Tarleton had not allowed the August heat of South Carolina to slow his pace. He was equally contemptuous of the January rains. His scouts reported that Morgan’s army was at Grindal Shoals on the Pacolet River. To reach the patriots he had to cross two smaller but equally swollen streams, the Enoree and the Tyger. Swimming his horses, floating his infantry across on improvised rafts, he surmounted these obstacles and headed northeast, deep into the South Carolina back country. He did not realize that his column, which now numbered over a thousand men, was becoming more and more isolated. He assumed that Cornwallis was keeping pace with him on the east side of the Broad River, cowing the rebel militia there into staying home. [Illustration: Gen. Alexander Leslie, veteran commander in America. His service spanned actions from Salem Bridge in February 1775 to the British evacuation of Charleston in December 1782.] Tarleton also did not realize that this time, no matter how swiftly he advanced, he was not going to take the patriots by surprise. He was being watched by a man who was fighting with a hangman’s noose around his neck. 3 _Skyagunsta_, the Wizard Owl, was what the Cherokees called 41-year-old Andrew Pickens. They both feared and honored him as a battle leader who had defeated them repeatedly on their home grounds. Born in Pennsylvania, Pickens had come to South Carolina as a boy. In 1765 he had married the beautiful Rebecca Calhoun and settled on Long Canes Creek in the Ninety Six district. Pickens was no speechmaker, but everyone recognized this slender man, who was just under 6 feet tall, as a leader. When he spoke, people listened. One acquaintance declared that he was so deliberate, he seemed at times to take each word out of his mouth and examine it before he said it. Pickens had been one of the leaders who repelled the British-inspired assaults on the back country by the Cherokee Indians in 1776 and carried the war into the red men’s country, forcing them to plead for peace. By 1779 he was a colonel commanding one of the most dependable militia regiments in the State. When the loyalists, encouraged by the British conquest of Georgia in 1778-79, began to gather and plot to punish their rebel neighbors, Pickens led 400 men to assault them at Kettle Creek on the Savannah River. In a fierce, hour-long fight, he whipped them although they outnumbered him almost two to one.