After leaving the saucy and peremptory adjutant we were shown into the handsomest ambulance I have ever seen. I suppose the one we had been using was returned to Harper’s Ferry or left at Winchester for the horses to rest until Captain Goldsborough’s return. At any rate, we were in new quarters, and very elegant ones they were. The sides and seats were cushioned and padded, and it was really a luxurious coach. It was drawn by four large black horses with coats like silk. There was a postilion on the seat, and beside him sat a small boy who kept peeping behind us and into the woods on all sides, and as far ahead as possible. I didn’t know what he was trying to see or find out, but I came to the conclusion that he was there to “peep” on general principles.
As soon as we were seated we asked Captain Goldsborough what upon earth that impertinent adjutant meant by referring to us as “prisoners,” and ordering us about so.
Whereupon he explained with much embarrassment and many apologies that we were really prisoners—that General Kelly could not have sent us through without the formality of putting us under arrest.
“I wish,” he said in an aside to me, “that I didn’t have to release you.”
Of course we were perfectly satisfied to be General Kelly’s prisoners under such circumstances. In fact, we charged Captain Goldsborough to tell him how nice we thought it was to be put under arrest by him.
We withdrew our charges against the adjutant, and even acknowledged that there was kindness in the pert little Yankee’s telling us to “holler for Jeff Davis and we’d get sent on quick enough.”
Six miles from Winchester we met the detachment of cavalry to which Milroy’s adjutant had referred. It was a magnificent-looking body of men, handsomely uniformed and mounted. As they were about to dash past us Captain Goldsborough halted them, gave an order, and instantly thirty riders wheeled out of line and surrounded the ambulance, the others riding on without a break in their movements. Captain Goldsborough had gotten out of the ambulance some minutes before we met the detachment of cavalry, and was sitting with the driver, having sent the little boy inside. It sounds rather a formidable position for a Southern woman, a blockade-runner, in a Yankee ambulance, and surrounded by thirty Yankees armed to the teeth; but I was never safer in my life. The little boy was in a state of terror that would have been amusing if it had not been pitiful.
“What are all these men around the ambulance for?” I asked. He didn’t look as if he could get his wits together at once.
“Are they afraid we will get away?” I continued.
“Oh, no’m! no’m!” he answered, his eyes as big as saucers. “There’s been lots of fightin’—an’ there’s rebels all along here in the woods—and they’d come out and take this here ambulance an’ these here horses—an’ we all, an’ you all, an’ all of us!”