Ronald MacDonnell gave full credit to the strategy of Choolah. For it would now seem--it needs must--that their little party no longer feared the enemies in the quiet woods! They must have presumed the Cherokees all gone! The Chickasaws were building a fire since the moon was sinking. Probably they felt they could not lie down to sleep without its protection and wolves very near in the woods. Listen to that shrill, blood-curdling cry! They were surely disposing themselves to rest! Already as the blaze began to leap up and show in the water of the river below like a great red jewel, with the deep crystalline lusters of a many-faceted ruby, figures might be seen by the flare of the mounting flames, recumbent on the ground, wrapped in blankets; here and there was tartan, an end of the plaid thrown over the face as the Highlanders always slept; here and there a hunting-shirt and leggings were plainly visible--all lying like the spokes of a wheel around the central point of the fire. “It is only the Muscogees who sleep in line,” Choolah explained to MacDonnell, who had criticised the disposition. The crafty Cherokees, stealthily approaching ever nearer and nearer, had not seen in the first feeble glimmers of the flames the figures of the seven men crawling gingerly back to the grotto in the covert of the laurel, leaving around the fire merely billets of wood arrayed in the blankets and stolen gear which the Owl had brought off from the battle-field. “But I am always in the wrong,” plained Oop-pa, sarcastically. “What would you and the big tartan-man have to dress those warriors in if I had not stayed for my goods?” MacDonnell had urged his scruples. This was hardly according to the rules of war. “But if the Cherokees fire on sleeping men,” he argued-- “_Angona_,” the wily Chickasaw assured him, suavely, “they are disarmed. We can rush out and overpower them before they can load.” “They ought to be able to fire three times to the minute,” thought MacDonnell, who was a good drill. But the Cherokees were not held to the rigorous manual of arms, and did not attain to that degree of dexterity considered excellent efficiency in that day although a breech-loading musket invented by Colonel Patrick Ferguson, who met his death at King’s Mountain, was capable of being fired seven times a minute, and was used not many years after these events, with destructive effect, by his own command at the battle of the Brandywine, in 1777.