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Updated: June 20, 2025
In the supreme moment of excitement he flung himself into the Tennessee River, and while eagerly sought by the emissaries of Colannah in the woods, he swam to Choté, "beloved town," the city of refuge of the whole Cherokee nation, where the shedder of blood was exempt from vengeance.
This was the distorted version of his father's name that Colannah had preserved.
Perhaps his quiescence, indeed, fostered some doubt of his presence here, for suddenly there sounded the rasping of flint on steel, the spunk was aglow, and then in the timorous flame of the kindling candle, taken from his own stores above, Varney recognized the face and figure of the stately and imperious old chief Colannah. The next moment he remembered something far more pertinent.
The sons of Colannah, slain in the cruel wars with other Indians, had been to him like brothers, and in their loss he had felt his full and bitter share of the grief of a common household.
As Varney, half crouching on the ground, noted the latter in the dusk, he cried out precipitately, "Robbed you of what? My God! let us go upstairs. I'll give it back, whatever it is, twice over, fourfold! Don't swing the candle around that way, Colannah! the powder will blow us and the whole trading-house into the Tennessee River."
Colannah nodded acquiescence, the stately feathers on his head gleaming fitfully in the clare-obscure of the cavern. "That is why I came! Then the British government could demand no satisfaction for the life of the British subject an accident the old chief of Tennessee Town killed with him. And I should be avenged." "For what? My God!" Varney had not before called upon the Lord for twenty years.
Thus he had grown up without the thirst for vengeance, which showed how little the methods of his Cherokee environment had influenced his heart. And truly the far-away Queetlees, if any such were cognizant of his existence, had troubled themselves nothing about it, and had infinitely less claim on his gratitude and filial affection than Colannah. They had left him to be as a waif, a slave.
These Indians, always more or less inimical to the colonists, bloodthirsty, cruel, crafty, and but recently involved in a furious war against the Cherokees, were glad to thwart Colannah in any cherished scheme of revenge, and received the fugitive kindly.
"What do the English always? you have robbed me!" said Colannah, the light strong on his fierce indignant features, his garb of fringed buckskin, his many rich strings of the ivory-like roanoke about his neck, his gayly bedecked and feathered head, and in shadowy wise revealing the rough walls of the cave, the boxes and bales of goods, the reserve stock, as it were, the stands of arms, and the kegs and bags of powder.
He manifested so earnest and genuine a desire to repair the damage of his ill-starred suggestion that Colannah, showing his age in his haste and his tremulousness and excitement, disclosed to him in a flutter of triumphant glee that he had a spell to work which naught could withstand a draught from Herbert's Spring to offer to Otasite.
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