A Spectre of Power by Mary Noailles Murfree

THERE stood a quaint, grotesque figure in the midst of the level spaces about Chilhowee, Old Town. It maintained its stiff, stanch pose alike through shadow and sheen; oblivious of night or day; unmindful of the rain that the sudden mountain storms now and again sent surging down from over the summit of the Chilhowee Range, looming high above; disdainful of the wind that fluttered the fringes of its buckskin shirt and leggings and slanted the feathers of its war-bonnet askew, and flouted and buffeted its aged, painted, fantastic face.

So like a grim old warrior in good truth was the adroitly constructed effigy that Callum MacIlvesty long remembered the day when first he beheld it upon entering the Cherokee town of Chilhowee, and was moved to wrath because of its surly, important, inimical attitude and fixed aggressive stare. Only the closest scrutiny enabled him to realize that it was but a scarecrow, albeit the cleverest of its type, with a painted gourd for a head and a gaudily arrayed body of fagots and straw. But he did not then even vaguely divine that he was ever to hold a closer association with the image, or that years afterward and far away the mere recollection of its aspect in his sleeping fancies would wake him to a breathless fright and dreary reminiscences of a most troublous episode in a chequered history.