Otasite quitted the country, he felt his life would hardly
be safe here, since the craft of Colannah had drawn from the
unsuspecting young fellow the details of the plan of removal to
Charlestown which he had proposed. And yet Varney himself was averse to
any change, unless it was indeed necessary. When put to the test he felt
he would rather live in the Cherokee nation than anywhere else in all
the world, and he valued his commerce with the tribe and his license
from the government, under duly approved bond and security, to conduct
that traffic in Tennessee Town and Tellico as naught else on earth. He
manifested so earnest and genuine a desire to repair the damage of his
ill-starred suggestion that Colannah, showing his age in his haste and
his tremulousness and excitement, disclosed to him in a flutter of
triumphant glee that he had a spell to work which naught could
withstand--a draught from Herbert's Spring to offer to Otasite. Thither
some fifty miles he had dispatched a runner for a jar of the magic
water, and after drinking of it Otasite could not quit for seven years
the Cherokee nation even if he would.

It was in the council-house that the mystic beverage was quaffed. There
had been guests--head men from Great Tellico and Citico--during the
afternoon, received in secret conclave, and now that their deliberations
were concluded and they were gone, Otasite, not admitted to the council,
being one of those warriors who did the fighting of the battles devised
by the "beloved men," strolled into the deserted, dome-like place. Its
walls, plastered with red clay, were yet more ruddy for a cast of the
westering sun. The building was large enough to accommodate several
hundred people, and around the walls were cane seats, deftly constructed
and artificially whi