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.
Victors and vanquished drove on in the dark, close to the great
flank of hills. From where King's Mountain, strewn with dead and
dying, reared its black shape like some rudely hewn tomb of a
primordial age when titans strove together, perhaps to the ears
of the marching men came faintly through the night's stillness
the howl of a wolf and the answering chorus of the pack.
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