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"May become unpleasant when the wind shifts," remarked Stuart easily, and without emotion apparently, "but we are spared the duties of punishing deserters according to their deserts." Demeré's face had shown a sudden nervous contraction but resumed its fixed reserved expression, and he said nothing. Corporal O'Flynn's report, however, was not yet exhausted. He hesitated, almost choked.
Stuart knew that Demeré's quill, scraping over the paper, was fashioning the appeal to the royal governor of that province, even while Hamish was still speaking, and he, himself, wrote supplemental letters to other persons of note, that the news of their desolation, failing to carry in one direction, might be spread in another.
Although, as ringleaders in the food riot, they had been summarily placed in irons, their punishment had been too brief perhaps for a salutary moral effect. Demeré's severity was always theoretical, a mental attitude one might say.
A group from the fort strolled along the river-bank, and the ripples were red under the red sunset sky, and the eastern mountains were blue and misty, and the western were purple and massive and distinct, and though sedges were sere and the birds gone, summer was in the air, and they talked of hope and home. Captain Demeré's suggestion broke discordantly on the serenity of the hour and the theme.
The bystanders might argue little from Demeré's reticent soldierly dignity, but Stuart's ringing laugh, as he spoke aside to his brother officer, his cheerful, buoyant, composed mien, restored confidence as naught less than the sound of Montgomery's bugles outside the works might have done. Doubtless he was apprised of early relief.
In silence he was conducted back to his quarters in Demeré's house at Fort Loudon. And as there he sat in the spare, clean room, in the single chair it contained, with one elbow on the queer, rough little table, constructed according to a primitive scheme by the post carpenter, he stared forward blankly at the inevitable prospect so close before him.
But long before Captain Demeré's time, and often since, the futility of opposing regular scientific tactics to the alert wiles of the savage native in his own difficult country has been commented upon by observers of military methods, and doubtless recognized in the hard knocks of experience by those whose fate it has been to try again the experiment.
She diverted with difficulty Hamish's attention from Captain Demeré's half-finished map on the table at the other end of the room, over which the boy had been poring during the entire interview, and then they took their leave. Little did any of the party realize how important the mistaken impression of the Cherokee women was to prove! The winter wore gradually away.
But Stuart slept presently, waking once to reply to Demeré's remark that a married man would have the homing quality desired, the fort holding his family; Stuart declared that no one would be willing to leave wife and children to such protection as other men might have presence of mind to give them in a desperate crisis. The mere communication might create a panic.
The papers had been pushed near Demeré's elbow, and he began to look over them disaffectedly. "Hear Governor Lyttleton," he said, and read in a tone that was itself a commentary: "'Use all means you think proper to induce our Indians to take up the hatchet. Promise a reward to every man who shall bring in the scalp of a Frenchman or a French Indian."
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