Across the corner of the public square upon which the Nashville Inn finds hospitable frontage, stands the City Hotel. Sunning themselves in the veranda of the latter caravansary, but with war written upon their angry visages, the General and the faithful Coffee perceive the brothers Benton. The enemies glare at one another, and the General says to Colonel Coffee that they will now go to the post office. Since a trip to the post office is calculated to bring them within touching distance of the brothers Benton, Colonel Coffee at once discerns the propriety of such a journey.
The pair go to the post office, staring haughtily at the brothers Benton as they pass. The brothers Benton, for their side, being apoplectic of habit, grow black in the face with rage.
Having visited the post office, and being now upon their return, the General and Colonel Coffee again draw near the apoplectic Bentons, glowering from their veranda. When within three feet of them, the General abruptly whips out one of those celebrated saw-handles, and jams its muzzle against the horrified stomach of brother Thomas Benton. That imperiled personage thereupon backs rapidly away from the saw-handle, which as rapidly follows; while the public, assembling on the run, confidently expects the General to shoot brother Thomas Benton in two.
The General might have done so, and thus gratified the public, but the unexpected occurs. As brother Thomas Benton backs briskly from the muzzle of the saw-handle, brother Jesse, who is not wanting in a genius for decision, whirls, and from a huge horse pistol plants two balls in the General's left shoulder. As the warrior goes down, Colonel Coffee empties his pistol at brother Thomas, who avoids having his head blown off only by the fortunate fact of a cellar, into whose receptive depths he tumbles, just in what novelists call “the nick of time.” As brother Thomas lapses into the cellar, young Hays, a nephew of the blooming Rachel, hurls brother Jesse to the floor, to which he makes heartfelt attempts to pin him with a dirk, but is baffled by the activity of the restless brother Jesse, who will not lie still to be pinned.
The whole riot has not covered the space of sixty seconds, when the public, suddenly conceiving its duty to lie in that direction, seizes young Hays, releases the recumbent brother Jesse, disarms Colonel Coffee, fishes brother Thomas out of that receptive cellar, and carries the badly wounded General to a bed in the Nashville Inn. The City Hotel mentions its own beds, and lays claim to the injured General, on the argument that the battle has been fought in its bar. The claim is disallowed and the General conveyed to the rival hostelry aforesaid, as being peculiarly his own proper inn, since it is there he has ever repaired for billiards, mint juleps, and to hold conferences over pipe and glass with his friends.
Once in bed, the local surgeons burst in and offer to cut off the General's arm. The offer is declined fiercely and a poultice of slippery-elm bark is substituted for that proposed surgery. This latter medicament works wonders; under its soothing influences, and the revivifying effects of whisky—both being remedies much in vogue along the Cumberland—the General begins to mend.
The General, the patient object of a deal of slippery-elm bark and whisky—the one applied externally and the other internally—lies in bed a month. Then the awful word arrives of the massacre at Fort Mims. Five hundred and fifty-three souls have been slaughtered, and Chief Weathersford with all his Creeks, valor sharpened by English gold and English firewater, is reported on the warpath. The news brings the General out of bed in a moment. His friends remonstrate, the doctors command, the blooming Rachel pleads; but he puts them aside. Gaunt of cheek, face paper-white with weakness, left arm in a sling, he climbs painfully into the saddle and takes command.
The General sends Colonel Coffee and his mounted riflemen to the fore, with orders to wait for him at Fayettesville. Meanwhile, he himself lingers briefly to enroll and organize his little army. A few weeks later he follows the doughty Coffee, and the entire command—horns full of powder, pouches heavy with bullets, hunting knives whetted to a razor edge—moves southward after hostile Creeks.