We dispatched the whiskey.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 345.

With the picket guard was young Robert Henry, our King’s Mountain veteran, who had recovered from being bayoneted through his hand and thigh. He was ten days shy of his sixteenth birthday. Born in 1765 in Tryon County, North Carolina, “in a rail pen,” according to his son, he lived in the vicinity of Tuckasegee Ford, ten miles below Cowan’s Ford. His father was an Ulster-born Protestant. After the war Robert Henry became a surveyor and was on the team that surveyed the North Carolina-Tennessee line in the late 1790s. That occupation led him to the law, and a man who knew him called him “a great land lawyer.”19 His narrative of his new adventure in war reveals a mixture of boyish bravado, courage, and terror.
Henry was attending school near his home, taught by a lame schoolmaster named Robert Beatty, when word came to the classroom that Cornwallis was camped about seven miles away, and “that Tarleton was ranging through the country catching Whig boys to make musicians of them in the British army.” Robert Beatty immediately dismissed school and told the boys to spread the news. That night Robert Henry and five of his schoolmates hid outdoors to escape Tarleton’s dragnet, for the tale, true or not, was fervently believed. The next day they went upriver to John Nighten, “who treated us well by giving us potatoes to roast and some whisky to drink. We became noisy and mischievous. Nighten said we should not have any more whisky.” Emboldened by the whiskey, Robert Henry said he would go to Cowan’s Ford if he had a gun and ammunition, whereupon his brother Joseph, who had joined them, gave him his gun. Robert’s schoolmate Charles Rutledge said he would go too if he had a gun, and another schoolmate, Moses Starrett, handed Charles his gun. “When about to start I gave Nighten a hundred dollar Continental bill for a half a pint of whiskey. My brother gave another bill of the same size for half a bushel of potatoes. We dispatched the whiskey.”

Being thus fortified, Robert and his friend Charles Rutledge made their way to Cowan’s Ford, which was about a mile and a half off. The picket guard at the exit of the wagon ford, numbering thirty men, “made us welcome. The officer of the guard told us . . . that each one of the guard had picked their stands . . . so . . . they would not be crowded, or be in each other’s way—and said we must choose our stands.” Robert chose the lowest, where the wagon ford left the river. He recalled quite matter-of-factly that he would man his post as long as “I could stand it, until the British would come to a place where the water was riffling over a rock; then it would be time to run away.” Besides his friend Charles Rutledge, the only members of the guard he knew were Joel Jetton and his lame schoolmaster, Robert Beatty. “Shortly after dark,” said Robert Henry, “a man across the river hooted like an owl and was answered; a man went to a canoe some distance off, and brought word from him that all was silent in the British camp. The guard all lay down with their guns in their arms, and all were sound asleep at day-break except Joel Jetton, who discovered the noise of horses in deep water.”