After remaining in the woods a few miles from Lewisburg for several days without being able to do any good toward ferreting out the “foot-burners,” we started back through Van Buren and Izard counties without molesting any one until we got near a little town called Mount Olive, where we captured a man whom we accidentally met in the road. Several of my men knew him, and stated that he had been run off from Bloomfield, Missouri, for professing loyalty during the second year of the war, and thus betraying the confidence his neighbors had hitherto placed in him. He was also accused of having had a man shot near Bloomfield, by reporting on him; this accusation he virtually acknowledged after we had captured him.
We took him a few hundred yards from the road, hung him to a limb, and proceeded on through Lawrence county to our old headquarters.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Gloomy prospects for the South. Takes a trip to Missouri with four men. Saved from capture by a woman. Visits his mother on Big river. Robs the store of J. V. Tyler at Big River Mills.—Escapes to Arkansas.
I had a long conversation with Capt. Bolin, who had just returned from an expedition on the head waters of Current river, concerning the probable termination of the war.
He was a man of considerable intelligence, and I always noticed on his return from a raid his pockets were stuffed full of Yankee newspapers.
I found him sitting on a log deeply absorbed in examining his miscellaneous pile of news.
“Well, Captain! what‘s the news from the North? Are they ready to give it up yet?”
“Give it up, indeed! Sam, the war is very near to a close.”