“‘AND WE ARE TO LEAVE ALL THESE CAMP EQUIPMENTS?’” 314 FOREWORD It has always seemed proper to me that he who writes a story should explain to the readers how it came about that he was prompted to tell the tale, for surely there must be a good and sufficient reason for the making of a book, and it also comes to my mind that however dry and uninteresting such an explanation may be, he who reads the story owes it to himself, as well as the author, to learn all he can regarding the facts, however remote, which may pertain to the characters presented, and yet be of such a nature that the author cannot well, without sacrificing his own plans, deviate sufficiently to relate them in the book itself. Therefore it is that I shall be grateful to the reader if he will set down in his own mind certain passages from history which are quoted below, to the end that he may the better understand why two lads born and bred in Charleston, in the State of South Carolina, left their homes at a time when the cause of liberty appeared to be crushed to earth, and why they followed the desperate ventures of Francis Marion during his unequal but wondrously successful struggle against an enemy which was bent on trampling into the mire the patriots who strove to rear a country for themselves in the New World. Shortly after the publication of the story entitled “The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley,” a gentleman residing at Charleston sent to me a packet of closely written pages, stained by time, and with the ink so faded that only with difficulty certain portions could be read. I was richly rewarded, however, for the labor spent in reading that which was set down, for I found that the manuscript was neither more nor less than a series of letters connected, evidently at a later date, by memoranda, and all written by one Rufus Randolph, a distant relative of Francis and Gabriel Marion. To make of the whole a story, such as entertained myself at least, was a trifling task compared with the labor which had been performed by the young writer, and verily it was a labor of love, for while working over the faded pages I came to learn many things concerning that heroic struggle which the “Swamp Fox” made against overwhelming forces bent on devastating the fair colony of South Carolina, and I have done little more in the pages which follow than transcribe his own story. So much for the reason why “The Minute Boys of South Carolina” has been put into print, and now, because Rufus Randolph failed to set down anything concerning those terrible days after Sir Henry Clinton captured the city of Charleston, I ask that the following extracts from the historian Lossing’s “Field Book of the Revolution,” a goodly portion of which I have condensed lest one weary with the reading, be studied with some care.