I lingered a long time in the Gap, at such points as admitted of my seeing out into Kentucky. I kept my eager longing eyes strained over that vista, hoping I might see the Stars and Stripes floating defiantly above the tree-tops. So eager was I to learn about the land of hope and of home, that lay stretched out before me, that I quickly gathered from these soldiers who were about me all the information they had about the land that lay beyond. My curiosity was pardonable at the time, because they supposed I was green and had never seen the Yankee country before. They were also quite anxious to tell all they knew, and more too. I gathered enough information in a very short time to satisfy me, first, that there were no Rebel pickets stationed beyond the Gap, though some predatory horsemen belonging to the artillery, and mounted on anything they could get, were in the habit of scouting out the roads occasionally for forage; secondly, the Yankees were in force within a few miles of me. I was told that their Cavalry frequently came almost to the foot of the mountain below.
This was enough. I should not allow another sun to set or rise on me before I had put myself under the protection of the old flag. I sat alone on a log, on the side of the hill, for a long time. I recalled that awfully hot July day that my companion and myself had sat out together on a log in like manner on a hill-side, very like this one, at Harper's Ferry, that other great hole in the mountains near my home, and how we both escaped inside the lines in the evening. My experiences in the Rebel lines during the months that followed passed before me rapidly. I was willing to risk a good deal to get away without the formality of a "Good-by" to the boys whom I had just met and left at the camp a little to the rear. I remarked to the sentry who was on guard nearest me:
"Is there any danger of being caught if I go down the hill to that house (pointing to one right below); I want to get something good to eat."
"Oh, no," he said, "our fellows go down there all the time."
He was a very obliging sentry. If he had orders at all, they were probably to allow no one to pass in; so, with a heart throbbing with suppressed excitement, I looked around. It was close on to evening, about supper time in the Rebel camps. Lanyard had returned to the performance of some duty. No one was near except the good-natured sentry. I leisurely stepped beyond "bounds," and, with a parting injunction to the soldier not to shoot when he saw me coming up, I stepped off down grade at a lively gait, and was soon winding down the horse-shoe curved road, which led me either to home or heaven, liberty or death.
Before reaching the foot of the winding road, that led on past the little house standing some distance below, I stopped a moment—only a moment—to plan. In those days my mind was soon made up, and, once I had decided a matter, I was always prepared to act upon it the same moment.
I concluded not to go to the house—that I must avoid leaving any trail by which I might be traced. To accomplish this, it was necessary that I leave the road and clamber up the steep side-hill embankment, which was full of brush and thickets; by so doing it would lead me into a wood to the side of the house.
It was probably another of my mistakes to have left the road and climbed that hill to get into the wood. I saw at the foot of the mountain below me the little old house by the roadside, which reminded me, both by its similarity in appearance and location of the old shanty near Manassas, where I had experienced so much annoying trouble from the quizzical and curious old bushwhacker proprietor, after my failure to get through the lines to Washington that night in August, 1861. It must have been about supper time when I had gotten pretty close to the house that day, because the curling, blueish smoke from a freshly-made wood fire was just then beginning to pour from the top of the big rough-stone and mud chimney, which was, as usual, hung on to the end of the cabin as a sort of annex.
The sentry I had so recently left at the top of the mountain had said that "our men" were in the habit of going down to the house, but, with the vision before me of former experience in such a mixed crowd in a shanty in Virginia, I quickly enough decided to apply some strategy and to flank the obstacle.
It's a simple matter to plan things and to apply strategy to the proposed movements. By the time I had climbed up that perpendicular cliff to the side of the road, through a thicket of last year's blackberry bushes, that were apparently growing out of a stone quarry, I was so done out that I had to sit down on the ground awhile to get my second wind. I had expended sufficient strength and nerve in making that climb to have carried me miles past the house, if I had only made the dash on the straight road.