RETURN TO KENTUCKY.
When I prepared to leave Canada, I knew a Confederate soldier was watched by detectives from across the Detroit River. I got on the train from the East as it slowed up and came into Windsor. I do not recall whether it was a Grand Trunk train or the Canadian Pacific, but at any rate I got off the train before we reached the depot, and some detective evidently saw me. When I got out among the other passengers and undertook to get on the ferry boat, he was following me. Thinks I, this won’t do, and I got off and mixed up with the other passengers again. After eluding him, I went down in the engine room of the ferry boat, and stayed there until I crossed over to Detroit, and he was thus unable to find me.
Another thing: I thought I had become pretty well known, and to disguise myself, I had my hair dyed before leaving Windsor. You can imagine what a sight I was. My moustache and chin whiskers were dyed a deep black with nitrate of silver or some sort of preparation. I paid five dollars for it, I know. In that way, I came on to Kentucky without being detected. I came to Covington, and at a restaurant there I sat right opposite a man that was with me and knew me well in Windsor. He had gone up there, I think, to evade the draft. He did not recognize me at all. I did not say anything to him, nor he to me. I was pretty well disguised.
It was in April, 1864, when I returned to Kentucky from Canada. While watching a chance to go back to the Confederacy, I worked on a farm three weeks near Florence, in Boone County, a town afterward celebrated, in John Uri Lloyd’s novel, as “Stringtown-on-the-Pike.” While there I visited, on Sundays, my aunt and family, who lived nearby.