“Do you see that Rebel riding yonder?”
“I do.”
“Can you fetch him?”
“I can try.”
The old man took deliberate aim and fired. He does not say he killed the Rebel, but simply that his shot was cheered by the Wisconsin boys, and that afterwards the horse the Rebel rode was seen galloping with an empty saddle.
“That’s all I know about it.”
He fought until our forces were driven back in the afternoon. He had already received two slight wounds, and a third one through the arm, to which he paid little attention; “only the blood running down my hand bothered me a heap.” Then, as he was slowly falling back with the rest, he received a final shot through the leg. “Down I went, and the whole Rebel army run over me.” Helpless, nearly bleeding to death from his wounds, he lay upon the field all night. “About sun-up, next morning, I crawled to a neighbor’s house, and found it full of wounded Rebels.” The neighbor afterwards took him to his own house, which had also been turned into a Rebel hospital. A Rebel surgeon dressed his wounds; and he says he received decent treatment at the hands of the enemy, until a Copperhead woman living opposite “told on him.”
“That’s the old man who said he was going out to shoot some of the damned Rebels!”
Some officers came and questioned him, endeavoring to convict him of bushwhacking. But the old man gave them little satisfaction. This was on Friday, the third day of the battle; and he was alone with his wife in the upper part of the house. The Rebels left; and soon after two shots were fired. One bullet entered the window, passed over Burns’s head, and penetrated the wall behind the lounge on which he was lying. The other shot fell lower, passing through a door. Burns is certain that the design was to assassinate him. That the shots were fired by the Rebels there can be no doubt; and as they were fired from their own side, towards the town, of which they held possession at the time, John’s theory seems the true one. The hole in the window, and the bullet-marks in the door and wall, remain.
Burns went with me over the ground where the first day’s fight took place. He showed me the scene of his hot day’s work,—pointed out two trees behind which he and one of the Wisconsin boys stood and “picked off every Rebel that showed his head,” and the spot where he fell and lay all night under the stars and dew.