oon after the
sun went down, for the wind was laid, and such a chill glittering white
moon came gliding out of the mists about the dark Great Smoky domes that
it seemed the winter incarnate. All adown the desert aisles of the
leafless woods the light lay with a flocculent glister like snow, so
enhanced was its whiteness in the rare air and the blackness of the
forest shadows--spare, clearly drawn, all filar and fine like the
intricacies of a delicate line engraving. Something that the daylight
might have shown, blue and blurred, was about the mountains; it followed
the progress of that wintry moon westward. Presently, drawn up from
across the ranges, it proved to be a purple cloud, and despite the broad
section of the heavens still clear and the glittering whorls of the
constellations, that cloud held snow.

As the loitering southern winter had been long in abeyance, many of the
Cherokees of Citico Town were still in their airy summer residences, but
in one of the conical "winter houses," stove-like, air-tight,
windowless, plastered within and without with the impervious red clay of
the region, after the fashion of the great rotunda, Tscholens, in view
of his sudden seizure and complaint of the gentle breeze of the south as
freighted with the chill of the north, was consigned to rest. Half a
dozen Cherokee braves were detailed to accompany him, nominally as a
guard; but, there being no menace, this was in recognition of his
importance and distinction, his escort of Delaware Indians having been
billeted about in the town. There was no chimney, and although the fire
which burned in the centre of the clay floor exhaled but little smoke,
it hung in the air for the lack of the means of escape, and seemed to
add to the warmth which the fuel sent forth. Now and again the
superfluity of ashes encroached on the live coals. Whereupon one or
another of the occupants of the restricted apartment, silent and
recumbent upon the cane divan, which served now as bed and extended all
ground the room between the walls and the row of posts that upheld the
roof, would reach out a long stick, furnished for the purpose to each
sleeper, and touch off the incumbering ash from the glow of the embers.
As the night wore deeper into the dark hours these intervals of waking
were rarer.

Tscholens, muffled in bed draperies of otter furs and feathered mantles,
his cane-wrought couch softened with panther and wolf skins, heard the
wind going its round