pinioned before he could be disarmed,
and then helpless, hopeless, with what feelings one may hardly imagine,
he was constrained to set forth with his captor on the return march to
Fort Loudon.

[Illustration: "The men had been hastily formed into a square."]

The Cherokees could hardly restrain their joy in thus taking him alive.
So far-famed had he become among them, so high did they esteem his
military rank, so autocratic seemed his power in the great stronghold of
Fort Loudon, with his red-coated soldiers about him, obeying his words,
even saluting his casual presence, that it afforded the most aesthetic
zest of revenge, the most acute realization of triumph, to contemplate
him as he stood bound, bloody, bareheaded in the sun, while the very
meanest of the lowest grade of the tribesmen were free to gather round
him with gibes and menacing taunts and buffets of derision. His hat had
been snatched off in order to smite him with it in the face; his hair,
always of special interest to the Indians because of its light brown
color and dense growth, was again and again caught by its thick, fair
plait with howls of delight, and if the grasp of the hand unaided could
have rent the scalp from the head, those fierce derisive jerks would
have compassed the feat; more than one whose rage against him was not to
be gratified by these malevolently jocose manifestations of contempt,
gave him such heavy and repeated blows over the head with the butt of
their firelocks that they were near clubbing the prisoner to death, when
this circumstance attracted the attention of his captor, Willinawaugh,
who was fain to interfere. Stuart, regretting the intervention, realized
that he was reserved to make sport for their betters in the fiercer and
more dramatic agonies of the torture and the stake.

His fortitude might well have tempted them. In a sort of stoical pride
he would not wince. Never did he cry out. He hardly staggered beneath
the crushing blows of the muskets, delivered short hand and at close
quarters, that one might have thought would have fractured his skull.
That the interposition of Willinawaugh was not of the dictates of
clemency might be inferred from the manner in which the return journey
was accomplished. Forced to keep pace with his captor on horseback
Stuart traveled the distance from Taliquo Town to Old Fort Loudon in
double-quick time, bareheaded, pinioned, in the blazing meridian heat of
a sultry August day. He hoped