“Dead?”
“No, but wounded and on ahead in an ambulance.”
I didn’t have an opportunity to see him until some time after midnight. I found him stretched out on some straw, with others, in a barn that had been converted into a hospital. His head was swathed in bandages and looked as big as a half bushel. His face was so swollen he could not see, and the poor fellow was delirious.
From the surgeon I learned that Mike had marched a couple of prisoners up to him, saying: “Take charge of ’em, Doc,” when he keeled over at his feet with an empty six-shooter in his hand. An examination showed that his head had been terribly beaten; the cuts were to the skull in five different places.
I afterwards learned from Mike, as soon as he was able to crawl out and suck his cob pipe, that after emptying both barrels of his gun, he did not have time to draw his pistol before he was wedged in the Federal column, and clubbing his gun, he was “knocking the spalpeens” right and left, when some “dirty blackguard” struck him over the head, knocking him from his horse. In falling he was caught between the horses of a couple of Federal troopers, his arms pinned to his sides as the horses were crowded together in the lane, and the last thing he remembered they were beating a tattoo on his head. When he recovered consciousness he was lying in the timber and two Federal soldiers were standing close by, their command gone and they undecided whether to try and escape or surrender. Mike decided the question for them. Struggling to his feet and taking a pistol from the ground, having lost his own, doubtless in his tumble, he promptly ordered them to throw up their hands, which they did, and were marched back as above stated. Neither Mike nor his prisoners knew at the time that the pistol he pointed at them was empty.
Mike was a great favorite with the colonel, who, like the rest of us, would occasionally joke him about his riding. Shortly after the incident just mentioned Mike was out sunning himself. The colonel passed by and began to rig him about letting his horse run away in the charge, and carry him into the Yankee lines. “Run away, is it,” said Mike. “Och, colonel, now it’s yerself that’s fond of a joke. Whin we swung out in the lane ’n ye told us to charge, if ye had jist tipped me a wink, and said, ‘Mike, me lad, I don’t mane it, I’m only joking,’ me head would be as sound this minit as your own.”
The laugh was on the colonel, and he enjoyed it most heartily.
Dear old Mike! He answered the last “roll call” only a few years ago, and “passed over the river.”
The first time I met him after the war was at the general reunion of the U. C. V. Association in this city in 1897. I had gone to the headquarters of the Arkansas veterans looking for him, and learned he was out looking for me. There were a number of the old company present, and as I stood chatting with them about the old days, some one remarked, “Yonder comes Kelley now.” Looking up the street we saw him coming, with his hat off, mopping the perspiration from his face.
“Let’s see if he will know him, boys,” said one, as they clustered around me.