A BREACH OF ETIQUETTE
WE had marched nearly all night, in order to join Jeb Stuart at the time appointed. This was in the early summer of 1861.
We regarded ourselves with more or less of self-pity, as sleep-sacrificing heroes, who were clearly entitled to a full day’s rest.
Jeb Stuart didn’t look at it in that way at all. He was a soldier, while we were just beginning to learn how to be soldiers. These things make a difference.
We hadn’t got our tents pitched when he ordered us out for a scouting expedition under his personal command.
Our army lay at Winchester. The enemy was at Martinsburg, twenty-two miles away. Stuart, with his four or five hundred horsemen, lay at Bunker Hill, about half-way between but a little nearer to the enemy than to his supports. That was always Stuart’s way.
In our scouting expedition that day, we had two or three “brushes” with the enemy—“just to get us used to it,” Stuart said.
Finally we went near to Martinsburg, and came upon a farmhouse. The farm gave no appearance of being a large one, or one more than ordinarily prosperous, yet we saw through the open door a dozen or fifteen “farm hands” eating dinner, all of them in their shirt-sleeves.
Stuart rode up, with a few of us at his back, to make inquiries, and we dismounted. Just then a slip of a girl,—not over fourteen, I should say—accompanied by a thick-set, young bull-dog, with an abnormal development of teeth, ran up to us.
She distinctly and unmistakably “sicked” that dog upon us. But as the beast assailed us, the young girl ran after him and restrained his ardor by throwing her arms around his neck. As she did so, she kept repeating in a low but very insistent tone to us: “Make ’em put their coats on! Make ’em put their coats on! Make ’em put their coats on!”