“Why, do you believe he's one of that band?”
“Sure as preaching he belongs to the gang who are bothering the whole country round here, and all that saved us was your generosity in making him welcome to the little black cow. He's got a heart hid away somewhere, and you just touched it.”
Tom's eyes opened wide. “I couldn't see that little creature starving there, and not offer them something to help her out. Why, she was nothing but skin and bones.”
“We mustn't loiter here. It is a good three miles to camp, and we must make it quick, or they'll head us off before we reach the road.”
Touching their animals lightly with their spurs, they dashed across the open field toward another road, and were almost ready to congratulate themselves on their escape, when they heard a yell, and looking back they saw one of the guerrillas who had sighted them and was almost standing in his stirrups in his excitement, and shouting wildly to his companions, who were coming after him at full gallop. Tom and Jim did not need any further hint, but led the way, at a rattling pace. Tom was mounted on a racer, but Jim's army mule proved that he could run, for he kept pace with the horse, almost neck and neck. Whether he dreaded capture and being set to work, or feared being converted into mule meat, we are not able to say, but he held his own.
With shouts and oaths that were heard by the two men with distinctness, the guerrillas dashed after them, while they kept on with break-neck speed, now through a gully, then over a broken fence, and sinking in the furrows of fields that had been plowed in the long ago, now past a ruined building that rose up black and forbidding in the weird moonbeams, and then the lights gleamed friendly from one that was occupied. What the end of this John Gilpin ride would have been, it is hard to say, for the guerrillas were gaining on them, but at a turn in the road a dozen blue-coats were seen coming toward them. The pursuing foe fired a few wild shots, which were returned with a will, when they wheeled about and fled across the field, and were soon in hiding in the woods.
“Tom's cow came near getting me into trouble,” Jim Cleary said, when he finished telling the story to the lieutenant.
A few weeks later, when they had reached Knoxville and gone into camp, an old, feeble-looking farmer came into the lines looking for Tom Grant. His hair was grizzled, and his beard uncut, and as Tom came toward him, he was surprised to see the wrinkled brown hand extended as if to clasp that of an old friend.
“You don't seem to recognize me,” the man said awkwardly. “You haven't forgotten the little sick gal and her mammy down in the country a hundred miles or so?”
“You're not the man who showed us so much kindness when you knew the guerrillas were on our track?” Tom asked.