A Spectre of Power by Mary Noailles Murfree

MOY TOY came indeed the next day and laden thus. In fact it was he who had first thought of the design of falling on the trader's pack-train on their return trip to Charlestown and cutting them all off. Thus, he argued, the country would be rid at one blow of the trade, -- for the others, here, there, everywhere, would never return, -- and it was the trade, the paltry bauble, that had bought the Cherokees, scot and lot, alienated them from their own best interest, threatened them with vassalage to the British, and with national annihilation. The vengeance of the Carolina authorities would scarcely discriminate, scarcely even seek out so elusive a prey as the immediate offenders; frantic and furious it would alight like a bolt from heaven on whatever lay within its orbit. Thus it would serve to unite the upper Cherokees, the Ottare district, and the Ayrate towns in their own defense -- the doubting must needs be steadfast, the weak-hearted confident and strong, the politic might scheme only from ambush, and Atta-Kulla-Kulla postpone his strategic talks of statecraft till the council once more should have time to heed his plotting and counterplotting. Then the way of the French would be open. Then might its skilled officer bring the great guns and build the forts and drive forever from the Cherokee borders this perfidious foe who sought to enslave a free people by goods and rum, at ruinous great prices and tolls of trade.

Despite Laroche's experience of the inconsistencies and contradictory traits of the Indian character, this precipitancy surprised him. He began to see that the patience with which the savages were credited, their long waiting and scheming for revenge, the illimitable distances they traversed in war, the innumerable shifts and devices they practiced, of almost inconceivable ingenuity, to attain their object -- all were exerted only when it lay beyond their immediate reach. Once within the possibilities, and the leap to seize upon it was like a panther's, as swift, as bloodthirsty, and as unreckoning. For the Indians' policy of doubting and debating was only when impotence held their revenge in bounds. Thus it was that their hasty, unguarded, impulsive seizing upon an opportunity of massacre and robbery so often recoiled upon the body politic, which suffered as a whole in the vengeance of the colony, the withdrawal of the trade, and the cutting off of supplies and ammunition, for the murderous enterprise of some small band. More than once Moy Toy himself, both earlier and later, headed a party of these independent warriors, for whose deeds the Cherokee nation at large paid the reckoning.