ruck
at the rifleman with his broken hilt. But the other guns aimed at him
spoke; and Ferguson's body jerked from the saddle pierced by eight
bullets. Men seized the bridle of the frenzied horse, plunging on with
his dead master dragging from the stirrup.

The battle had lasted less than an hour. After Ferguson fell, De Peyster
advanced with a white flag and surrendered his sword to Campbell. Other
white flags waved along the hilltop. But the killing did not yet cease.
It is said that many of the mountaineers did not know the significance
of the white flag. Sevier's sixteen-year-old son, having heard that his
father had fallen, kept on furiously loading and firing until presently
he saw Sevier ride in among the troops and command them to stop shooting
men who had surrendered and thrown down their arms.

The victors made a bonfire of the enemy's baggage wagons and supplies.
Then they killed some of his beeves and cooked them; they had had
neither food nor sleep for eighteen hours. They dug shallow trenches
for the dead and scattered the loose earth over them. Ferguson's body,
stripped of its uniform and boots and wrapped in a beef hide, was thrown
into one of these ditches by the men detailed to the burial work, while
the officers divided his personal effects among themselves.

The triumphant army turned homeward as the dusk descended. The uninjured
prisoners and the wounded who were able to walk were marched off
carrying their empty firearms. The badly wounded were left lying where
they had fallen.

At Bickerstaff's Old Fields in Rutherford County the frontiersmen
halted; and here they selected thirty of their prisoners to be hanged.
They swung them aloft, by torchlight, three at a time, until nine had
gone to their last account. Then Sevier interposed; and, with Shelby's
added authority, saved the other twenty-one. Among those who thus
weighted the gallows tree were some of the Tory brigands from Watauga;
but not all the victims were of this character. Some of the troops would
have wreaked vengeance on the two Tories from Sevier's command who had
betrayed their army plans to Ferguson; but Sevier claimed them as under
his jurisdiction and refused consent. Nolichucky Jack dealt humanely by
his foes. To the coarse and brutish Cleveland, now astride of Ferguson's
horse and wearing his sash, and to the three hundred who followed him,
may no doubt be laid the worst excesses of the battle's afterpiece.

Victors and vanqu