As quickly as General Gates’s reputation had been lost, reputations were won. Marion, issuing from the swamps of the Pee Dee carried alarm to the gates of Charles Town. Sumter made his name a terror through all the country between the Broad and the Catawba Rivers. Colonel Campbell on the Watauga, Davy on the North Carolina border flung the fiery torch far and wide. It was all that Tarleton and his British Legion, the best force for this light work that we possessed, and Ferguson and his Provincials, now a shattered body—it was all that these could do to make head against the rebels or maintain the spirits of our party. There were humane men, thank God, in both camps. But there were also men whom the memory of old wrongs wrought to madness. Cruel things were done. Quarter was refused, men were hung after capture, houses were burnt, women were made homeless. Therefore, no bitterness of feeling, no animosity, on one side or the other, was much of a surprise to me; rather I was prepared for it. But as the soldier by profession is the last, I hope, to resort to these practices, so is he the most sorely hurt by them. And we, as I have said, had another grievance. Not only were we at a loss in this irregular fighting, but we had held our heads too high in the last war. We had looked down—the worst of us—on the Colonial officers. And now this was remembered against us. We were at once blamed and derided; our drill, our discipline, our service were turned to ridicule. Nor was this shrew of a girl the first who had scoffed at our courage and made us the subject of her scorn. Yet, though I understood her feelings, I was hurt. When a man is laid aside by illness or by an injury, something of the woman awakes in him, and he is wounded by trifles which would not touch him at another time. With Wilmer gone, with none but black faces about me, with no certainty of safety, I had only this girl to whom I could open my views or impart my wishes. And enemy as she was, she was a woman—in that lay much of my grievance. She was a woman, and the notion of the woman as his companion and comforter in sickness and pain is so deeply inbred in a man, that when she stands away from him at that time, it seems to him a thing monstrous and unnatural.