the hills, were trained in Sevier's method
of Indian warfare--the secret approach through the dark, the swift dash,
and the swifter flight. "Fight strong and run away fast" was the Indian
motto, as their women had often been heard to call it after the red men
as they ran yelling to fall on the whites. The frontiersmen had adapted
the motto to fit their case, as they had also made their own the Indian
tactics of ambuscade and surprise attacks at dawn. To sleep, or ride if
needs must, by night, and to fight by day and make off, was to them a
reasonable soldier's life.

But Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which grew
among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest legends about his
ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a habit he had of pouncing on
his foes in the middle of the night and pulling them out of bed to
give fight or die. It was generally both fight and die, for these
dark adventures of his were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no
neutrals or conscientious objectors; any man who would not carry arms
for the King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeit. A
report of his reads: "The attack being made at night, no quarter could
be given." Hence his wolfish fame. "Werewolf" would have been a fit name
for him for, though he was a wolf at night, in the daylight he was a man
and, as we have seen, a chivalrous one.

In the guerrilla fighting that went on for a brief time between the
overmountain men and various detachments of Ferguson's forces, sometimes
one side, sometimes the other, won the heat. But the field remained
open. Neither side could claim the mastery. In a minor engagement fought
at Musgrove's Mill on the Enoree, Shelby's command came off victor and
was about to pursue the enemy towards Ninety-Six when a messenger from
McDowell galloped madly into camp with word of General Gates's crushing
defeat at Camden. This was a warning for Shelby's guerrillas to flee as
birds to their mountains, or Ferguson would cut them off from the north
and wedge them in between his own force and the victorious Cornwallis.
McDowell's men, also on the run for safety, joined them. For forty-eight
hours without food or rest they rode a race with Ferguson, who kept hard
on their trail until they disappeared into the mystery of the winding
mountain paths they alone knew.

Ferguson reached the gap where they had swerved into the towering hills
only half an hour after their horses' hoofs