"Corporal," he said dryly, as if suddenly regretting his smile, "I have noticed that you always did the duty assigned you with promptness. I need a quartermaster sergeant. You are the man."
I was almost paralyzed with astonishment and pleasure. I stood stock still, without a word of gratitude. At last, recovering myself, I explained that I had enlisted expecting to fight, and not to fill some easy position with the trains.
"If I could only be allowed to find a substitute," I ventured to say, "in case of a fight, so I might share the danger with my comrades, I would like the promotion."
Again the colonel tried to smile. "You probably will change your mind; you will find excitement enough," he remarked, dismissing me.
I was hardly installed in my new post when to my surprise I was ordered by the colonel to take a good horse and ride twelve miles across the lone prairies and carry a message to a command at the village of Tipton. Instantly my mind was excited with the hopes of an adventure. I don't know, even now, just why I was selected for the venturesome undertaking. I knew there was scarcely a road and not a house in the whole distance. I knew, too, the whole country was full of murderous guerrillas. But nevertheless I was full of elation. This was the kind of a thing I had hoped for when I enlisted.
Light flakes of snow were falling when, with exultant spirits, I started from the camp. The trip outward proved uneventful, for nothing happened to me on my way. As I was returning, however, at a point halfway across the prairie I was surprised to see a man in gray, probably a guerrilla, ride out of a long slough or hollow to my left and gallop into the road directly ahead of me. He was in complete gray uniform, wore a saber, and had revolvers at his saddle bow. The man glanced back at me, and I saw him reaching for his pistols. "Here comes my first fight in the war," I thought instantly, "out here alone on the prairie." Save my one half-loaded revolver, strapped to my waist, I was unarmed. The stranger, without firing, galloped faster. I, too, galloped faster, the distance between us remaining about the same. Each of us now had a pistol in his hand, but it looked as if each were afraid to commence the duel. If the stranger checked his horse to give him breath, I checked mine. If he galloped again, I, too, put spurs to my animal. Imagining that other guerrillas must be lurking quite near, I was not over-anxious to bring on the engagement, and I suppose the armed man felt much the same way, for he could not have thought that I was in such a place absolutely alone. So neither fired. We just looked at each other and galloped. Finally we approached a little wood, and in a twinkling he turned into a path and was out of sight. I did not care to follow him to his hiding-place just then, and quickly galloped to our camp a few miles off.
Before midnight that night I, with a dozen of my regiment, surrounded the little wood and a cabin secreted in its center. Approaching, we looked into the windows, and, sure enough, there, roasting his feet in front of an open fire, sat my rider of the day. When three of us suddenly entered the house and demanded his surrender he sprang for a rifle that stood like a poker by the fireside, aimed it at me, and shouted "Never! Surrender yourself." A bayonet that instant against his breast brought him to terms, however. There followed a little farewell scene between him and his wife, who poured bottles of wrath on the heads of the "bluecoats," and our captive—my captive—was hurried to the guardhouse at the camp. It had been a perfectly bloodless encounter, but next morning it turned out that I had by chance captured one of the most dangerous guerrillas in Missouri.