The frontiersmen had adapted the motto to fit
their case, as they had also made their own the Indian tactics of
ambuscade and surprise attacks at dawn. To sleep, or ride if
needs must, by night, and to fight by day and make off, was to
them a reasonable soldier's life.
But Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which
grew among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest
legends about his ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a
habit he had of pouncing on his foes in the middle of the night
and pulling them out of bed to give fight or die. It was
generally both fight and die, for these dark adventures of his
were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no neutrals or
conscientious objectors; any man who would not carry arms for the
King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeit. A report
of his reads: "The attack being made at night, no quarter could
be given." Hence his wolfish fame. "Werewolf " would have been a
fit name for him for, though he was a wolf at night, in the
daylight he was a man and, as we have seen, a chivalrous one.
In the guerrilla fighting that went on for a brief time between
the overmountain men and various detachments of Ferguson's
forces, sometimes one side, sometimes the other, won the heat.
But the field remained open.
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