He expressed the opinion which many hold, that a brutal man is made more brutal by it, and a refined and cultivated man is softened.
We were on the immediate flank of Early’s army. His cavalry was all around us. The road was much used. It was almost night. We had passed a rebel picket but a mile back, and knew not how near another camp might be.
The three rebel guards were riding in front of us and on our flanks. Our party of prisoners was in the centre, and I was by the side of Lieutenant Whiting, who acted as rear-guard, when we entered a small copse of willows which for a moment covered the road. The hour was propitious. I gave the fatal signal and instantly threw myself from my saddle upon the Lieutenant, grasping him around the arms and dragging him from his horse, in the hope of securing his revolver, capturing him, and compelling him to pilot us outside of the rebel lines. At the same instant Mack raised one of the loaded carbines, and, in less time than I can write it, shot two of the guard in front of him, killing them instantly; and then coolly turning in his saddle, and seeing me struggling in the road with the Lieutenant, and the chances of obtaining the revolver apparently against me, he raised the carbine the third time; and as I strained the now desperate rebel to my breast, with his livid face over my left shoulder, he shot him as directly between the eyes as if firing at a target at ten paces distance.
Brown had only wounded his man in the side, and allowed him to escape.
Our position was now perilous. Not a man of us knew the country, except in a general way. The rebel camps could not be far away; the whole country would be alarmed in an hour, darkness was intervening; and I doubted not that, before sundown, blood-hounds as well as men would be on our track. One-half our party had already scattered, panic-stricken, at the first alarm, and they were flying through the country in every direction.
Only five remained, including the faithful Wash, who immediately showed his practical qualities by searching the bodies of the slain, and recovering, among other things, my gold hunting-watch from the person of Lieutenant Whiting, and over eleven hundred dollars in greenbacks, the proceeds, doubtless, of their various robberies of our men.
“Not quite nuff,” said Wash, showing his ivories from ear to ear. “Dey vally dis nigger at two thousand dollars. I tink I ought to git de money.”
We instantly mounted the best horses, and, well armed with carbines and revolvers, struck directly for the mountain on our right; but knowing that would be the first place we should be sought for, we soon changed our direction to the south, and rode for hours as rapidly as we could ride, directly towards the enemy. Before darkness came on we had made thirty miles from the place of our escape; and then turning sharply up the mountain, we rode as far as horses could climb, and, abandoning them, pushed on through the whole night to the very summit of the Blue Ridge. There we could see the rebel camp-fires in the valley, and at break of dawn we could view their entire lines.
The length of this weary day, and the terrible pangs of hunger and thirst which we suffered on this barren mountain, belong to the mere common experience of a soldier’s life, and I need not describe them here.
We had to go still farther south to avoid the scouts and pickets, and finally struck the Shenandoah twenty miles to the rear of Early’s entire army. There we built a raft, and floated by night forty miles down that memorable stream, through his crafty pickets, until the glorious old flag once more greeted us in welcome.