n a moment and run to camp.

"The Back Water men have crossed the mountains: McDowell, Hampton,
Shelby, and Cleveland are at their head, so that you know what you have
to depend upon. If you choose to be degraded forever and ever by a set
of mongrels, say so at once, and let your women turn their backs upon
you, and look out for real men to protect them.

"Pat. Ferguson, Major 71st Regiment." *

* Draper, "King's Mountain and its Heroes," p. 204.

Ferguson's force has been estimated at about eleven hundred men, but
it is likely that this estimate does not take the absentees into
consideration. In the diary of Lieutenant Allaire, one of his officers,
the number is given as only eight hundred. Because of the state of his
army, chroniclers have found Ferguson's movements, after leaving Gilbert
Town, difficult to explain. It has been pointed out that he could easily
have escaped, for he had plenty of time, and Charlotte, Cornwallis's
headquarters, was only sixty miles distant. We have seen something of
Ferguson's quality, however, and we may simply take it that he did not
want to escape. He had been planning to cross the high hills--to him,
the Highlander, no barrier but a challenge--to fight these men. Now that
they had taken the initiative he would not show them his back. He craved
the battle. So he sent out runners to the main army and rode on along
the eastern base of the mountains, seeking a favorable site to go into
camp and wait for Cornwallis's aid. On the 6th of October he reached the
southern end of the King's Mountain ridge, in South Carolina, about half
a mile south of the northern boundary. Here a rocky, semi-isolated spur
juts out from the ridge, its summit--a table-land about six hundred
yards long and one hundred and twenty wide at its northern end--rising
not more than sixty feet above the surrounding country. On the summit
Ferguson pitched his camp.

The hill was a natural fortress, its sides forested, its bald top
protected by rocks and bowlders. All the approaches led through dense
forest. An enemy force, passing through the immediate, wooded territory,
might easily fail to discover a small army nesting sixty feet above the
shrouding leafage. Word was evidently brought to Ferguson here, telling
him the now augmented number of his foe, for he dispatched another
emissary to Cornwallis with a letter stating the number of his own
troops and urging full and immediate assistance.

Meanwhile the