“Got any word you want to send to your mammy? We are going to see her,” they mockingly cried.
And thus with taunt and laugh and hurrah, Morgan’s men rode away, leaving their enemies standing helpless on the farther bank.
“Twenty miles to Corydon,” said Calhoun, as he galloped with his scouts to the front to take the advance. “I wonder if I shall meet my friend Jones, and whether, when he sees us, he will throw his hat on high, and give us a royal welcome? If he spoke the truth, the bells of Corydon will ring a joyful peal when the people see us coming, and we shall be greeted with waving flags, and find hundreds of sturdy Knights ready to join us.”
But in that twenty miles not a single waving flag did Calhoun see, not a single shout of welcome did he hear. Instead, the inhabitants seemed to be in an agony of fear. They met only decrepit old men and white-faced women and children. Not a single cup of cold water was freely offered them in that twenty miles. If Calhoun could only have seen the welcome given Hobson’s men the day after as they came over the same road, the flags that were waved, the shouts of welcome that greeted them, how women and children stood by the roadside with cooling water and dainty food to give them, and sent their prayers after them—if Calhoun could have seen all these things, his heart would have sunk, and he would have known that there was no welcome for Morgan’s men in Indiana.
But he was soon to have a ruder awakening. As he neared Corydon, he and his scouts were greeted with a volley, and sixteen of his men went down. The raid for them was over.
“Charge!” shouted Calhoun, and like a whirlwind he and his men were on the little band of [pg 238]home guards, who thought they could withstand Morgan’s whole force.
In a few brief minutes the fight was over, and on the sod lay several motionless figures. In spite of himself, Calhoun could not help thinking of Lexington and the farmer minute men who met Pitcairn and his red-coats on that April morning in 1775. Were not these men of Corydon as brave? Did they not deserve a monument as much? He tried to dismiss the thought as unworthy, but it stayed with him for a long time.
A short distance beyond Corydon stood a fine house, which, with all its surroundings, showed it to be the dwelling of a rich and prosperous farmer. When Calhoun came up, the owner, bareheaded and greatly excited, was engaged in controversy with one of Calhoun’s scouts who had just appropriated a fine ham from the farmer’s smoke-house and was busily engaged in tying it to his saddle-bow.
“You have no business to take my property without paying for it!” the farmer was saying, angrily. “I am a friend of the South; I have opposed the war from the beginning.”
Seeing Calhoun, and noticing he was an officer, the farmer rushed up to him, crying, “Stop them! Stop them! they are stealing my property!”