Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 37.djvu/316
308 Southern Historical Society Papers.
they could and soon were fast asleep. I hitched to a bush close beside the road, kicked the snow off a brush pile and went to sleep on it with my shotgun in my arms. I don't know whether I slept a minute or an hour, but I awoke amid a most infeinal din of firearms, clattering of horses' feet and yells. It was a minute or two before I could realize where I was and what it all meant. I saw a detachment of Federal cavalry, about eighty in number, pass me in a sweeping gallop with drawn pistols, coming from the direction of Huntington. Just past me some Confed- erates had formed and poured a volley into them which sent them flying past me, and I fired both barrels at them at a dis- tance of less than twenty feet with no visible effect. I loaded and capped my gun with fingers so numb I could not feel the caps, mounted and set off in a gallop after the fleeing Yankees. On the road we found one dead Yankee, and met two of our men coming back wounded. One I did not know. He was shot in the head or face and was very bloody. He said: "Boys, we' whipped them, but they got me!" The other man was Ander- son Hagar, of my company, shot through the lungs, and bleed- ing from his mouth copiously. According to my theory of the "death pallor," I decided that neither was mortally wounded. Nor did they die.
