ernment, which accepted the
satisfaction thus offered for his crimes,--the deeds themselves,
however, accounted by him and the rest of the tribe praiseworthy and the
achievements of war.

And here he was protesting that he was dead and a ghost. "_Akee-o-hoosa!
Akee-o-hoosa! Tsida-wei-yu!_" he cried continually.

Indeed, this seemed to be the only reasonable method of accounting for
the renewed presence in the world of a man known to be dead. This was
his status, he argued. He was a dead man, and this was his captive. The
Cherokee nation could not pretend to follow with its control the actions
of a dead man. They themselves had pronounced him dead. He had no place
in the war. He had been forbidden, on account of his official death, to
compete for the honors of the campaign. Apart from his former status as
a Cherokee, merely as a supernatural being, a spirit, an ada-wehi, he
had captured this British soldier, who was therefore the property of a
dead man. And the Cherokee law of all things and before all things
forbade interference with the effects of the dead.

Despite the curling contempt on the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council
did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered
the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the
details of this choice argument. There was an illogical inversion of
values in the experience of the tribe, and while they could not now
accept the worthless figments of long ago, it was not vouchsafed to them
to enjoy the substantial merits of the new order of things. Reason,
powder, diplomacy, had brought the Cherokee nation to a point of
humiliation to which superstition, savagery, and the simplicities of the
tomahawk had never descended in "the good old times." Reason was never
so befuddled of aspect, civilization never so undesired as now. In their
own expanded outlook at life, however, they could not afford to ignore
the views of Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the advocate of all the newer methods, in
so important a matter as the release of a British prisoner of war on the
strange pretext that his captor was a ghost of a peculiar spectral
power, an ada-wehi, although this course would have been more agreeable
to the "old beloved" theories of their halcyon days of eld, when the
Cherokee name was a terror and a threat.

Therefore, averse as they were to subscribe to the modern methods which
had wrought them such woe and humiliation and defeat, the dominant
sup