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insistent. They knew that we would have need of the cows’ milk sooner rather than later, for the younger children could not eat the rough rations that the rest of us were making do with. The fact that two of my own children swelled that number made me mindful of the urgency of the situation.
    Siding with the young mothers were a few tenderhearted girls of sixteen or thereabouts, those who likely tended those very cows and knew each one by name, and would not be swayed by arguments of prudence. They clamored to be let out to tend to their animals.
    Perhaps the young never really believe that they can die.
    I believed it, both for them and for myself, for I was a man of thirty by then, married these thirteen years and father of eight, and in a sense a father to all those within the fort, for I was one of those in command of Fort Watauga. Two hundred lives depended on our ability to lead.
    The young girls brought their argument to me. Colonel Carter and James Robertson were busy with the men, planning for the rationing of the provisions and ammunition, in case the siege should drag on for even more weeks. They sent me to reason with the women. I tried to persuade Robertson to talk to them in my stead, but he laughed and said, “A handsome fellow like you holds much more sway with the ladies, Sevier. Put your charm to good use.” Robertson’s sister Keziah was married to my own younger brother Robert, which made us kinsmen of a sort, or at least uncles to the same little boy, but he insisted that he had no patience for the wailing of women over a bunch of cattle, and he all but ordered me to do what I could to pacify them.
    Thus I was doubly besieged—Indians without, and weeping maidens within. Four flowers of the frontier encircled me, their lips set with determination and their moist eyes flashing with indignation at the suffering of the animals.
    â€œWe don’t even know that Old Abram and his men are still out there!” declared the doughty blonde whose hair fluffed around her ruddy face like a dandelion.
    I looked into her gooseberry eyes and sighed. The poor girl was no beauty. I wondered if she thought that a show of bravery would add luster to her charms. Well, I did not think so. Courage from a stout woman is the sign of the shrew, the termagant, endearing her to no one. The willowy Sherrill girl was the oldest of the four women, past twenty-one and still unwed, though I would warrant it was not for lack of beauty. She had the look of a storybook heroine—too small and too pretty even to have to smile. And there they were, the two of them, and two more unmarried girls besides, asking my leave to die—a futile gesture for the stout girl and a waste of the beauty of Catherine Sherrill. Perhaps the others were followers, ready to fall in with any enterprise proposed by their companions. Or perhaps boredom at the tedium of our confinement had made them foolhardy. The boys their age—like my own firstborn Joseph—had been allowed to serve alongside their elders as guards and musket men, and so they felt like men, but the girls had done nothing except help with the chores and tend to the babies, and they were restless. In some measure, we all were. It is difficult to live day after day with the threat of an impending storm that never breaks.
    â€œWe want to go,” the stout one said again. She gave me a mulish look that told me my arguments would fall on deaf ears.
    The others were nodding in stony agreement. “We have heard no shots, seen no movement all day,” said one.
    â€œSurely it is safe, Mr. Sevier.”
    â€œI cannot open the gates,” I said again, for to contest the point with reasoned arguments would be futile. They had an answer for everything. These fair flowers had thorns aplenty between them.
    â€œWell,” said dark-eyed Catherine Sherrill with a trace of a smile. “If you will not let us bring the cows in, you will have to let us out.