And at that instant of crisis, as if to seal his doom, a great guttural clamor arose about the southeast bastion, and here was Willinawaugh, with wild turbulent gesticulations, and starting gleaming eyes, and a glancing upheaving tomahawk, for in the perspective a dozen hale fellows were dragging out of the pit beneath the old smoke-house the ten bags of powder that Stuart had concealed there--only two nights ago, was it?--it seemed a century! How had they the craft to find them, so securely, so impenetrably were they hidden! Stuart's store of Cherokee enabled him to gather the drift of the excited talk. One of the Indians, with the keen natural senses of the savage, had smelled the freshly turned clay--_smelled it_ in that assortment of evil odors congregated in the parade!--and had sought to discover what this might be so recently buried. Fraud! Fraud! the cry went up on every side. Unmasked fraud, and Stuart should die the death! He had violated the solemn agreement by which the garrison was liberated; he had surrendered the spare arms and the cannon indeed, but only a fraction of the powder of the warlike stores--and he should die the death and at once. Stuart wondered that he was not torn to pieces by the infuriated savages, protesting their indignation because of his violation of the treaty,--while his garrison, under the Cherokees' solemn agreement of safe-conduct, lay in all their massacred horrors unburied on the plains of Taliquo. The cant of the Cherokees, their hypocrisy, and their vaunting clamor of conscience made them seem, if one were disposed to be cynical, almost civilized! Doubtless, but for Oconostota's statesmanlike determination to sift the matter first, Stuart could not have been torn from among the tribesmen and dragged to the seclusion of his own great mess-hall, where the door was closed and barred in their distorted faces as they followed with their howls. He was required to stand at one end of the grievously dismantled room and detail his reason for this reserve of the powder. Had he grounds to suspect any renewal of the English occupancy? Had he knowledge of forces now on the march in the expectation of raising the siege of Fort Loudon? Oconostota pointed out the desirability of telling the truth, with a feeling allusion to the Great Spirit, the folly of seeking to deceive the omniscient Indian, as the discovery of the powder sufficiently illustrated, and the discomforts that would ensue to Captain Stuart, should it be found necessary to punish him for lying, by burning him alive in his own chimney-place, admirably adapted for the purpose. Oconostota sat now with his back to it, with all his council of chiefs in a semicircle about him, on the buffalo rug on the broad hearth. The Indian interpreter Quoo-ran-be-qua, the great Oak, stood behind him and looked across the length of the room at Captain Stuart, the only other person standing, and clattered out his wooden sentences.