As I was the only person who saw him do it, I think he would have killed me, too, if I had not run from him. As it was, he followed me presently, and with a pistol in his hand told me I must go with him, adding that if I ever told anybody what had happened he would kill me.
He took off his uniform and put on a suit of citizen’s clothing. Then he made me mount a horse, he mounting another, and we rode all night. In the morning we were in a Federal camp.
I don’t know what Campbell told the Federal officers, but he satisfied them somehow, and, taking me with him, he went East. He put me in charge of a very ugly old woman and her daughter, somewhere up in the mountains of Pennsylvania, not near any town or even village. Then he went away, and for three years I lived with those people, practically a prisoner. They never for a moment let me out of their sight, and at night I had to sleep in an upper room, a kind of loft, which had no window and no door—nothing but a trap-door over the stairs. Every night the younger woman closed the trap-door, fastening it below. The two women slept in the room beneath.
If I could have got away, I should have gone, even if I had been obliged to go into the woods and starve. For the women treated me horribly, and I could not forget the scene when my mother was killed. I thought of her always as she lay there on the floor, dead, with her face purple and—I can’t write about that.
Once I tried to escape. By hard work I made a hole in the roof above me, one night, and tried to climb up to it. But I missed my hold and fell heavily to the floor. That brought the two women up the stairs, and after that they took away every stitch of my clothing every night before I went to bed, not leaving me even a nightgown. So I made no further efforts to escape.
But I set to work in another way. I had learned that Campbell was now an officer in the Federal army, and I managed to find out how to reach him with a letter, so I wrote to him. I told him I intended to have him hanged for killing my mother, and that it didn’t matter how long he kept me in the mountains; that some time or other, sooner or later, I should get free; and that whenever that time came, I meant to go to a lawyer and tell him all about the crime.
I knew that this would make Campbell uneasy. I thought it not improbable that he would come up into the mountains and kill me, though I thought he might be afraid to do that. You see, when he killed my mother there was nobody but me to tell about it, and he knew he could go to the other side in the war and not be followed; while if he should do anything to me up there in the Pennsylvania mountains, everybody would know of it. For in that country everybody knew when a stranger came into the neighbourhood, and when he went away again. So I thought Campbell would be afraid to kill me there. I thought my letter would frighten him, and that he would take me away from that place. That was what I wanted. I thought that if I were taken to any other place, I should have a better chance of escaping.
Chapter the Seventeenth
THAT was not long before you saw me, Dorothy, and it turned out as I had expected. Campbell grew alarmed. He ordered the two women to bring me to him in Washington. When I got there, he told me that I had relatives in Virginia who wanted me to come to them, and that he had arranged to send me through the lines under a flag of truce. I know now that he was not telling me the truth, but I believed him then, and I was ready to do anything and go anywhere if only I could get out of his clutches.
He took me into another room, where an officer was writing, and there they made me swear to a parole. Then Campbell took me down to the Rapidan, and we went into that house from which Colonel Kilgariff rescued me. Campbell said that the flag of truce would start from there, but that we must wait there for the soldiers in charge of it to come.