The Lost Dispatch

by Anonymous

Devotedly hoping that I might miss all these ill-regulated gentlemen, I left Petterbridge's and pushed on. The horse I had taken was only a fair traveler, but then he was not too valuable to abandon to the enemy.

A number of times I met and was accosted by single stragglers and skulkers. They were a pitiful looking set of men, ragged as Lazarus, generally barefoot, and gaunt almost to emaciation. I always stopped at the least effort on their part to enter into conversation, and asked earnestly after a lost cow or a fictitious companion, varying the inquiry as I thought my interlocutor took me for one of the mountaineers indigenous to that region, or for one of themselves.

I never willingly ran against them, but it was impossible to avoid them entirely, for they were making for the Potomac, and I was practically following its course and going across their line of march. There was really little to fear from them. They could not know that I was a Union spy, and they were not a suspicious set of men anyway.

It was the bushwhackers and raiders I was most in danger from, and more from the bushwhackers than the raiders. The latter, like the stragglers, kept on and near the roads, and there was always enough of them together to make me aware of their presence by their noise, so with due caution I would not be likely to encounter them. More than a dozen times I drew up into thickets and ravines to let a party of them pass, and several other times saw squads in the distance. From the bushwhackers I had no protection. Singularly enough I did not actually encounter any, although I discerned a good many by the aid of my imagination and had plenty of evidence of their actual near presence. The whole country was an extremely pretty one to bushwhack in. I tried to let the fact slip my mind, but I had an unpleasant, ticklish sensation in my back the whole time and longed for an eye in the rear of my head to keep a lookout in the direction from which I particularly anticipated a bullet.

I will here say I was in the bloodiest and most hopeless battles of the war, and I have had a pretty steady diet of Indian fighting since the war, having been surrounded by half-frozen Indians of various tribes in Montana and Dakota, and chased and been chased by red hot Apaches in Arizona and New Mexico, but never have I undergone such nerve-trying work as was that trip I made as a Union spy, the account of which I am telling.

There was never at any time more danger than I met afterward, but there was no let up. Every nerve was strung to its highest tension and kept there, every sense was held alert. There was never present the enlivening enthusiasm of battle, which warms a man's blood to deeds of heroism; there was no emulation to keep up one's courage; there was always the demoralizing necessity of keeping out of the way of danger; there was ever present the fretting fact that self-preservation only could insure success. No man is anxious to be killed. No matter how strongly he is imbued with a sense of duty and honor and of love for his country, he is pretty certain to feel that her good will be better secured if he is on the boards to look after it, than it would be if he had laid down his life at her shrine. He prefers to live, but at the same time he does not want his personal safety to be a matter of perpetual concern.

I was not a coward, but I felt decidedly averse to being shot. I had started out to do something and I wanted to do it; I had already concluded that there was no "right time" for a spy to be killed. He does not want to be shot until he has found out what he seeks to know, and then not until he has told it.

It was about three o'clock when I finally stumbled on an oat stack in an odd little clearing, far out from sight of the owner's windows.

I let my horse take his dinner, while I kept guard and ate a sandwich. In order to let him make as good a meal as possible I delayed as long as my impatience would let me and then nearly made him break his neck and mine too, by trying to canter him down a place about as steep as Jordalemet and nearly as slick, in order to make up for lost time.