“We came from the north. We met him,” gravely informed Jackson. “We’d been here sooner, but the men formed a ring and he and I had it out. I found this on him.” And he touched the money-belt strapped outside his hunting-shirt. “It’ll help raise the militia you’re going to need. Now for Red Hajason—and Elsie!”
“Hajason is on the ground here somewhere. Elsie and her father are near. Round up the rascals in the bush and I’ll fetch her to you.”
“No; I’ll go with you. Stetson is wounded, but he can handle the fighting,” cried Jackson.
A shout from Sevier, and Major Tonpit and his daughter descended from their hiding-place. Tonpit was stupefied by the defeat of his schemes and showed neither resentment nor interest in the young people’s public avowal of their shameless preference for each other’s arms.
“Creeks fooled. Cherokees quieted for a time at least. Spain blocked. Hajason wiped out,” checked off Sevier as he rode ahead with the despairing major by his side. “Now for Bonnie Kate and the building of the new State.”
Escorted by two thousand men in buckskin, the delegates met at Jonesboro on August twenty-third and voted that the people should elect fifteen representatives, who were to write a constitution for the new State and organize its Government. The North Carolina Legislature met in November and repealed the Cessions Act and granted all that had been asked in the Jonesboro petition. But the fifteen representatives proceeded, nevertheless, and created the State of Franklin with John Sevier as governor, thereby constituting one of the most unique chapters in American history.
The new State endured for three years, then passed out of existence, to be recreated in time as Tennessee. How Sevier was outlawed by North Carolina, put on trial for high treason and rescued from the court-room in a most amazing manner; how he was appointed brigadier-general by Washington, unanimously selected six times as governor of Tennessee and elected three times to Congress is told in history.
How in his last years he was often visited by John Watts and other chiefs, with whom he had fought, and how they partook of his hospitality and profited by his kind advice, rounds out a career seldom, if ever, equalled in all border chronicles.
THE END