The overmountain men saw two white handkerchiefs, axed to bayonets, raised above the rocks; and then they saw Ferguson dash by and slash them down with his sword. Two horses were shot under Ferguson in the latter part of the action; but he mounted a third and rode again into the thick of the fray. Suddenly the cry spread among the attacking troops that the British officer, Tarleton, had come to Ferguson's rescue; and the mountaineers began to give way. But it was only the galloping horses of their own comrades; Tarleton had not come. Nolichucky Jack spurred out in front of his men and rode along the line. Fired by his courage they sounded the war whoop again and renewed the attack with fury.

"These are the same yelling devils that were at Musgrove's Mill," said Captain De Peyster to Ferguson.

Now Shelby and Sevier, leading his Wataugans, had reached the summit. The firing circle pressed in. The buckskin-shirted warriors leaped the rocky barriers, swinging their tomahawks and long knives. Again the white handkerchiefs fluttered. Ferguson saw that the morale of his troops was shattered.

"Surrender," De Peyster, his second in command, begged of him.

"Surrender to those damned banditti? Never!"

Ferguson turned his horse's head downhill and charged into the Wataugans, hacking right and left with his sword till it was broken at the hilt. A dozen rifles were leveled at him. An iron muzzle pushed at his breast, but the powder flashed in the pan.

He swerved and struck at the rifleman with his broken hilt. But the other guns aimed at him spoke; and Ferguson's body jerked from the saddle pierced by eight bullets. Men seized the bridle of the frenzied horse, plunging on with his dead master dragging from the stirrup.

The battle had lasted less than an hour. After Ferguson fell, De Peyster advanced with a white flag and surrendered his sword to Campbell. Other white flags waved along the hilltop. But the killing did not yet cease. It is said that many of the mountaineers did not know the significance of the white flag.

Sevier's sixteen-year-old son, having heard that his father had fallen, kept on furiously loading and firing until presently he saw Sevier ride in among the troops and command them to stop shooting men who had surrendered and thrown down their arms.

The victors made a bonfire of the enemy's baggage wagons and supplies. Then they killed some of his beeves and cooked them; they had had neither food nor sleep for eighteen hours. They dug shallow trenches for the dead and scattered the loose earth over them. Ferguson's body, stripped of its uniform and boots and wrapped in a beef hide, was thrown into one of these ditches by the men detailed to the burial work, while the officers divided his personal effects among themselves.

The triumphant army turned homeward as the dusk descended. The uninjured prisoners and the wounded who were able to walk were marched off carrying their empty firearms. The badly wounded were left lying where they had fallen.

At Bickerstaff's Old Fields in Rutherford County the frontiersmen halted; and here they selected thirty of their prisoners to be hanged. They swung them aloft, by torchlight, three at a time, until nine had gone to their last account. Then Sevier interposed; and, with Shelby's added authority, saved the other twenty-one. Among those who thus weighted the gallows tree were some of the Tory brigands from Watauga; but not all the victims were of this character. Some of the troops would have wreaked vengeance on the two Tories from Sevier's command who had betrayed their army plans to Ferguson; but Sevier claimed them as under his jurisdiction and refused consent. Nolichucky Jack dealt humanely by his foes. To the coarse and brutish Cleveland, now astride of Ferguson's horse and wearing his sash, and to the three hundred who followed him, may no doubt be laid the worst excesses of the battle's afterpiece.