The whole affair seemed to the mess serious enough. For the Chickasaws, baffled and furious, had threatened his life on their return, reinforced by a dozen excited, elated, expectant tribesmen, laden with light wood and a chain, to find their prisoner gone. But after the first wild outburst of rage and despair Choolah, although evidently strongly tempted to force the Highlander to the fate from which he had rescued the French officer, resolved to preserve the integrity of his nation’s pledge of amity with the British, and restrained his men from offering injury. This was rendered the more acceptable to him, as with his alert craft he perceived a keen retribution for Ronald MacDonnell in the displeasure of his commanding officer, for the Chickasaws well understood the discipline of the army, which they chose to disregard. To better enlist the prejudice of Colonel Grant, Choolah was preparing himself to distort the facts. He upbraided Ronald MacDonnell with causelessly liberating a prisoner, a Frenchman and an officer, taken by the wily exploit of another. As to the dry wood, he said, the Chickasaws had merely brought some drift, long stranded in a cave by the waterside, to replenish the fire, kindled with how great difficulty in the soaking condition of the forests the Lieutenant well knew. “Hout!--just now when we are about to cross the river?” cried Ronald, unmasking the subterfuge. “And for what then that stout chain?” The chain, Choolah protested, was but part of the equipment of one of the pack animals that had broken away and had been plundered by the Cherokees. Did the Lieutenant Plaidman think he wanted to chain the prisoner to the stake to burn? He had had no dream of such a thing! It was not the custom of the Chickasaws to waste so much time on a prisoner. It was sufficient to cut him up in quarters; that usually killed him dead,--quite dead enough! But if the Lieutenant had had a chain, since he knew so well the use of one, doubtless he himself would have joyed to burn the prisoner, provided it had been his own exploit that had taken him,--for did not the Carolinians of the provincial regiment say that when the Tartan men were at home they were as wild and as uncivilized as the wildest Cherokee savage! “_Holauba! Holauba! Feenah!_” (It is a lie. It is a lie, undoubtedly), cried the phlegmatic MacDonnell, excited to a frenzy. He spoke in the Chickasaw language, that the insult might be understood as offered with full intention.