The moon was at its full, and for a while Davy and his men tried their skill with the bows and arrows of the Indian boys. While they were doing this, a scared negro who had joined them during the day warned them that the Red Sticks were likely to surprise them, but they made light of his fears. They tied their horses ready to mount at a second’s notice, and lay with their guns by their sides. They had scarcely dozed when a cry like that of an angry panther rang through the night. The negro shouted that the Red Sticks were coming, and every one stood at bay. Then an Indian appeared in the bright moonlight, with the news that the war party had been crossing the Coosa all day at the Ten Islands, on their way to fight Jackson’s army, then gathering at Fayetteville, in Tennessee. In a few minutes every Indian in the camp had fled, while Davy and his men “put out in a long lope” on the back trail, to give notice to the force they had left at the landing, sixty-five miles away. At the Cherokee town they found great fires blazing, but no Indians. Radcliff and his family had disappeared. At daylight they came to Brown’s house, where they ate hurriedly and then pushed on. Having crossed the Tennessee, they reached the volunteers’ camp, and reported to Colonel Coffee. To Davy’s disgust, the Colonel seemed to place little confidence in the story he had to tell, so far as the imminence of danger was involved. The little band of scouts had ridden their tired horses sixty-five miles in eleven hours by moonlight, and had forded the river, and they were disgusted by their reception. Davy said that he was burning inside like a tar-kiln, and wondered that the smoke was not pouring out of him as he withdrew. The next day the Major came into camp with a similar report, which set Colonel Coffee into what Davy called “a fidget.” He at once threw up breastworks twelve hundred feet long, and dispatched a messenger to hurry up Jackson’s army. It always rankled in Davy’s memory that the word of a common soldier and scout could be so lightly held, while the Major’s report was never doubted for a moment. Davy had much to learn in a world where so many unjustly receive pay and praise for work that is done by obscure toilers. The forty thousand French who lay dead or dying that week before the walls of Leipzig are nameless now, but Napoleon is not forgotten. Davy’s sense of the unfairness of Fame may be the reason for his later enmity towards Andrew Jackson. When, years afterward, he told of the forced march that brought Old Hickory and his troops to the support of Coffee, he called the General “Old Hickory Face.”