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Updated: October 26, 2024
The remaining savage, a chief, by his lock and eagle-quill, had fastened to Elerson's legs with the fury of a tree-cat, clawing and squalling, while Murphy dealt him blow on blow with clubbed stock, and finally was forced to shoot him so close that the rifle-flame set his greased scalp-lock afire. "Take to the timber, you Tryon County men!
They were far beyond earshot, singing over the spring songs the Moon and Sambhur Songs with the wolves of the pack; for in the spring-time the Jungle People make very little difference between the day and the night. He gave the sharp, barking note, but his only answer was the mocking maiou of the little spotted tree-cat winding in and out among the branches for early birds' nests.
"There you go, red as a turkey-cock and madder than a singed tree-cat! George, can't you let me plague you in comfort! Dammy, it's undutiful! For pity's sake! let me sneer let me gibe and jeer if it eases me." I glared at him, half inclined to laugh. "Curse it!" he said, wrathfully, "I'm serious. You don't know how serious I am. It's no laughing matter, George. I must do something to ease me!"
I was aroused toward nine by the Mohican, and sat up as wide awake as a disturbed tree-cat, instantly ready for trouble. "An Oneida on the Ouleout," he said. "Where?" "Yonder just across." "Friendly?" "He has made the sign." "An ambassador?" "A runner, not a belt-bearer." "Bring him to me." Strung along the banks of the Ouleout, each behind a tree, I saw my Indians crouching, rifles ready.
"I think," said the Mohican deliberately, "that there may be a tree-cat in their vicinity." A dead silence followed. The Wyandotte's countenance was still smiling, but I thought the smile had stiffened and become fixed, though not a tremour moved him.
I say a cock-bird because I know that log to be a drumming-log." She raised herself and guided her horse along the trail, bright eyes restlessly scanning ground and fringing underbrush. "Deer passed here one two three the third a buck a three-year old," she said, sinking her voice by instinct. "Yonder a tree-cat dug for a wood-mouse; your lynx is ever hanging about a drumming-log."
The nails of her hands were like the claws of a tree-cat as they tore at me. But I held her and mastered her, and for two days beat her and forced her to travel with me down out of the canyons of the Hill-Men to the grass lands where the river flowed through the rice-swamps and the ducks and the blackbirds fed fat. I saw my vision when the rice was ripe.
Yet, what the Mohican had said always with two meanings, and one quite natural and innocent meant, if taken in its sinister sense, that not only might there be Senecas lying in ambush at the ford, but also emissaries from the Red Priest Amochol himself. For the forest lynx, or tree-cat, was the emblem of these people; and every Indian present knew it.
I raised my troubled eyes and glanced toward my Indians. They had stripped great squares of bark from half a dozen trees, and were busily painting upon them, in red and blue, insulting signs and symbols a dead tree-cat, scalped, and full of arrows; a snake severed into sections; a Seneca tied to a post and a broken wampum belt at his feet.
He thought of her as like the leopard tree-cat, most graceful creature of the wood, so trim was she and full of elasticity, and thought of her, too, as he looked in her intelligent face, as higher in another way. He was somewhat awed, but he was courageous. He had, so far in life, but sought to get what he wanted whenever it was in sight. Now he was nonplussed.
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