In another moment he was standing outside among the savages, saying blandly in Cherokee, of which he had mastered sundry phrases--"How now, my friends,--my best friends!" and holding out his hand with his frank, genial manner first to one of the Indians, then to another. They looked upon his hand in disdain and spat upon the ground. The sentry in the gate-house above, his firelock ready leveled to his shoulder, gazed down at the officer, as he stood with his back to the heavy iron-spiked oaken gates; there was light enough in the reflection of the snow, that made a yellow moon, rising higher and higher into the blue night and above the brown, shadowy woods, seem strangely intense of color, and in the melancholy radiation from its weird, gibbous disk to show the officer's calm, impassive face; his attitude, with his arms folded, the rejected hand withdrawn; even the gold lace on his red coat and the color of his hair in the thick braid that hung down under his cocked hat. Even the latent expectation might be discerned in his eyes that the interval of silence would prove too irksome to the hot impulse, which had nerved the rush on the gates, to be long continued, and that the moment would reveal the leader and the purpose of the demonstration. A Cherokee stepped suddenly forward--a man with a tuft of eagle feathers on his scalp-lock quivering with angry agitation, his face smeared with vermilion, clad in the buckskin shirt and leggings that the settlers had copied from the Indians, with pistols at his belt as well as a firelock in one hand--the barrel sawed off short to aid its efficacy. The air was bitterly cold, but the blood blazed hot in his face; in Cherokee he spoke and he paused for no interpreter; if the _unaka_ Captain did not understand him, so much the worse for the _unaka_ Captain. Through his teeth the tense swift utterances came in half-suppressed breathless tones, save when a sudden loud exclamation now and again whizzed out on the air like the ascent of a bursting rocket. His fury was such that even without the disguise of the paint on his face, Stuart might hardly have recognized him were it not for his peculiarly sinewy, slight elegance of shape. He had advanced one foot and he brandished his tomahawk--a furious gesture, but without immediate intention, for now and again he thrust the weapon into his belt.