About the 27th of the month, a badly scared negro returned to Fort Mims from a hunt for stray cows. He had seen the woods full of Indians, apparently covered with blood. Their red skins being ominous of trouble, Major Beasley, who was in command, sent out scouts to the place where the negro had been. The scouts failed to find Red Eagle and the thousand braves with him, and the negro had a close escape from being flogged for lying. Two days later two other negroes claimed to have seen the Indians, and were whipped. One of them was still triced up when the bell called the people of the fort to dinner. As they went their way, Red Eagle and his savages crept from their hiding-places, and were within a hundred feet of the gates before they were discovered. Then it was found that the gates were blocked by drifted sand and could not be closed. For some hours the battle raged, and before sunset all but twenty or thirty of the people in the fort had been killed and scalped. A few had escaped through the stockade, and some had been spared as slaves. After in vain trying to stop the fury he had fanned to action, Red Eagle rode away from the scene of butchery, and when he returned, on his fine black horse, more than five hundred lay dead and mutilated within the fort. No half-way position was now possible, and until the end of the war he was active and aggressive. The whole western slope of the mountains now awoke to the danger. Calls for men were answered by North and South Carolina and Georgia, and Tennessee, whose volunteers for the defense of New Orleans had recently been recalled from Natchez, also took up the gage of battle. All her people agreed that Andrew Jackson should be the one to lead the volunteers into Alabama, but he was in bed, suffering from a wound in his left shoulder, caused by two slugs from the pistol of Thomas H. Benton, in a free-for-all fight. The two men were afterwards reconciled and became friends, but Jackson could never wear one of his heavy epaulets for any length of time. While Jackson is generally spoken of as a great Indian fighter, he was not at this time entitled to such a reputation. A few years before he had been chosen Major-General of Volunteers, but most of his actual fighting had been with his personal and political foes. He had killed Charles Dickinson in a duel for slurs upon Mrs. Jackson, and had ridden full tilt at Governor Sevier with the intention of running over him. Before Jackson could take the saddle, a rally was held at Winchester, ten miles from Davy Crockett’s. As Davy there enlisted as a volunteer, it will be worth while to hear what he had to say upon the subject.