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Now and again these heavy projectiles flew through the air, impelled with an incredible force and a skill so accurate that it seemed impossible that both contestants should not excel. There was a moment, however, when Otasite might have made the decisive point to score eleven had not the chungke-stone slipped from the hand of Wyejah as he cast it, falling only a few yards distant.
Wyejah, disconcerted and shaken by the mischance, launching his lance at haphazard, almost mechanically, struck by obvious accident the flying lance of his adversary, deflecting its course the decisive cast, for which he had striven so long in vain, and which was now merely fortuitous.
The discoidal quartz chungke-stone had been hurled with a tremendous fling along the smooth sandy stretch of the yard, its flat edge, two inches wide, and the curiously exact equipoise of its fashioning causing it to bowl swiftly along a great distance, to fall only when the original impetus should fail; his competitor, Wyejah, a sinewy, powerful young brave, his buckskin garb steeped in some red dye that gave him the look when at full speed of the first flying leaf of the falling season, his ears split and barbarically distended on wire hoops and hung with silver rings, his moccasins scarlet, his black hair decorated with cardinal wings, had just sent his heavy lance, twelve feet long, skimming through the air; then Otasite, running swiftly but lightly abreast with him, launched his own long lance with such force and nicety of aim that its point struck the end of Wyejah's spear, still in flight in mid-air, deflecting its direction, and sending it far afield from the chungke-stone which it was designed in falling to touch.
The crowds of Indian gamblers, with much money and goods at hazard upon the event, some, indeed, having staked the clothes upon their backs, the rifles and powder for their winter hunt that should furnish them with food, were at once in a clamor of discussion as to the fair adjustment of the throw in the score. The backers of Wyejah claimed the accidental hit as genuine and closing the game.
This fine cast counted one point in the game, which is of eleven points, and the Indian braves among the spectators howled like civilized young men at a horse-race. The sport was very keen, the contest being exceedingly close, for Wyejah had long needed only one additional point to make him a winner, and when Otasite had failed to score he had also failed.
Although but for this fact his temerity in venturing among them would have cost him his life, they ministered to his needs with great hospitality, and forwarded him on his way to Charlestown, sending a strong guard with him as far as Long Cane settlement, a little above Ninety-Six. Wyejah also made his escape. Appalled by the calamity of the accidental blow, he "took sanctuary."
Whenever the trader thought anew of his secret knowledge of this fact he offered odds on Wyejah, and glanced at him with approbation at the young Indian warrior's face fiercely, eagerly smiling, his great flattened ears distended on their wire hoops, his dark eyes full of sombre brilliance. How well he played! and how hard the skill of his opponent pressed him!
Indeed, disingenuously profiting by the tip afforded by Herbert's Spring, he was heavily backing Wyejah as a winner! A windy day it was; the clouds raced through the sky, and their shadows skimming over the valleys and slopes challenged their speed. The Tennessee River was singing, singing! The mountains were as clearly and definitely blue as the heavens.
A wild clamor of excitement, of applause, rose up from the throats of the crowd in the natural amphitheatre, clanging and clattering in long guttural cries, all intensified by a relish of the unexpected, a joy in a new sensation, for Wyejah had never before been beaten, and Otasite was the victor at chungke.
He dropped on one knee suddenly, bending low, affecting to find something amiss with one of his moccasins. Wyejah, too, could seem unmoved by victory, but indifference to defeat was more difficult to simulate.
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