King's Mountain (3 page)

Robertson watched a bat soar up out of the forest in search of moths in the twilight. “I hope their patience is wearing thin. Mine certainly is.”

July turned to August, and we sweltered inside the fort, waiting for an attack that did not come. It had been nearly a fortnight since we had seen any sign of Old Abram's men. Some of our people began to say that the Cherokee had given up and gone back to their villages. This was more wishful thinking than good sense, but we were all mortally tired of whiling away the summer days cooped up in a wooden pen.

The young people minded the most, I think. I mentioned this to my Sarah, and she smiled. “I expect the children do mind being cooped up,” she said, “but except for the pall of danger, I reckon it hardly matters to the women. We are doing what we always do—cooking, washing, scrubbing floors, and tending to babies. One place is much the same as another for that.”

No one liked the waiting, the short rations, or the close quarters, but mostly the women bore it with Christian fortitude until the cows started to bawl. We had kept the cows within the fort as long as we could, but when the fodder gave out, we had no choice but to turn them out to pasture and to hope that the Indians would not steal or slaughter them. So far they had grazed unharmed, but two days had passed, and the unmilked cows were bawling in distress.

“We can't let the poor things die,” said one of the young mothers. “It isn't their fault we're in a war. Besides, our little ones need the milk.”

The older women, whose children had shed their milk teeth and could subsist on the fare of the adults, hugged their young'uns close against them, and declared themselves persuaded by the arguments of the old Indian fighters. Since they had no urgent need for the milk, they were more concerned that it was not safe to venture outside the fort. They said that they could bear the sacrifice of the cows for the safety of the community. But, after another day, those among the women with babes in arms or just-weaned lap babies grew more insistent. They knew that we would have need of the cows' milk sooner rather than later, for the younger children could not eat the rough rations that the rest of us were making do with. The fact that two of my own children swelled that number made me mindful of the urgency of the situation.

Siding with the young mothers were a few tenderhearted girls of sixteen or thereabouts, those who likely tended those very cows and knew each one by name, and would not be swayed by arguments of prudence. They clamored to be let out to tend to their animals.

Perhaps the young never really believe that they can die.

I believed it, both for them and for myself, for I was a man of thirty by then, married these thirteen years and father of eight, and in a sense a father to all those within the fort, for I was one of those in command of Fort Watauga. Two hundred lives depended on our ability to lead.

The young girls brought their argument to me. Colonel Carter and James Robertson were busy with the men, planning for the rationing of the provisions and ammunition, in case the siege should drag on for even more weeks. They sent me to reason with the women. I tried to persuade Robertson to talk to them in my stead, but he laughed and said, “A handsome fellow like you holds much more sway with the ladies, Sevier. Put your charm to good use.” Robertson's sister Keziah was married to my own younger brother Robert, which made us kinsmen of a sort, or at least uncles to the same little boy, but he insisted that he had no patience for the wailing of women over a bunch of cattle, and he all but ordered me to do what I could to pacify them.

Thus I was doubly besieged—Indians without, and weeping maidens within. Four flowers of the frontier encircled me, their lips set with determination and their moist eyes flashing with indignation at the suffering of the animals.

“We don't even know that Old Abram and his men are still out there!” declared the doughty blonde whose hair fluffed around her ruddy face like a dandelion.

I looked into her gooseberry eyes and sighed. The poor girl was no beauty. I wondered if she thought that a show of bravery would add luster to her charms. Well, I did not think so. Courage from a stout woman is the sign of the shrew, the termagant, endearing her to no one. The willowy Sherrill girl was the oldest of the four women, past twenty-one and still unwed, though I would warrant it was not for lack of beauty. She had the look of a storybook heroine—too small and too pretty even to have to smile. And there they were, the two of them, and two more unmarried girls besides, asking my leave to die—a futile gesture for the stout girl and a waste of the beauty of Catherine Sherrill. Perhaps the others were followers, ready to fall in with any enterprise proposed by their companions. Or perhaps boredom at the tedium of our confinement had made them foolhardy. The boys their age—like my own firstborn Joseph—had been allowed to serve alongside their elders as guards and musket men, and so they felt like men, but the girls had done nothing except help with the chores and tend to the babies, and they were restless. In some measure, we all were. It is difficult to live day after day with the threat of an impending storm that never breaks.

“We want to go,” the stout one said again. She gave me a mulish look that told me my arguments would fall on deaf ears.

The others were nodding in stony agreement. “We have heard no shots, seen no movement all day,” said one.

“Surely it is safe, Mr. Sevier.”

“I cannot open the gates,” I said again, for to contest the point with reasoned arguments would be futile. They had an answer for everything. These fair flowers had thorns aplenty between them.

“Well,” said dark-eyed Catherine Sherrill with a trace of a smile. “If you will not let us bring the cows
in,
you will have to let us
out.
”

I stared at her, but she did not back down. “Let you leave the fort without protection?”

She nodded, and the others murmured assent. “We need the milk for the youngest children,” she said quietly. “We haven't enough food as it is. Let the four of us slip out through the gates. With buckets. Let us milk the cows, at least, even if we must leave them there in the field. If we see any sign of trouble, we can drop the pails and run back to the fort. We are the fastest runners in the settlement.”

I doubted that, and I directed my gaze to their trailing skirts to make my point, but they all nodded in agreement that this preposterous statement was so.

“Not faster than the flight of an arrow,” I muttered, but they paid no heed. The bawling of the distant cattle drowned out my objections, and I could not deny the truth of their argument: food was indeed scarce, and we did not know how long it would have to last. But the danger was a consideration as well. Already, we had lost two of our number to a quest for supplies.

It was only a week or so before the cows began their pained exhortations, when we'd sent out two of our own. It had been quiet for an entire day, so James Cooper and a brave young boy called Samuel Moore had ventured out of the fort and down to the river in search of wood for roofing a hut being constructed within the fort.

The Cherokee must have been watching them from the moment they slipped out of the gate, but they let them get all the way to the river's edge before they made themselves known. The ambush, when it came, happened close enough to the fort that we could hear the two men's screams, but too far away for us to provide any covering fire for them. It was too late by then, anyhow. When their cries for help reached us, I rushed to the gate to assemble some of the militia and attempt a rescue, but Captain Robertson blocked the way, and ordered us to stay within.

“But they'll be killed!”

He nodded. “That may be. But you know full well that the Indians sometimes play tricks upon an unwary enemy. The attackers themselves will scream and call for help as if they were the captives, and foolhardy defenders will rush to the aid of these imaginary victims, only to be slaughtered themselves. We will not chance it. Your life is worth more than the risk.”

I was all but certain that Cooper and the boy were in mortal danger, but I could not disobey the orders of a superior officer, though sometimes I wish I had, for many is the night since then that the screams of those men have troubled my sleep.

We watched as James Cooper tried to swim across the river to the comparative safety of the wood beyond, but before he reached the opposite shore, the Cherokee warriors brought him down with arrows and shot. Then they hauled his bleeding body out upon the riverbank, within sight of the fort, finished the job of killing him with their knives, and then took his scalp for a trophy.

As for the boy who had gone with him—poor little Sam Moore—we heard that he had been burned at the stake. There was little to choose between the two fates—being killed outright or being taken prisoner.

At the time, the four women knew of Cooper's fate, and they could guess at the probable end of young Sam Moore. How could they suggest that I let them leave the fort?

The cries of the cattle echoed around me.
Oh, yes.

“The Indians are gone,” one of them said. “Else they'd have killed the cattle already.”

“Unless they left them alive to torment you,” I replied.

Catherine Sherrill gave me a steely look. “We cannot let the beasts suffer, sir. Give us the pails and let us take our chances. In this war, sir, are we not all soldiers?”

I could not dispute that. If the fort were overrun, all our lives would be forfeit. Perhaps, though, the young women could slip more quietly in and out than armed men would be able to do. I hoped that to be the case, but whether true or not, the fact was that we could spare the girls more than we could the men, for if there were too few men left to defend the fort, then all within would die.

“Very well,” I said. “You four may go at your own risk, but if you hear anything—the slightest sound in the underbrush—you are to drop those pails, and run straight for the fort without a thought for your companions. If you stop for one another, you may all perish. So you will run straight back as if you were alone. If you hear
anything.
Even a bird call. It might be a signal. Do you promise me that?”

Solemnly they nodded. They'd have promised me golden goose eggs to get my leave for their reckless errand.

If they heard anything.
Did they think me foolish or had they, too, forgotten that no one could hear a twig break when a field full of cows is bellowing in agony. And if they were indeed ambushed at the meadow, would they in their terror remember what they had been told? I knew what a risk they were taking, and I hoped that their bravery was illuminated with the knowledge of the danger they faced, for if they were merely softhearted simpletons, then, in letting them go, I would be consigning more helpless creatures to suffering.

They were right, though. We needed the milk, and more than that, we could ill afford for the cows to die. The risk must be taken. The men were needed to man the guns, and the older women had children to tend. If anyone could be spared, it was indeed these unmarried girls. I felt heartless even as I thought it, but life on the frontier is a lesson in hard truths.

It had been quiet for days. I decided that we could wait no longer, or the cows
would
die, Indians or no. With many misgivings, which I forebore to speak of, I escorted the four maidens and their pails out of the log building and saw them safely to the great wooden gate. “Godspeed,” I said, but, intent upon their mission, they hurried away with their oaken buckets without a backward glance. I watched them go, admiring their courage, for even though they were soldiers as much as any of us, they had willingly set out on a mission from which I doubted they would return.

I wished that there were a clear view of the meadow, instead of the curtain of trees into which they vanished only a few yards from the fort.

The young man who stood guard next to the gate touched my arm as I turned away. “Do you think the Indians have gone, sir?”

I shrugged. “I wouldn't have.”

PATRICK FERGUSON

Pitfour, Scotland

1758

“
There are better tombstones in Strachur.”

I was startled, that's all. Anybody would be, hearing a voice like that, as if out of nowhere in a gloomy kirkyard. I was glad to be alone—glad that I had managed to stand my ground, and that my sister Betty had wandered off into the sanctuary of the kirk, for she would have laughed and pointed to see me tremble so as if I were a quaking bairn.

But I wasn't afraid, not of old graves on a gray afternoon. Of course I wasn't. We Fergusons are an educated family, not a tribe of superstitious bumpkins. And isn't my uncle a famous general over the water in Canada? If I am to follow in his path, I must not be skittish over a sudden rush of movement or noise—for what else are battles but that?

It was just that I hadn't seen anyone else about among the tombstones, that's all.

*   *   *

High summer it was, and we had journeyed up from Edinburgh to our country house at Pitfour, in Buchan, just inland from Peterhead. The place had belonged to my Grandfather Ferguson, who had been Sheriff-Depute of Aberdeen, though I never knew him, for he died a decade before I came into the world. Upon his death, Pitfour was inherited by my father. One day it will go to Jamie, I suppose, along with any titles that happen to be going, for he is the eldest, and was born with his nose in the trough right enough. He will follow our father into the law, I have no doubt, and while I do not envy him that sedentary life, I would wish that mine were not so uncertain. The family is trying to decide what to do with me. Perhaps my solemnity comes from the uncertainty of my future, for I knew my childhood to be nearly over, exchanged for I knew not what.

I was called Patrick after my other grandfather Lord Elibank, but that is all I am likely to get, for a second son is only a spare, not an heir, and unless Jamie breaks his thick neck, I will have to shift for myself in this life. I tell Jamie that it's a blessing to have the freedom of the world from which to choose one's path, but he only smiles as if he knows that choosing is the greatest burden of all.