arlier to have been applied by Colonel Montgomery. However he spelled
his name, he was sufficiently identifiable. He came northward like an
avenging fury. Advancing swiftly with a battalion of Highlanders and
four companies of the Royal Scots,[11] some militia and volunteers,
through that wild and tangled country, he fell on Little Keowee Town,
where with a small detachment he put every man to the sword, and, by
making a night march with the main body of his force, almost
simultaneously destroyed Estatoe, taking the inhabitants so by surprise
that the beds were warm, the food was cooking, loaded guns exploded in
the flames, for the town was promptly fired, and many perished thus, the
soldiers having become almost uncontrollable on discovering the body of
an Englishman who had only that morning suffered death by torture at the
hands of the savages. Sugaw Town next met this fate--in fact, almost
every one of the Ayrate towns of the Cherokee nation, before Colonel
Montgomery wiped his bloody sword, and sheathed it at the gates of Fort
Prince George, having personally made several narrow escapes.

These details, however, were to Fort Loudon like the flashes of
lightning of a storm still below the horizon, and of which one is only
made aware by the portentous conditions of the atmosphere. The senior
officers of the post began to look grave. The idea occurred to them with
such force that they scarcely dared to mention it one to the other, lest
it be developed by some obscure electrical transmission in the brain of
Oconostota, that Fort Loudon would offer great strategic value in the
possession of the Indians. The artillery, managed by French officers,
who, doubtless, would appear at their appeal, might well suffice to
check the English advance. The fort itself would afford impregnable
shelter to the braves, their French allies and non-combatants. Always
they had coveted it, always they claimed that it had been built for
them, here in the heart of their nation. Stuart was not surprised by the
event. He only wondered that it had not chanced earlier.

That night the enmity of the Indians was prefigured by a great glare
suddenly springing into the sky. It rose above the forests, and from the
open spaces about Fort Loudon, whence the woods had been cleared away,
one could see it fluctuate and flush more deeply, and expand along the
horizon like some flickering mystery of the aurora borealis. But this
baleful glare admitted of no d