After we had traveled fifty miles, everybody said to us, "If you can only find Dan Ellis, and do just as he tells you, you will be certain to get through."
In Good Hands at Last.
We did find Dan Ellis. On this Sunday night, one hundred and thirty-four miles from our lines, greatly broken down, we reached a point on the road, waited for two hours, when along came Dan Ellis, with a party of seventy men—refugees, Rebel deserters, Union soldiers returning from their homes within the enemy's lines, and escaping prisoners. About thirty of them were mounted and twenty armed.
Like most men of action, Dan was a man of few words. When our story had been told him, he said to his comrades:
"Boys, here are some gentlemen who have escaped from Salisbury, and are almost dead from the journey. They are our people. They have suffered in our Cause. They are going to their homes in our lines. We can't ride and let these men walk. Get down off your horses, and help them up."
Down they came, and up we went; and then we pressed along at a terrible pace.
In low conversation, as we rode through the darkness, I learned from Dan and his companions something of his strange, eventful history. At the outbreak of the war, he was a mechanic in East Tennessee. After once going through the mountains to the Union lines, he displayed rare capacity for woodcraft, and such vigilance, energy, and wisdom, that he fell naturally into the pursuit of a pilot.
Six or eight of his men, who had been with him from the beginning, were almost equally familiar with the routes. They lived near him, in Carter County, Tennessee, in open defiance of the Rebels. When at home, they usually slept in the woods, and never parted from their arms for a single moment.
As the Rebels would show them no mercy, they could not afford to be captured. For three years there had
