Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 3, 2025
The long years as they passed had wrought only external changes since, as a slender wistful boy of eleven years, heart-sick, homeless, forlorn, friendless, save for his Indian captors, likely, indeed, to forget all language but theirs, he had first come with his question, always in English, always with a faltering eyelash and a deprecatory lowered voice, "Did you hear anything in Charlestown of any people named 'Queetlee'?"
Here you are valued as the great Otasite, and all men give you honor for your courage. There you are Jan Queetlee, a penniless clod, and all men despise you and pass you by." But again Otasite shook his head. It was no spurious flare of ambition, ineffectual, illusory; no discontented yearning for a different, a wider life that the trader's ill-advised words had roused.
That sentiment of loyalty to the British government, which had never sought to claim Jan Queetlee as a subject, seemed bred in his bone and born in his blood. Perhaps it was the stuff of which long afterward the Tories of the Revolution were made. He could not lift his hand against this aloof, indifferent fetich. And yet take part against the Cherokees, whom he loved as they loved him!
Jan Queetlee, by reason of his close association with the chiefs, knew far more than Varney dreamed of the bitterness roused in the hearts of the Indians by friction with the government, the aggressions of the individual colonist, the infringements of their privileges in the treaty, and in opposition the influence of the ever seductive suavity of the French.
He lifted his eyes suddenly with that long-lashed dreary look of his childhood. "Did you hear of any Queetlees in Charlestown?" he asked. "It is you who should seek your kindred, Jan Queetlee!" Varney said impulsively, calling him by his unaccustomed English name. "It is you who should go to Charlestown to find the Queetlees!" Otasite's face showed suddenly the unwonted expression of fear.
"When I took the boy Jan Queetlee why do I call him thus, instead of by the name he has earned for himself, the noble Otasite of Tennessee Town?" the old chief began as deliberately, as disregardfully of the surroundings as if seated under the boughs of one of the giant oaks on the safe slopes of Chilhowee yonder "when I took him away from the braves who had overcome the South Carolina stationers, I owed him no duty.
Jan Queetlee silently assisted, his face darker, more lowering with the thought in his mind than with the smears of the powder.
And Colannah had been like a father it seemed to Jan Queetlee as if he had had no other father. He could not leave Colannah, old, desolate, and alone. Yet the war was surely coming apace, as they both knew, a war which already tore his heart in sunder, in which he could evade taking part against his own his own of both factions only by going at once and going far.
As with a sudden hurt, Jan Queetlee cried out with a poignant voice against the government and its patent unfaith, striking his clinched fist so heavily on the head of a keg of powder that the stout fibres of the wood burst beneath the passionate blow, and in a moment he was covered with the flying particles of the black dust.
He was reinforced in this argument by the habit of thought of the Indians the absolute absence of tribal dissensions, of internecine strife, so marked among the Cherokees: here no man's hand was lifted against his brother. Jan Queetlee palpably winced.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking