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Updated: May 29, 2025
As they advanced deeper and deeper into the Cherokee country and the signs and sights of war grew remote, no sounds of volleys nor even distant dropping shots clanging from the echoes, no wreaths of smoke floating among the hills, no flare of flames flinging crude red and yellow streaks across the luminous velvet azure of distant mountains with their silver haze, viewed through vistas of craggy chasms near at hand, he observed a lessening of cordiality in the manner of the other two Indians toward the Northward Warrior, and a frequency on his part to protest that he was a great ada-wehi, and was dead although he appeared alive.
So idle they were they must needs talk and talk. But this was an exercise requiring some skill and patience on the part of each, for the Scotchman could only by the closest attention gather the meaning of the Cherokee language as it was spoken, and the magic of the ada-wehi compassed but scanty English.
For great as he himself was, the Northward Warrior, he had known how bitter it was to lack kindness. "It is not happy to be an ada-wehi!" he confessed, "for those who believe fear those who do not!"
He was carving a pipe from the soft stone of the region, which so lends itself to the purpose, hardening when heated. "Tsida-wei-yu!" There was a long pause while the mockingbird sang with an exuberant magic which might baffle the emulation of any ada-wehi of them all.
With a violent effort he shook himself free from their grasp for one moment; yet as the blade came glittering forth from the scabbard, a sharp blow scientifically administered upon the wrist by the ada-wehi almost broke the bone and sent the weapon flying from his hand and clattering to the floor of the niche.
This evidence of the importance of the Cherokee magnate in the opinion of the British colonists did not please the ada-wehi. He spat upon the ship with ostentatious contempt as it were, and then went on silently with his carving. The mockingbird paused to listen to a note from the hermit thrush in the dense rhododendron, still splendidly abloom on the mountain slope.
Although he finally agreed with this, he could not stay still, and thus as he appeared in various skirmishes it became gradually bruited abroad among the Cherokees that Attusah, the Northward Warrior, was a great ada-wehi, a being of magical power, or a ghost as it might be said, of special spectral distinctions.
The council was obviously steeled against this proposition, as MacVintie shortly perceived, and equally determined that the ada-wehi must needs exert phenomenal and magical powers indeed to avoid yet making good the nation's pledge of his death to the British government, and becoming a ghost in serious earnest.
He was armed with a tomahawk and a pistol, without powder as useless as a toy, and a bow borne in default of aught better lay on the floor beside him, while a gayly ornamented quiver full of poisoned arrows swung over his shoulder. "Ha-tsida-wei-yu!" he proclaimed. "I am a great ada-wehi! I see him! Of a surety I see him!"
And the Cherokee law of all things and before all things forbade interference with the effects of the dead. Despite the curling contempt on the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the details of this choice argument.
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