The Amulet by Mary Noailles Murfree — Read

When Ensign Raymond encountered the snow-storm he was already advanced some two days' march on his mission to Choté Great, the "beloved town," the city of refuge of the whole Cherokee nation. The tempest came first in a succession of capricious flurries; then the whole world seemed a maelstrom of dizzily whirling flakes. The young officer and his force pushed on with mettlesome disregard of its menace, although for days it persistently fell. Afterward it drifted with the wind into great mounds, it obscured the trail, hid the landmarks, set many a pitfall in the deep chasms and over the thin ice of unsuspected watercourses in narrow and steep ravines. Night brought hard freezes; the thaws of the rising temperature at noonday were resolved into ice at dusk, and the trees, ceasing to drip, were hung with icicles on every bough and twig. The great pearly moon, now and again showing above the mountains through gusty clouds, revealed strange endless forests glimmering with crystalline coruscations, despite the obscurity, as if endowed with some inherent source of light. The bivouac fires made scant impression on these chill primeval environments; the flare on the ruddy faces of the young soldiers, with their red coats and their snatches of song and their simple joy in the contents of their unslung haversacks, paled as it ventured out amidst the dense mysterious woods. The snowy vistas would presently grow dim, and shadows thronged adown the perspective.

Before the ultimate obscurities were reached, the vanishing point, certain alien green glimmers were often furtively visible, -- a signal for the swift replenishing of the fires and a renewed flaring of the flames high into the air, with great showers of sparks and a fierce crackling of boughs. For the number of wolves had hardly been diminished by the Cherokee War with the British, so recently at an end, although the easily affrighted deer and buffalo seemed for a time to have fled the country. The predatory animals had doubtless found their account in the slaughter of the battle-fields, and Raymond's chief anxiety at night was the maintenance of the vigilance of the fire-guard, whose duty it was to feed the protective flames with fuel. To drive off the beasts with musketry was esteemed a wanton waste of powder, so precious was ammunition always on the frontier. Moreover, the bellicose sound of British muskets was of invidious suggestion in the land of the sullen and smarting Cherokees, so reluctantly pacified, and recently re-embittered by the downfall of secret cherished schemes of the assistance of the French to enable them to regain their independence. Now the French were quitting the country. Canada was ceded; the southern forts were to be evacuated. The "great French father" had been overpowered and forced to leave them to their fate, and their treaties with the British, half-hearted, compulsory, flimsy of intention, were to be kept or broken at the peril of their national existence. They resisted this conviction, -- so high had been their hopes. They had long believed that a confederation of the Indian tribes under French commanders would drive the British colonies of the south into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. They had grown heady with this expectation, and prophetically triumphant. They were now desperate with the sudden dissolving of this possibility forever, -- vindictively inimical.