opped, the officers returned,
and the candles were relighted. The Union officers found Mosby on the
floor, bleeding badly, and asked the family who he was. They said, of
course, that they did not know, and neither did Tom Love--he was only
a Confederate officer on his way to rejoin his command, who had
stopped for a night's lodging. There was a surgeon with the Union
detachment. After they got most of Mosby's clothes off and put him on
the bed, he examined the wounded Confederate and pronounced his wound
mortal. When asked his name and unit, Mosby, still conscious, hastily
improvised a false identity, at the same time congratulating himself
on having left all his documents behind when starting on this scouting
trip. Having been assured, by medical authority, that he was as good
as dead, the Union officers were no longer interested in him and soon
went away.

* * * * *

Fortunately, on his visit to Lee's headquarters, Mosby had met an old
schoolmate, a Dr. Montiero, who was now a surgeon with the Confederate
Army, and, persuading him to get a transfer, had brought him back with
him. Montiero's new C.O. was his first patient in his new outfit.
Early the next morning, he extracted the bullet. The next night Mosby
was taken to Lynchburg.

Despite the Union doctor's pronouncement of his impending death, Mosby
was back in action again near the end of February, 1865. His return
was celebrated with another series of raids on both sides of the
mountains. It was, of course, obvious to everybody that the sands of
the Confederacy were running out, but the true extent of the debacle
was somewhat obscured to Mosby's followers by their own immediate
successes. Peace rumors began drifting about, the favorite item of
wish-thinking being that the Union government was going to recognize
the Confederacy and negotiate a peace in return for Confederate help
in throwing the French out of Mexico. Of course, Mosby himself never
believed any such nonsense, but he continued his attacks as though
victory were just around the corner. On April 5, two days after the
Union army entered Richmond, a party of fifty Mosby men caught their
old enemies, the Loudoun Rangers, in camp near Halltown and beat them
badly. On April 9, the day of Lee's surrender, "D" Company and the
newly organized "H" Company fired the last shots for the Forty-Third
Virginia in a skirmish in Fairfax County. Two days later, Mosby
received a messag