Spain, powerful, rapacious and cunning, stalked its prey beyond the mountains. She dreamed of a new world empire, with the capital at New Orleans, and her ambitions formed a sombre back-curtain before which Creek and Cherokee warriors—some twenty thousand fighting men—manœuvred to stop the white settlers straggling over the Alleghanies. These logical enemies of the newcomers were augmented by white renegades, a general miscellany of outlaws, who took toll in blood and treasure with a ferocity that had nothing to learn from the red men. So the over-mountain men had at their backs the indifference of the seaboard. Confronting them were ambuscades and torture. But there was one factor which all the onslaughts of insidious intrigue and bloody violence could not eliminate from the equation—the spirit of the people. The soul of the freeman could not be bought with foreign gold or consumed at the stake. Men died back on the seaboard, and their deaths had only a biological significance, but men were dying over the mountains whose deaths will exert an influence for human betterment so long as these United States of America shall exist. The fires of suffering, kindled on the western slopes of the Alleghanies to sweep after the sun, contained the alchemy of the spiritual and were to burn out the dross. From their clean ashes a national spirit was to spring up, the harbinger of a mighty people following a flag of many stars, another incontestable proof that materiality can never satisfy the soul of man. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. FROM OVER THE MOUNTAINS 3 II. THE DEAD ARE DANGEROUS 27 III. THE PRICE OF A JUG OF WHISKY 43 IV. FOR WATAUGA AND AMERICA 68 V. THE ANCIENT LAW 86 VI. ON THE WHITE PATH 106 VII. IN THE MAW OF THE FOREST 125 VIII. THE EMPEROR OF THE CREEKS 142 IX. POLCHER’S LITTLE RUSE 174 X. THROUGH THE NECK OF THE BOTTLE 197 XI. SEVIER OFFERS THE RED AX 210 XII. TONPIT CHANGES HIS PLANS 226 XIII. THE SENTENCE OF THE WILDERNESS 237 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RED BELTS CHAPTER I FROM OVER THE MOUNTAINS With its sixty cabins and new log court-house Jonesboro was the metropolis of the Watauga country. The settlers on the Holston and Nolichucky as a rule lived on isolated farms, often entirely surrounded by the mighty forest. Outside the tiny communities along these three rivers the Western country was held by red men, wild beasts and beastly white renegades. There were no printing-presses, and it required thirty days for a backwoods horseman, familiar with the difficult mountain trails, to make the State capital five hundred miles away.