And Ronald MacDonnell answered that he had granted to his prisoner exactly what he had intended to demand of his captor had the situation been reversed--to adjure him by their fellow feeling as soldiers, by the customs of civilized warfare, by the bond of a common religion, to save him from torture by savages. “Can a gentleman give less than he would ask?” he demanded. And when Colonel Grant would urge that he should have trusted to his authority to protect the prisoner, Ronald would meet the argument with the counter-argument that the Indians respected no authority, and in cases of fire it would not do to take chances. “Why did you not at least exact a parole?” “Lord, sir, we couldn’t talk at all!” said Ronald, conclusively. “In common humanity, I was obliged to release him or shoot him, and I could not shoot an unarmed prisoner to save my life--not if I were to be shot for it myself.” Lieutenant-Colonel Grant’s heart was well known to be soft in spots. He has put it upon record in the previous campaign against the Cherokees that he could not help pitying them a little in the destruction of their homes,--it is said, however, that after this later expedition his name was incorporated in the Cherokee language as a synonym of devastation and a cry of warning. He was overcome by the considerations urged upon him by the Lieutenant until once more the possibility loomed upon the horizon that it was Louis Latinac who had escaped him, when he would feel that nothing but Ronald MacDonnell’s best heart’s blood could atone for the release. To set this much vexed question at rest the young officer was repeatedly required to describe the personal appearance of the stranger, and thus it was that poor Ronald’s verbal limitations were brought so conspicuously forward. “A fine man,” he would say one day, and in giving the details of that sensitive emotional countenance which had so engaged his interest that momentous night--its force, its suggestiveness, its bright, alert young eyes, would intimate that he had indeed held the motive power of the Cherokee war in his hand, and had heedlessly loosed it as a child might release a butterfly. The next day “a braw callant” was about the sum of his conclusions, and Colonel Grant would be certain that the incident represented no greater matter than the escape of a brisk subaltern, like Ronald himself. In the course of Colonel Grant’s anxious vacillations of opinion, the young Highlander was given to understand that he would be instantly placed under arrest, but for the fact that every officer of experience was urgently needed. And indeed Colonel Grant presently had his hands quite full, fighting a furious battle only the ensuing day with the entire Cherokee nation.