"Ben Hanby is my husband. He is lying out. I wondered, if you were the Guard, what you could be doing without guns. From a hill near our house, the children saw you coming more than an hour ago; and my husband, taking you for the soldiers, went with his rifle to join his companions in the woods. Word has gone to every Union house in the neighborhood that the troops are out hunting deserters."
We embarked in the log canoe, and shipped a good deal of water before reaching the opposite shore. We had two sea-captains on board, and concluded that, with one sailor more, we should certainly have been hopelessly wrecked.
A winding forest-path led to the lonely house we sought, where we found no one at home, except three children of our fair informant and their grandmother. For more than two hours we could not allay the woman's suspicions that we were Guards. They had recently been adopting Yankee disguises, deceiving Union people, and beguiling them of damaging information.
As indignantly as General Damas inquires whether he looks like a married man, we asked the cautious woman if we resembled Rebels. At last, convinced that we were veritable Yankees, she gave us breakfast, and sent one of the children with us to a sunny hillside among the pines, where we slept off the weariness and soreness caused by the night's march of sixteen miles.
Among Union Bushwhackers.
At evening a number of friends visited us. As they were not merely Rebel deserters, but Union bushwhackers also, we scanned them with curiosity; for we had been wont to regard bushwhackers, of either side, with vague, undefined horror.
These men were walking arsenals. Each had a trusty rifle, one or two navy revolvers, a great bowie knife, haversack, and canteen. Their manners were quiet, their faces honest, and one had a voice of rare sweetness. As he stood tossing his baby in the air, with his little daughter clinging to his skirt, he looked
——"the mildest-mannered man,
That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat."
He and his neighbors had adopted this mode of life, because determined not to fight against the old flag. They would not attempt the uncertain journey to our lines, leaving their families in the country of the enemy. Ordinarily very quiet and rational, whenever the war was spoken of, their eyes emitted that peculiar glare which I had observed, years before, in Kansas, and which seems inseparable from the hunted man. They said: