"Then the Cherokee warwhoop pierced the echoing sky; a scattered fire was poured upon us from behind the rocks and trees; the sharp steel tomahawks came flashing and whirling through the air; bullets and arrows whistled, and rifles rung, and in a moment we found ourselves surrounded by a living sea of dark-skinned and yelling Cherokees, with plumes on their scalp locks, their fierce visages streaked with war paint, and all their moccasins rattling.
"Fire and fury, such a time it was!
"We all fought like devils, but our men fell fast on every side; the Royals lost two lieutenants, and several soldiers whose scalps were torn from their bleeding skulls in a moment. Our regiment, though steady under fire as a battalion of stone statues, now fell into disorder, and the brown warriors, like fiends in aspect and activity, pressed on with musket and war-club brandished, and with such yells as never rang in mortal ears elsewhere. The day was lost, until the Highlanders came up, and then the savages were routed in an instant, and cut to pieces. 'Shoot and slash' was the order; and there ensued such a scene of carnage as I had not witnessed since Culloden, where His Royal Highness, the fat Duke of Cumberland, galloped about the field, overseeing the wholesale butchery of the wounded.
"We destroyed their magazines of powder and provisions; we laid the wigwams in ashes, and shot or bayonetted every living thing, from the babe on its mother's breast, to the hen that sat on the roost; for as I had made our commander aware of all the avenues, there was no escape for the poor devils of Cherokees. Had the pious, glorious, and immortal King William been there, he would have thought we had modelled the whole affair after his own exploit at Glencoe.
"All was nearly over, and among the ashes of the smoking wigwams and the gashed corpses of king's soldiers and Indian warriors, I sat down beneath a great chestnut to wipe my musket, for butt, barrel, and bayonet were clotted with blood and human hair—ouf, man, why do you shudder? it was only Cherokee wool;—all was nearly over, I have said, when a low fierce cry, like the hoarse hiss of a serpent, rang in my ear; a brown and bony hand clutched my throat as the fangs of a wolf would have done, and hurled me to the earth! A tomahawk flashed above me, and an aged Indian's face, whose expression, was like that of a fiend, came close to mine, and I felt his breath upon my cheek. It was the visage of the sachem, but hollow with suffering and almost green with fury, and he laughed like a hyæna, as he poised the uplifted axe.
"Another form intervened for a moment; it was that of the poor Indian girl I had so heartlessly deceived; she sought to stay the avenging hand of the frantic sachem; but he thrust her furiously aside, and in the next moment the glittering tomahawk was quivering in my brain—a knife swept round my head—my scalp was torn off, and I remember no more."
"A fortunate thing for you," said Ewen, drily; "memory such as yours were worse than a knapsack to carry; and so you were killed there?"
"Don't sneer, comrade," said Wooden-leg, with a diabolical gleam in his eye: "prithee, don't sneet; I was killed there, and, moreover, buried too, by the Scots Royals, when they interred the dead next day."
"Then how came you to be here?" said Ewen, not very much at ease, to find himself in company with one he deemed a lunatic.
"Here? that is my business—not yours," was the surly rejoinder.