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In that drear dawn on the plains of Taliquo the mother and child were killed in the same volley of musketry, and afterward, as he ordered from time to time the ranks to close up, he saw Sandy, who had been fighting in line with the troops, lying on the ground, quite dead. "You may be sure of this," Stuart added; "I took especial note of their fate, having from the first cared much for them all."
Be sure they will have heard of the massacre of the soldiers under the Cherokees' pledge of safe-conduct on the plains of Taliquo." "To-e-u-hah!" Atta-Kulla-Kulla broke out furiously. "To-e-u-hah! It is most true!" His countenance had changed to extreme anger.
Forced to keep pace with his captor on horseback Stuart traveled the distance from Taliquo Town to Old Fort Loudon in double-quick time, bareheaded, pinioned, in the blazing meridian heat of a sultry August day. He hoped he would die of exhaustion.
He was trying to tell Demeré that he was afraid something would happen to that second gun in the barbette battery on the northeast bastion, for the metal always rang with a queer vibration, and he had had a dream that Oconostota had overcharged and fired it, and it had exploded; and as Demeré was laughing at this folly Stuart realized suddenly the fact that the day was coming in to him again there in his friend's place, as it would come no more to Demeré, though dawning even now at Taliquo Plains where he lay.
Stuart wondered that he was not torn to pieces by the infuriated savages, protesting their indignation because of his violation of the treaty, while his garrison, under the Cherokees' solemn agreement of safe-conduct, lay in all their massacred horrors unburied on the plains of Taliquo.
Thus they were enabled, despite the retarding presence of the women and children, and the enfeebling effects of the long siege, to make the progress of between fifteen and twenty miles that day. They encamped on a little plain near the Indian town of Taliquo.
He had left them spare arms, great guns, ball, powder, much powder, and if he had seen fit to reserve some store he could say, with a clear conscience, that it was done only in the interests of peace and humanity, and because of doubts of their good faith, how well grounded the blood shed this day upon the plains of Taliquo might testify!
At night they encamped on a plain about two miles from Taliquo, an Indian town, when all their attendants, upon one pretence or another, left them; which the officers considered as no good sign, and therefore placed a strict guard round their camp.
Demeré was with him still, not in the guise of that white, stark face, upturned now to the stars on the plains of Taliquo, but in his serene, staid presence as he lived; together they were at Fort Loudon, consulting, planning, as in its happier days; now it was the capacity of the spring which they wished to enlarge, and this they had done with blasting-powder; now it was the device to add to the comfort of the garrison by framing the little porches that stood before the doors of the barracks; now it was the erection of an out-work on the side exposed to assault by the river, and they were marking off the ravelin, Corporal O'Flynn and a squad, with the tapes, and directing the fashioning of the gabions, the Indians peacefully sitting by the while like some big, unintelligent, woodland animals, while the great, basket-like frames were woven of white oak splints and then filled with the solid earth.
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