on the rear, and Colonel Boone still urged his men to the fight with all the backwoods eloquence in his power.  But, alas! of what avail was coolness, impetuosity, or desperation now?  The Indians were closing in thicker and thicker.  Officers and privates, horsemen and footmen, were falling before the destructive fire of their rifles, or sinking beneath their bloody tomahawks, amid yells and screeches the most diabolical.  Cries, groans, and curses, resounded on every hand, from the living, the wounded, and dying.  But few now remained in command.  Colonels Todd and Trigg, Majors Harlan and McBride, Captains Bulger and Gordon, with a host of other gallant officers, were now no more.  Already had the Indians enclosed them as in a net, hemmed them in on all sides, and they were falling as grass before the scythe of the mower.  Retreat was almost cut off—­in a few minutes it would be entirely.  They could hope for nothing against such odds, but a certain and bloody death.  There was a possibility of escape.  A few minutes and it would be too late.  They hesitated—­they wavered—­they turned and fled; and now it was that a horrible sight presented itself.

The space between the head of the ravines and the ford of the river a distance of more than a mile, suddenly became the scene of a hard and bloody race.  As the whites fled, the Indians sprung after them, with whoops and yells that more resembled those of infuriated demons than human beings; and whenever an unfortunate Kentuckian was overtaken, he instantly fell a victim to the tomahawk and scalping knife.  Those who were mounted generally escaped; but the foot suffered dreadfully; and the whole distance presented an appalling sight of bloody, mangled corses, strewing the ground in every direction.  Girty, the renegade, was now at the height of his hellish enjoyment.  With oaths and curses, and horrid laughter, his hands and weapons reeking with blood of the slain, he rushed on after new victims, braining and scalping all that came within his reach.

At the river the carnage was in no wise abated.  Horsemen and footmen, victors and vanquished, rushed down the slope, pell-mell, and plunged into the stream—­some striving for life and liberty, some for death and vengeance—­and the dark rolling waters went sweeping on, colored with the blood of the slaughtered.

An act of heroic gallantry and presence of mind here occurred, which has often been mentioned in history, tending to check somewhat the blood-thirsty savages, and give many of the fugitives time to escape.  Some twelve or fifteen horsemen had already passed the ford in safety, and were in the act of spurring forward, regardless of the fate of their unfortunate companions on foot, when one of their number, a man by the name of Netherland, who had previously been accused of cowardice, suddenly shouted, as if giving the word of command: 

“Halt!  Fire on the Indians, and protect the men in the river!”