Five of them rushed in to secure his scalp, and each fell dead, and their bodies concealed the boy from view. Up to one o'clock the fighting raged with undiminished fury, with never any cessation of their taunts and epithets and Cornstalk's stentorian encouragement.
Now it is never in Indian nature to prolong a conflict once it is obvious they must suffer heavy losses. They consider it the better wisdom to run away and await an opportunity when the advantage will be with them. Cornstalk had been confident that his early morning attack would drive us into the rivers, thus affording his forces on the opposite banks much sport in picking us off.
But so fiercely contested had been the battle that none of our dead had been scalped except Hughey and two or three men who fell at the first fire. By all that we had learned of Indian nature they should now, after six hours of continuous fighting, be eager to withdraw. They had fought the most bitterly contested battle ever participated in by their race.
Nor had they, as in Braddock's defeat, been aided by white men. There were, to be true, several white men among them, such as Tavenor Ross, John Ward and George Collet; but these counted no more than ordinary warriors and Collet was killed before the fighting was half over. According to all precedents the battle should have ended in an Indian rout by the time the sun crossed the meridian. Instead the savages stiffened their resistance and held their line.
Our men cheered from parched throats when word was passed that Collet's body had been found and identified. Poor devil! Perhaps it opened the long trace to him, where everything would be made right. He was captured when a child and had responded to the only environment he had ever known.
The case of such as Collet--yes, and of John Ward and Ross--is entirely different from that of Timothy Dorman, and others of his kind, who was captured when a grown man and who turned renegade to revenge himself for wrongs, real or fancied, on his old neighbors.
It was not until after seven hours of fighting that we detected any falling off in the enemy's resistance. Even then the savages had the advantage of an excellent position, and to press them was extremely hazardous business. We continued to crowd them, however, until they were lined up on a long ridge which extended from the small marsh where Cousin and I first saw Robertson and Sevier, for half a mile to the east, where it was cut by the narrow bed of Crooked Creek.