Once free of the camp, Yeates had hurried his charges to a place of temporary safety farther up the valley, leaving the Catawba to cross the stream to lay a train of dampened powder to the makeshift magazine. When he had led the women to a place of safety, the old man left them and ran back to his masked battery of loaded muskets. Here, at an owl-cry signal from Uncanoola, he opened fire upon the redcoats.
The outworking of the coup de main was a triumph for the old borderer's shrewd generalship. At the death-dealing volley the Englishmen were thrown into confusion; whilst the Indians, summoned by the firing and the shrilling of the captain's whistle, dashed blindly into the trap. At the right moment Uncanoola touched off his powder train and cut in with a clear field for his rescue of Dick and me.
Of the complete success of these various climaxings, Ephraim Yeates had his first assurance when we three came safely to the rendezvous; for, after firing his masked battery, the old hunter lost no time in rejoining the women and in hastening with them out of the valley. Had these three been afoot we might have overtaken them; but Yeates had been lucky enough to stumble upon the black mare peacefully cropping the grass in a little glade; and with this mount for Margery and her tire-woman he had easily outpaced us.
All this I had from Yeates what time Margery was pouring the wine and oil of womanly sympathy into Richard's woundings; and I may confess that whilst the ear was listening to the hunter's tale, the eye was taking note of these her tender ministrations, and the heart was setting them down to the score of a great love which would not be denied. 'Twas altogether as I would have had it; and yet the thought came unbidden that she might spare a niggard moment and the breath to ask me how I did. And because she would not, I do think my burns smarted the crueler.
It was to have surcease of these extra smartings that I turned my back upon the trio under the flaring torch and took up with Ephraim Yeates the pressing question of the moment.
"As I take it, we may not linger here," I said. "Have you marked out a line of retreat?"
The old borderer was busied with his loot of the Indian camp—'twas not in his nature to come off empty-handed, however hard pressed he had been for time. In the raffle of it, guns and pistols, dressed skins and warrior finery, he came upon my good old blade and Richard's great claymore—trophies claimed by the head men of the Cherokees after our taking, as we made no doubt.
"Found 'em hanging in the lodge that usen to belong to the Great Bear," said the hunter, and then with grim humor: "'Lowed to keep 'em to ricollect ye by if so be ye was foreordained and predestinated to go up in a fiery chariot, like the good old Elijah." The weapons disposed of, he made answer to my query. "Ez for making tracks immejitly, if not sooner, I allow there ain't no two notions about that. But I'm dad-daddled if I know which-a-way to put out, Cap'n John, and that's the gospil fact."
"Why not strike for the Great Trace, and so go back the way the powder convoy came?" I asked.
It could be done, he said, but the hazard was great. 'Twas out of all reason to hope that there were no survivors left in the sunken valley to carry the news of the earthquake massacre. That news once cried abroad in the near-by Cowee Towns, the entire Tuckasege nation would turn out to run us down. Moreover, the avengers would look to find us in the only practicable horse-path leading eastward.