g-place, and presently Captain
Stuart was called aside by the officer of the day, who stated that in
making the rounds he had learned that the sentinel at the gate had
reported having observed bands of Indians lurking about on the edge of
the woods, and that quite a number had come, singly and in groups, to
the gate to demand admission. The gathering of the white people had
roused their attention evidently. They had always held the
cannon-mounted fort and the presence of the soldiery as a menace, and
they now sought to discern what this unprecedented assemblage might
portend. If their entrance were resisted, they who so often frequented
the place, it was obviously inimical to them. They had heard--for the
transmission of news among the Indians was incredibly swift--of the
massacres on the frontier and feared some effort at reprisal. The scanty
numbers of the garrison invited their blood-thirsty rapacity, but they
were awed by the cannon, and although entertaining vague ideas
concerning the management and scope of artillery, realized its terrible
potencies.

Perhaps it was with some idea of forcing an entrance by surprise--that
they might be within the walls of the fort and out of the range of the
guns at this critical juncture of the massing of the forces of the
settlers and the garrison--that a party of thirty or forty Cherokees
suddenly rushed past the sentinel on the counterscarp, who had hardly
time to level his firelock and to call lustily on the guard. The guard
at once turning out, the soldiers met the onset of the savages at the
gate and bore them back with the bayonet. There was the sudden, quick
iterative tramp on the frozen ground of a man running at full speed, and
as Stuart dashed through the sally-port he called out "Bar the gates!
Bar the gates!" in a wild, imperative voice.

In another moment he was standing outside among the savages, saying
blandly in Cherokee, of which he had mastered sundry phrases--"How now,
my friends,--my best friends!" and holding out his hand with his frank,
genial manner first to one of the Indians, then to another.

They looked upon his hand in disdain and spat upon the ground.

The sentry in the gate-house above, his firelock ready leveled to his
shoulder, gazed down at the officer, as he stood with his back to the
heavy iron-spiked oaken gates; there was light enough in the reflection
of the snow, that made a yellow moon, rising higher and higher into the
blue night and a