Ensign Sam Houston says nothing, but the moment his commander's back is turned rushes headlong over those log breastworks again. Later he is picked up with two bullets in him, which serve to keep him quiet for nigh a fortnight.
Once the hunting-shirt men are across the log breastworks, a slow and painstaking killing ensues. Not a Creek asks quarter; not a Creek accepts it when tendered. It is to be a fight to the death—a fight unsparing, relentless, grim!
“Remember Fort Mims!” shout the hunting-shirt men, working away with, rifle and axe and knife.
The Creeks, caught between the General and Colonel Coffee, hide in clumps of bushes or behind logs. From these slight coverts, the hunting-shirt men flush them, as setters flush birds, and shoot them as they fly. Once a Creek is down, out flashes the ready hunting knife and a Creek scalp is torn off; for the hunting-shirt men, on a principle that fights Satan with fire, have adopted the war habits of their red enemy.
The hunting-shirt men range up and down, quartering those one hundred acres of Horseshoe wood like hounds, killing out in all directions. Now and then a warrior, sorely crowded, leaps into the Tallapoosa, and strikes forth for the opposite shore. His feather-tufted head is seen bobbing on the muddy surface of the river. To gentlemen who, offhand, make nothing of a turkey's head at one hundred yards, those brown bobbing feather-tufted Creek heads are child's play. A rifle cracks; the shot-pierced Creek springs clear of the water with a death yell, and then goes bubbling to the bottom. Sometimes two rifles crack; in which double event the Creek takes with him to the bottom two bullets instead of one.
The slaughter moves forward slowly, but satisfactorily, for hours. It is ten o'clock in the night when the last Creek is killed, and the hunting-shirt men, hungry with a hard day's work, may think on supper. Of the red one thousand and more who manned those British-built fortifications in the morning, not two-score get away. It is the Creek Thermopylae.
The General's triumph at the Horseshoe puts the last paragraph to the last chapter of the Creek wars. Also, it disappoints certain English prospects, and defeats for all time those savage hopes of a general race battle against the paleface, the fires of which the dead Tecumseh so long supported by his eloquence and fed with deeds of valor. By way of a finishing touch, from which the hue of romance is not wanting, the terrible Weathersford rides in, on his famous gray war horse, and gives himself up to the General.
“You may kill me,” says Weathersford. “I am ready to die, for I have beheld the destruction of my people. No one will hereafter fear the Creeks, who are broken and gone. I come now to save the women and little children starving in the forest.”
