# War Drums (Sass)/Chapter 25

ALMAYNE on Nunda the Moon-Face rode in the lead. Behind him strode the Muskogee warrior, Little Mink, who, soon after the flight began, had stepped suddenly from behind a tree trunk and joined the party. Jolie Stanwicke on Selu rode next, and Lachlan on Tuti the Snowbird brought up the rear. They followed no trail. For some miles, after leaving the pack train, they had raced along the Great Path, then they had turned to the right into the forest.
Of necessity their pace was now much slower. Sometimes the horses trotted, but more often their gait was a walk. They were heading, Lachlan had told Jolie, for the great swamp of the Santee, a vast fastness of cypress forest and interminable canebrakes where, Almayne felt confident, they could throw their pursuers off the track.
Riding in single file, they spoke seldom, but Jolie, her bridle rein loose on Selu's neck, hummed a song. She had no sense of peril, no consciousness of anxiety. In the charge of these three men she felt as safe in this trackless wilderness as she had ever felt amid the groves of Hampshire.
She studied them as she rode. In front of her the eagle feather, fastened in Little Mink's narrow crest ​of straight black hair, swayed rhythmically; the long muscles of his naked back and broad, copper-coloured shoulders bulged and writhed with every stride. Save for the loin-cloth about his waist and the high moccasins on his feet and calves, his body was bare. Its symmetry, its feline slimness and litheness, its evident power fascinated her. Here in another form was that beauty of the wilderness which from the beginning had so delighted her.
He was as beautiful, she decided, this young warrior of the wilderness, as the wilderness itself of which he was a part. The thought engendered another, and a shadow came into her eyes. Yes, they must be beautiful, those tall, slim Indian maidens of whom Lachlan had spoken, since the Indian youths were so good to look upon. And that mysterious daughter of Chief Concha, the Appalache, who held Gilbert Barradell prisoner, was a princess among her own people, and the high-born Indian girls would be the fairest.
For a little while her happiness was clouded; but these thoughts passed. Almayne turned in his saddle to speak briefly with Little Mink in the latter's tongue. She studied the tall hunter's thin, tanned, hawklike face, his deep-set gray-blue eyes gleaming above his white moustache. He felt her eyes on him, looked at her and smiled, and she gave him a radiant smile in return. Suddenly it came to her that her first distaste for him had passed—that now she liked him profoundly, counted him her most trusted friend in this, her time of trial.
​She turned to glance momentarily at Lachlan, riding ten paces behind her. He was gazing to the right, watching a small herd of wild black cattle grazing in a savannah, and she saw his face in profile. She saw the Indian in it, and she saw the Frenchman; the Scotch blood, she had already decided, was not apparent. Beneath its buckskins, she knew, that body was as lithe and strong as Little Mink's; and the face was far handsomer. It had not the stony impassiveness of an Indian's countenance. Even in moments of repose the vivid spirit behind it shone through it like a flame; always, in spite of the sharply chiselled Indian features, it was a face luminous and alive.
He was like a fairy-tale, she reflected, this young Indian Prince. Somehow she could not quite believe in him. And all that Almayne had told her about him was like a fairy-tale. Who in England would credit her if she told the story there: that in the wilderness of America there was a nation, or group of nations—an empire in miniature, the Confederacy of the Muskogee—over which an old Scotsman reigned as King, dwelling in barbaric affluence in his great house at Tallasee, waited upon by his scores of negro slaves, teaching his copper-skinned subjects the arts of peace and of war?
Who in England would believe her if she told what Almayne had told her about that wilderness empire of which this slim, dark youth behind her was Prince and heir, if she told of the Red Towns and the White ​Towns, the towns of war and the towns of peace, of the strange dances and the stately ceremonials, the Green Corn Dance and the sacred Dance of the Serpent, of the "beloved bear grounds," where, instead of beef cattle, droves of bears were kept to furnish meat, of the great herds of horses and the smiling fields of grain?
Who would believe her if she told what Almayne had told her of the origin of this empire of the Muskogee; how, when the Spanish conquerors sacked Mexico and wrecked the magnificence of Montezuma, there were some among the great Emperor's subjectpeoples who would not submit to the foreign yoke; how they left their home in that distant country and marched northward and eastward, a whole nation of them, men, women, and children, seeking a new abode; how they met and fought many savage and warlike tribes in the land of the buffalo and the antelope; how at last, after long years of wandering in the western wilderness, they settled on the River Albamas, subdued all the nations that held the vast and smiling country, southward and westward of the Cherokee mountains and, teaching these nations something of the civilization of the Aztecs, bound them together into a powerful Indian empire known as the Confederacy of the Muskogee?
Who in England would believe her if she told of the ruling families of this barbaric empire, as proud ef their blood as any English earl—of the Family of the Wind, whose maidens were princesses; of the ​Families of the Wolf and the Panther; of the Family of the Beaver, whose old men took precedence among the counsellors? And who in England would believe her if she told of the young man who was Prince of this empire, this young Lachlan McDonald, who had in his veins the Indian blood of the Family of the Wind (the blood of Montezuma himself), the staunch blood of Scotland and the fiery blood of France? This young Indian Prince whose speech and manners were those of a polished English gentleman, whose woodcraft was that of a red hunter and warrior, and whose swordcraft would do credit to any young gallant of the English court?
Yes, they would laugh at her if she told them about Lachlan McDonald, Prince of the Muskogee Confederacy, Chief of the Family of the Wind. They would set it all down as mad romance. Yet he was there, riding behind her, in the flesh.
She felt his eyes upon her. She knew how he watched her, how he studied her when he thought himself unobserved. Well, she must not be too hard with him. He had ventured his life for her and had all but lost it. He had done her good service and he was serving her still. He had named her the Lady Sanguilla, so Almayne had told her, after some sweetvoiced beautiful bird, and she liked the name and was somehow glad that he had so named her.
She half-regretted now the tone that she had adopted when he had come to ask her pardon. She had done it with a purpose. She must guard against ​the danger that Almayne had seen fromthe beginning. She must not let that happen. But she must not be too hard with Lachlan McDonald; and she did not wish to be too hard with him. Yet, for some reason that she could not fix clearly, she could not trust him as she trusted Almayne.
It was not that she mistrusted him. It was not that she doubted the sincerity of his intention to do all that he could to rescue Gilbert Barradell. She knew not what it was that warned her. She knew only that there was something in Lachlan McDonald's eyes—something of which, perhaps, he himself was unaware.
But she could not now think long or deeply of these matters. Around her, as she rode, the panorama of the wilderness unfolded—an ever-changing picture, more beautiful, more marvellous than ever. Its sights and sounds held her, drove all else from her mind. She wondered vaguely where their pursuers were now, whether Lance Falcon was with them, whether Meg Pearson and Mr. O'Sullivan had been able to detain them for any appreciable length of time. But the problem of the pursuit held her thoughts only briefly. Almayne and Lachlan McDonald betrayed no anxiety, and she felt none.
The rich wilderness soothed and lulled her. Again her mind was full of languid, dreamlike content, a sense of fulfilment ahead and of sorrow and evil eft forever behind. There had been beauty and wonder along the Great Path; here there were greater beauty, greater wonder.
​The deer were everywhere. There was scarcely a moment when she could not look to right or left and see a grazing herd. Crossing the head of a long, narrow savannah walled in by dense growths of cane, she tried to count the wild animals feeding there. In the foreground were nineteen white-tails, beyond them a drove of fifteen wild black cattle, and beyond these again five elk, while farther away there were still other herds of deer, too closely bunched to be counted with certainty. But the number of these was as nothing compared with the birds; tall cranes, some white with black-tipped wings, some gray with crimson patches on their heads; egrets pure white from head to drooping tail, walking in hundreds along the edges of the shallow pools; a great army of white ibis whose curved orange-red bills glowed in the sun.
She was watching the tall, stately cranes when a sudden movement among the grazing deer nearer at hand fixed her attention. She saw their small heads suddenly lift, saw some of them go bounding away, their tails held high, while others still stood at gaze; and suddenly from the tall grass a long, tawny shape launched upward and forward, and a great panther fell upon one of the deer, bearing it to the ground.
Almayne turned in his saddle and spoke a word to Lachlan, then wheeled his horse and galloped down the savannah, the others close behind him.
The big tawny cat, like a lioness in shape and scarcely less in bulk, crouching on the body of the ​deer, rose as they drew near and stood watching them, head hanging low, long tail waving slowly. Jolie's heart beat faster. She noticed that Almayne held his rifle ready. She noticed, too, that Nunda the Moon-Face went forward laggingly, and she felt Selu trembling under her.
The panther's body stiffened, his long tail ceased its waving, in his bloody jaws Jolie could see the long teeth gleam. Almayne's rifle went to his shoulder; but still he rode on slowly, Lachlan and Little Mink beside him, Jolie close behind. When they were no more than twenty paces' distant, the panther whirled like a flash and bounded away to the right, vanishing in the tall grass.
Almayne turned to Jolie with a smile.
"Sometimes, Mistress," he said, "Klandaghi the panther fights for his game, but this one figured the odds too heavy. I hate to rob him, for Klandaghi is a great hunter and a clean one. But we must have meat, and it is best not to fire our rifles; in this still air the sound would carry far."
Before he had finished speaking, Little Mink's knife was at work upon the deer's carcass. Within a few minutes the task was completed and they were again on their way.
It was an hour after this when Almayne reined in suddenly and held up his hand to halt the others. They were coming up out of a dense bed of low fern to slightly higher ground where the great pines were supplanted by oaks of even mightier girth; and under ​these oaks the ground was almost bare of vegetation and the soil was light and sandy. Almayne, bending forward in his saddle, was gazing intently at the sand in front of his horse's fore-feet, while Little Mink, stooping low, was also examining the ground. Lachlan rode forward past Jolie, dismounted, and stooped beside Little Mink, and a moment later Almayne dismounted and walked a few paces to the right, his eyes studying the sand at his left hand.
Jolie waited curiously. The three men talked briefly together, and presently they came toward her. Lachlan was frowning; Almayne's thin face was grave.
"We think it well that you should know," Lachlan said to her. "In the sand yonder are the tracks of a great war party of Cherokees, perhaps three hundred braves. It can mean only one thing—that the Cherokees have begun their threatened war against the Province."
She nodded calmly, inviting him to go on.
"This war party," he continued, "was moving eastward. They left the Great Path to the northward and came through the forest to shorten the way. Probably they struck the Path again near the point where we left the pack train."
"Our friends—Meg Pearson, Mr. O'Sullivan—they are in danger, then?" asked Jolie quickly.
"We can't tell, Mistress," Almayne answered her. "The war party may have missed them. I pray God so."
​"Little Mink will go back to warn them, if they are still alive," said Lachlan. "We must think of ourselves. Almayne believes that we had best lie for some days in the canebrakes of the Santee and decide later what to do."
"Let us do what you and Almayne think best," Jolie answered. Turning in her saddle, she saw Little Mink striding through the ferns behind her, following the back trail. As she watched, his tall, copper-brown form faded amid the straight trunks of the pines.