"But his mother was but a wee bit of a woman," urged O'Kimmon; "the most
of him is Frinch,--look at the size of him!"

For O'Kimmon was now bidding as high against the English aegis as
earlier he had been disposed to claim its protection, when he had
protested his familiarity with the Royal Governor of South Carolina. In
an instant he was once more gay, impudent, confident of carrying
everything before him. He divined that some recent friction had
supervened in the ever-clashing interests subsisting between the
Cherokee nation and the British government, and was relying on the
recurrent inclination of this tribe to fraternize with the French. Their
influence from their increasing western settlements was exerted
antagonistically to the British colonists, by whom it was dreaded in
anticipation of the war against a French and Cherokee alliance which
came later. Oo-koo-koo, complacent in his own sagacity in having
detected a difference in the speech of the new-comers from the English
which he had been accustomed to hear in Charlestown, and animated by a
wish to believe, hearkened with the more credulity to an expansive
fiction detailed by the specious Irishman as to their mission here.

They were awaiting the coming of certain pettiaugres from New
Orleans,--a long journey by way of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the
Cherokee, and the Tennessee rivers,--with a cargo of French goods
cheaper than the English. They designed to establish a trading-post at
some convenient point, out of reach of the grasping British, and thus to
compete with the monopoly of the Cherokee commerce which the English
government sought to foster. And then, to furnish a leaven of truth to
this mass of lies, he detailed, with such a relish as only an Irishman
can feel in a happy incongruity, that the French, having no market in
old France for deerskins, the chief commodity of barter that the Indians