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.
