"If it plaze yer honor," said O'Kimmon in English, taking off his coonskin cap with a lavish flourish as a tall and stately Indian hastily garbed in fine raiment of the aboriginal type, a conspicuous article of which was a long feather-wrought mantle, both brilliant and delicate of effect, detached himself from the group and came forward, "I can't spake yer illigant language,--me eddication bein' that backward,--but I kin spake me own so eloquent that it would make a gate-post prick up the ears of understanding. We've come to visit yez, sor."
The smile which the Hibernian bent upon the savage was of a honeyed sweetness, but the heart of his companion sank as he suddenly noted the keen, intuitive power of comprehension expressed in the face of the old Indian. Here was craft too, but of a different quality, masked, potent, impossible to divine, to measure, to thwart. The sage Oo-koo-koo stood motionless, his eyes narrowing, his long, flat, cruel mouth compressed as with a keen scrutiny he marked all the characteristics of the strangers,--first of one, then deliberately of the other. A war captain (his flighty name was Watatuga, the Dragon-fly, although he looked with his high nose and eagle glance more like a bird of prey), assuming precedence of the others, pressed up beside the prophet, and the challenge of his eyes and the contempt that dilated his nostrils might have seemed more formidable of intent than the lacerating gaze of the cheera-taghe, except that to an Irishman there is always a subtle joy even in the abstract idea of fight. The rest of the braves, with their alert, high-featured cast of countenance, inimical, threatening, clustered about, intent, doubtful, listening.
Adrien L'Épine had his secret doubts as to the efficacy of the bold, blunt, humorous impudence which Terence O'Kimmon fancied such masterful policy,--taking now special joy in the fact that its meaning was partially veiled because of the presumable limitations of the Indian's comprehension of the English language. The more delicate nurture that L'Épine obviously had known revolted at times from this unkempt brusquerie, although he had a strong pulse of sympathy with the wild, lawless disregard of conventional standards which characterized much of the frontier life. He feared, too, that O'Kimmon underrated the extent of the Cherokee's comprehension of the language of which, however, the Indians generally spoke only a few disconnected phrases. So practiced were the savages in all the arts of pantomime, in the interpretation of facial expression and the intonation of the voice, that L'Épine had known in his varied wanderings of instances of tribes in conference, each ignorant of the other's language, who nevertheless reached a definite and intricate mutual understanding without the services of an interpreter. L'Épine felt entrapped, regretful, and wished to recede. He winced palpably as O'Kimmon's rich Irish voice, full of words, struck once more upon the air.