Lee and Pickens did not pursue the retreating Loyalists; but, anxious to overtake Tarleton, who was at Colonel O'Neil's, upon the Greensborough road, three miles northward, he resumed his march, notwithstanding it was almost sunset. He halted within a mile of O'Neil's, and encamped for the night, where they were joined by Colonel Preston and three hundred hardy mountaineers from Virginia, who had hastened to the support of Greene. At ten o'clock in the morning, the Americans formed for attack, when it was ascertained that Tarleton, alarmed by the exaggerated stories of some of the survivors of Pyle's corps, who made their way to his camp, had hastened to obey the orders of Cornwallis, just received, and was moving toward the Haw. The Americans pursued him as far as that river, when they halted, and Tarleton, after a narrow escape at the ford, returned in safety to Hillsborough. "Fortune, the capricious goddess," says Lee, "gave us Pyle, and saved Tarleton." ****
* Captain Eggleston was one of the most efficient cavalry officers in Lee's legion, during the campaigns further south the same year. We shall meet him hereafter.
** In this action the Americans did not lose a single man, and only one horse. The generally accurate and impartial Stedman, influenced, doubtless, by wrong information, called the event a "massacre;" says that "no quarter was granted" when asked; and that "between two and three hundred of them were inhumanly butchered while in the act of begging for mercy."—History of the American War, ii., 334.
*** About a quarter of a mile northwest from this pond, is the spot where the battle occurred. It was then heavily wooded; now it is a cleared field, on the plantation of Colonel Michael Holt. Mr. Holt planted an apple-tree upon the spot where fourteen of the slain were buried in one grave. Near by, a persimmon-tree indicates the place of burial of several others.
**** Memoirs, page 160.
The Allamance.—Factory Labor.—Regulator Battle-ground.—Greensborough