For the rest of 1780, a savage seesaw war raged along the Carolina frontier. Between engagements both sides exacted retaliation on prisoners and noncombatants. Elijah Clarke besieged Augusta with a mixed band of South Carolinians and Georgians. Forced to retreat by British reinforcements, he left about two dozen badly wounded men behind. The loyalist commander of Augusta, Thomas Browne, wounded in the siege, hanged 13 of them in the stairwell of his house, where he could watch them die from his bed. A rebel named Reed was visiting a neighbor’s house when the landlady saw two loyalists approaching. She advised Reed to flee. Reed replied that they were old friends; he had known them all his life. He went outside to shake hands. The loyalists shot him dead. Reed’s aged mother rode to a rebel camp in North Carolina and displayed her son’s bloody pocketbook. The commander of the camp asked for volunteers. Twenty-five men mounted their horses, found the murderers, and executed them. In this sanguinary warfare, the rebels knew the side roads and forest tracks. They were expert, like Marion’s men, at retreating into swamps. But the British also had some advantages. The rebels could do little to prevent retaliation against their homes and property. If a man went into hiding when the British or loyalists summoned him to fight in their militia, all his corn and livestock were liable to seizure, and his house might even be burned, leaving his wife and children destitute. This bitter and discouraging truth became more and more apparent as the year 1780 waned. Without a Continental army to back them up, Sumter and the other partisan leaders found it difficult to persuade men to fight. Not even the greatest militia victory of the war, the destruction of a loyalist army of over a thousand men at Kings Mountain in October 1780, significantly altered the situation. Although loyalist support declined, the British army was untouched by this triumph. Moreover, many of the militiamen in the rebel army had come from remote valleys deep in the Appalachians, and they went home immediately, as militiamen were inclined to do. The men of western South Carolina were left with the British regulars still dominating four-fifths of the State, still ready to exact harsh retaliation against those who persisted in the rebellion. [Illustration: Elijah Clarke, a colonel of Georgia militia, fought at a number of important actions in the civil war along the Southern frontier in 1780-81.]