At night, just as we were comfortably asleep in the barn, our host awakened us, saying:
"Five Rebel cavalry are reported approaching this neighborhood, with three hundred more behind them, coming over the mountains from North Carolina. I think it is true, but am not certain. I am so well known as a Union man, that, if they do come, they will search my premises thoroughly. There is another barn, much more secluded, a mile farther up the valley, where you will be safer than here, and will compromise nobody if discovered. If they arrive, you shall be informed before they can reach you."
Coleridge did not believe in ghosts, because he had seen too many of them. So we were skeptical concerning the Rebel cavalry, having heard too much of it. But we went to the other barn, and in its ample straw-loft found a North Carolina refugee, with whom we slept undisturbed. He deemed this place much safer than his home—a gratifying indication to us that the danger was growing small by degrees.
XIX. Thursday, January 5.
This morning, the good woman whose barn had sheltered us mended our tattered clothing. Her husband was a soldier in the Union service. I asked her:
"How do you live and support your family?"
"Very easily," she replied. "Last year, I did all my own housework, and weaving, spinning, and knitting, and raised over a hundred bushels of corn, with no assistance whatever except from this little girl, eleven years old. The hogs run in the woods during the summer, feeding themselves; so we are in no danger of starvation."
Boothby's company, enhanced by the two Rebel deserters from Petersburg, and a young conscript, formerly one of our prison-guards at Salisbury, here rejoined us. Our entire party, numbering ten, started again at 3 p.m.
The road was over Stony Mountain, very rocky and steep. As we halted wearily upon its summit, we overlooked a great waste of mountains, intersected with green valleys of pine and fir, threaded by silver streams. Our guide assured us that, at Carter's Dépôt, one hundred and ten miles east of Knoxville, we should find Union troops. Soon after dark, to our disappointment and indignation, he declared that he must turn back without a moment's delay. His long-deferred explanation that the young wife, whom he had left at his lonely log house, was about to endure
"The pleasing punishment which women bear,"