United States or Christmas Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The sage Oo-koo-koo stood motionless, his eyes narrowing, his long, flat, cruel mouth compressed as with a keen scrutiny he marked all the characteristics of the strangers, first of one, then deliberately of the other. The rest of the braves, with their alert, high-featured cast of countenance, inimical, threatening, clustered about, intent, doubtful, listening.
Kanoona repeated with a burst of raucous laughter. "Hala! Hala!" But Oo-koo-koo preserved his gravity. "They would not lie! Surely the white men would not lie!" Then turning to O'Kimmon he asked point-blank, "Chee-a-koh-ga?" The direct address was a relief to O'Kimmon.
But surely, Mister Injun, I've no part nor lot with the bloody bastes o' Englishers either over the say or in the provinces. If I were the brother-in-law o' the Governor o' South Carolina I'd hev a divorce from the murtherin' Englisher before he could cry, 'Quarter!" Oo-koo-koo, the wise Owl, made no direct answer.
Nevertheless as the wise Oo-koo-koo looked at O'Kimmon thus steadily, with so discerning a gaze, the Irishman felt each red hair of his scalp rise obtrusively into notice, as if to suggest the instant taking of it. He instinctively put on his coonskin cap again to hold his scalp down, as he said afterward. "Why come?" Oo-koo-koo demanded sternly. "Tell the truth, for God's sake!"
For it was thus that the rulers among the Cherokees rebuked their own young people, not upbraiding them with their misdeeds, but with gentle satire complimenting them for that in which they had notably failed. "Strangers to us, yet they requite us, for we treated them as our own," said Oo-koo-koo.
For believe what one might, the fact remained indisputable, that a decade earlier, when the place was inhabited, strange sounds were rife about the locality, the "sacred fire" was unkindled on the great "Sanctified Day," the two cheera-taghe of the town mysteriously disappeared, and their fate had remained a dark riddle. One of these men, Oo-koo-koo, was well known in Charlestown.
We have befriended them and loved them." "And they have befriended and loved us!" said Oo-koo-koo. Then silence. The river sang, but only a murmurous rune; the mute moonlight lay still on the mountains; the wind had sunk, and the motionless leaves glistened as the dew fell; a nighthawk swept past the portal of the grotto with the noiseless wing of its kind.
Oo-koo-koo, complacent in his own sagacity in having detected a difference in the speech of the new-comers from the English which he had been accustomed to hear in Charlestown, and animated by a wish to believe, hearkened with the more credulity to an expansive fiction detailed by the specious Irishman as to their mission here.
With the thought O'Kimmon, heavy, muscular, yet alert, threw himself upon Oo-koo-koo, and in an instant he had almost wrenched the knife from the Indian's belt. The other Cherokee cried warningly, "Akee-rooka! Akee-rooka!" The next moment, perhaps for many moments thereafter, none of them knew very definitely what had happened.
He had often wondered to see the young braves reduced almost to tears by this seemingly gentle discipline; he felt its poignancy when the keen blade of satire was turned against himself. "I did lie!" he admitted, as unreservedly as it he were at confession. "But Oo-koo-koo, we will pay for what we've got. This is all of ut!
Word Of The Day