tained silence for a time, the coal dying in Captain
Stuart's pipe as he absently contemplated the fireless chimney-place
filled now with boughs of green pine.

Demere spoke first. "If we can get no communication with Colonel
Montgomery it means certain death to all the garrison."

"Sooner or later," assented Stuart.

The problem stayed with them all that night. They were forced to
maintain a cheerful casual guise in the presence of their little public,
and the appearance of the express put great heart into the soldiery. The
fact that the commandant was in the immediate receipt of advices from
Colonel Montgomery and his victorious army seemed itself a pledge of
safety. The express was turned loose among them to rehearse the exploits
of Montgomery's troops,--the splendid forced marches they made; the
execution of their marksmanship; the terror that the Cherokees
manifested of their sputtering grenades, hurled exploding into the
ambuscades by the stalwart grenadiers at the word,--"Fall on"; the
interest of the Indians in the sound of the bagpipes and in the national
dress, the plaid and philibeg, of the Highlanders, which, although now
generally proscribed by law, was continued as a privilege granted to
those enlisted in regiments in the British army. He told of the delight
of the Highlanders in the sight of the Great Smoky Mountains, how they
rejoiced to climb the crags and steep ravines even of the foothills. He
repeated jokes and gibes of the camp outside Fort Prince George, for
Montgomery had overtaken him and raised the siege before he reached the
fort, so difficult was the slow progress of the express among the
inimical Cherokees. He detailed Colonel Montgomery's relish of the sight
of a piece of field artillery which Ensign Milne showed him; that
officer had mounted it one day before the siege when he was with a
detail that he had ordered into the woods to get fuel for the post, and
a band of Cherokees had descended upon him,--"a Quaker," he called it;
you might have heard Colonel Montgomery laugh two hundred miles to Fort
Loudon, for of course it wouldn't fight,--a very powerful Friend,
indeed,--only a black log mounted between two wheels, which the soldiers
had been in the habit of using to ease up the loads of wood. But the
Indians were deceived, and with their terror of artillery got out of
range in short order, and the soldiers made their way back into the fort
under the protection of their "little Quaker."