A Spectre of Power by Mary Noailles Murfree

LAROCHE, abandoned thus among the Cherokees, was in the extremity of peril. Apart from their spirit of tribal cohesion, the strongest of national sentiments, all those more intimate ties of family affection, of municipal unity, and of neighborly custom, in which they were peculiarly bound, were insistently asserted in the calamity, as the massacred braves were all of Tellico Great. When the gory figures of the unarmed, unpainted youths, still limp and warm, not yet stiffened into the starkness of death, were borne into the precincts of the town, the wailing of the women and children, and the hoarse cries of fury and despair and grief of the men, filled all the bland, sunlit spaces of the morning, and were a heavy burden to the air.

It was with no definite sense of the wisest course that Laroche had not moved from the portal of the great state-house whence he had beheld Mingo Push-koosh, followed by all his braves, rush across the "beloved square" to the pettiaugre and accomplish the destruction of the powder. He was stunned, bewildered, as by the fall of a thunderbolt. Only afterward he realized that he had no choice. The craft still lay at her moorings, but his single strength could not have sufficed to float her, even if in the confusion he had escaped. He had a shrewd surmise of the secret source of the wrath of the Mingo, and he doubted if the jealousy of the Choctaw, once unleashed and dipped in blood, were less formidable than the wild frenzy of the Cherokees. Moreover, at their freest pace, speeding for their lives, he knew that he could never have sustained the gait of the marching Choctaws, and must eventually have fallen by the wayside or lagged to certain capture.