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Updated: May 19, 2025
In fact, old Cheesto, in common with many men not Cherokees, cared little for the public weal when it interfered with private interest. But he had not realized how much he had jeopardized the success of Ioco Town in cutting the netting of the ball-sticks.
Then the ball, hardly checked by the web of his racket, passed through the ball-sticks, and all realized their bewitchment. Amoyah heard the gossip afloat concerning the matter before he had well quitted the course.
The eighty ball-players of Ioco stood in a row near the bank, submerged to the knees. They had gone in with a tumultuous rush, and with their faces painted, their heads crested with feathers, clad fantastically and gorgeously but scantily, they were holding their ball-sticks high in the air with an eager grasp, all except Amoyah.
He had imagined the incompleteness of the racket would merely show Amoyah as incompetent, render his play futile and ineffective, and discredit him with both friend and foe. Never, however, had the play of any one man been so important and conspicuous as his to-day when the bewitched ball-sticks became the salient feature and the living tradition of the match between Ioco and Niowee.
The Great Bear had torn the net of the ball-sticks with his claw, one brave was telling another as he passed, because Amoyah had unveraciously boasted that he had walked by invitation in the procession of the bears during their annual march with their shadows at their hidden mysterious town in the Great Smoky Mountains. Amoyah paused, tired, excited, panting, and critically examined the web.
The ball-sticks, of which each player owned his pair, were also partly made of deerskin, the two scoops or ladles being fashioned of a network of thongs on a wooden hoop, each furnished with a handle of hickory three feet long, worked together with a thong of deerskin to catch the ball between the rackets, it being of course prohibited to catch the ball in the hand.
Although still in his place in the line, he was looking over his shoulder with an amazed and startled gaze. For there upon the bank, as if struck from his hand in the confusion and turmoil of first entering the water, lay his ball-sticks. He seemed about to return for them, as the implement of the game must be dipped also in the water at the appropriate moment of the incantation.
For despite these points, thus lost by supernatural agency to Niowee, the bewitchment of the ball-sticks only served to illustrate the superior skill of the Ioco team, and to embellish their victory.
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