cry-baby!

A stroke of a knife here and there, and the two prisoners were freed
from their bonds. The Highland soldier did not know whether Attusah
looked back while in flight, but his last glimpse of the Cherokee town
of Citico showed the broad glare of lightning upon the groups of conical
roofs in the slanting lines of rain; the woman on the high mound at the
portal of the council-house, with the pappoose on her back and the gun
in her hand; the sentinel once more climbing the ascent to his post. And
the last words he heard were chronicling the adverse sentiments
entertained toward bad children by the Oo-koo-ne-kah, the mysterious
great white owl.

The escape was not discovered till the next day, and was universally
attributed to the magic of the ada-wehi. Even the sentinel himself
doubted naught, having left a trusty deputy in his stead, for the
devotion of the Cherokee women to the tribal cause was proverbial, and
gratitude, even for a rescue from starvation, is not usually an urgent
motive power.

Kenneth MacVintie was seen again in the Cherokee country only in his
place as a marker in the march of his regiment, and as he was evidently
exceedingly desirous to permit no one to incur penalties for his
liberation, his officers spared him questions concerning his escape,
save in a general way.

When the ada-wehi next reappeared in a remote town of the district and
was sedulously interrogated as to how his freedom had been achieved, he
threw out his right hand at arm's length in his old, boastful, airy
gesture.

"_Cheesto kaiere!_" (An old rabbit!) he exclaimed. "A little old rabbit
ran down the slope. I turned the soldier into a rabbit, and he ran away.
And I turned myself into a fish, and I swam away. Ha! _Tsida-wei-yu!_"
(I am a great ada-wehi!)

THE FATE OF THE CHEERA-TAGHE

Along the old "trading-path" that was wont to wind from the Cherokee
country among the innumerable spurs and gorges of the Great Smoky
Mountains, and through the dense primeval forests full five hundred
miles to the city of Charlestown, was visible for many years, on the
banks of the Little Tennessee, an "old waste town," as the abandoned
place was called in the idiom of the Indians. An early date it might
seem, in 1744, in this new land, for the spectacle of the ruins of a
race still in possession, still unsubdued. Nearly twenty years later,
after the repeated aggressive expeditions which the British government
sent against