When this reply was communicated to Marion, he instructed Horry to renew the demand. His purpose seems to have been, discovering the temper of the offender, to gain the necessary time. His officers, meanwhile, were gathering around him. He was making his preparations for a struggle which might be bloody—which might, indeed, involve, not only the safety of the brigade, but his own future usefulness. Horry, with proper spirit, entreated not to be sent again to the refractory officer, giving as the reason for his reluctance, that, in consequence of the previous rudeness of the other, he was not in the mood to tolerate a repetition of the indignity, and might, if irritated, be provoked to violence. Marion then dispatched his orderly to the guilty Major, with a civil request that he might see him at head-quarters. The Major appeared, accompanied by the Captain who had joined him in the outrage, and under whose influence he appeared to act. Marion renewed his demand, in person, for the sword of Crofts. The Major again refused to deliver it, asserting that Crofts was a Tory, even then with the enemy in Georgetown. "Will you deliver me the sword, Major?" repeated the General. "I will not." "At these words," says Horry, in his memoirs, I could forbear no longer, and said with great warmth, and a great oath: "Did I, sir, command this brigade, as you do, I would hang them both in half an hour!" Marion sternly replied: "This is none of your business, sir; they are before me! Sergeant of the guard, bring me a file of men with loaded arms and fixed bayonets." "I was silent," added Horry. "All our field-officers in camp were present, and they had put their hands to their swords in readiness to draw. My own sword was already drawn." In the regular service, with officers bred up to the severe sense of authority considered necessary to proper discipline, the offender would probably have been hewn down in the moment of disobedience. The effect of such a measure, in this instance, might have been most unhappy. The _esprit du corps_ might have prompted the Major's immediate followers to have resisted, and, though annihilated, as Horry says they would have been, yet several valuable lives would have been lost, which their country could ill spare. The mutiny would have been put down, but at what a price! The patience and prudence of Marion's character taught him forbearance. His mildness, by putting the offender entirely in the wrong, so justified his severity, as to disarm the followers of the criminals, who were about sixty in number.