“Nearest Encampment of any Division, C. S. A.:
“I am in the middle of Hatchers Run in an ambulance with my wife. The stream is rising rapidly and ambulance filling with water. Send immediate relief.
“Daniel V. Grey,
“Adjutant of the Thirteenth.”
After the boy was gone there we sat and waited while the water rose. I got very cold and Dan, who was yet weak from his wound and confinement, got chilled and stiff. After more than an hour of waiting we heard from the woods on the other side a noise as of men running, and then there came rushing out of the woods toward us thirteen men of mighty girth and stature. They were Georgia mountaineers who had been sent to our rescue. When they came to the water they didn’t like the look and feel of it, and evidently didn’t want to get in it.
“What is we uns to do?” they called across.
“Something to get us out of this,” Dan hallooed back, “and be quick about it, or we shall drown.”
“How is we uns to git to you uns?”
“Get in the water and swim here.”
They talked among themselves, but none of them seemed disposed to do this.
“Men!” called my husband, “I am hardly well of a wound, I am stiff and weak. I can not save my wife, who is up to the waist in water. Will you stand there and see a woman drown?”
They seemed ashamed, but none of them made the move to go in. Then the largest of them all—he seemed a mighty giant—stepped forth and took command.
“You say thar’s a lady in that ambulance?”