ceptive as if the figure in his thoughts were actually before his
eyes.

"And he is not dead?" cried Digatiski, in despair.

Some such wild rumor, as of hope gone mad, had pervaded the groups of
Cherokee fugitives.

"He would be if I could get close enough with a bare pinch of powder
that might charge my gun!" declared Attusah disconsolately. Then himself
again, "But I will tell you this! He is waiting for my poisoned arrow!
And when he dies he will come back no more. He is not like me."

He paused to throw out his hand with his splendid pompous gesture.
"_Akee-o-hoo-sa! Tsida-wei-yu!_" (I am dead! I am a great ada-wehi!)

Digatiski groaned. It mattered not to him whether Colonel Grant came
back or abode in his proper place when dead. The grievous dispensation
lay in the fact that he was here now, in the midst of the wreck he was
so zealously wreaking.

There were three women in the niche. One with her head muffled in her
mantle of fringed deerskin sat against the wall, silently weeping,
bemoaning her dead slain in the recent battle, or the national
calamities, or perhaps the mere personal afflictions of fatigue and fear
and hunger and suspense. Another crouched by the fire and gazed
dolorously upon it with dreary tear-filled eyes, and swollen, reddened
eyelids. The sorrowful aspect of a third was oddly incongruous with her
gay attire, a garb of scarlet cloth trimmed with silver tinsel tassels,
a fabric introduced among the Cherokees by an English trader of the name
of Jeffreys, and which met with great favor. Her anklets, garters, and
bracelets of silver "bell-buttons" tinkled merrily as she moved, for she
had postponed her tears in the effort to concoct some supper from the
various scraps left from the day's scanty food. The prefatory scraping
of the coals together caused a sudden babbling of pleasure to issue from
the wall, where, suspended on a projection of rock, was one of the
curious upright cradles of the people, from which a pappoose, stiff and
perpendicular, gazed down at the culinary preparations, evidently in the
habit of participating to a limited extent in the result, having
attained some ten months of age.

The mother glanced up, and despite the tear stains about her eyes,
dimpled and laughed in response. Griefs may come and pleasures go,
nations rise and fall, the world wag on as it will, but this old joy of
mother and child, each in the other, is ever new and yet ever the same.

Resuming her oc