"_Ha-tsida-wei-yu!_" he proclaimed. "I am a great ada-wehi! I see him! Of a surety I see him!"
Attusah gazed at the sombre night with an expression as definitely perceptive 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.