ect
except to try the endurance of the horses and men. I told him that we
were going to have a fight in less than an hour, and burn a town, and
probably we would all be killed. The chaplain turned pale and looked
faint.

I had read about hell, and seen pictures of it, from the imagination of
some eminent artist, but the hell I had read of, and seen pictured, was
not a marker to the experience of the next three hours. In a few minutes
the colonel woke up, and the regiment mounted and moved on. An advance
guard was put further out than before, with orders to charge the rebel
picket almost into town, and then hold up for the rest of us. As we
neared the town it was just light enough to see. The advance captured
the picket post without a shot being fired, and moved right into town,
followed by the regiment, and we actually rode right into the camp of
the boys in gray, and woke them up by firing. They scattered, coatless
and shoeless, firing as they ran, and in five minutes they were all
captured, killed, gone out of town, or were in hiding in the buildings.
Then began the conflagration. Immense buildings, filled with goods, or
bales of cotton, were fired, and soon the black smoke and falling walls
made a scene that was enough to set a recruit crazy. A train came in
just as the fire was at its greatest, and a squad of men was sent to
burn it, and the colonel told me to go and capture the engineer and
bring him to the headquarters.

[Illustration: Engineer threw a lump of coal and hit me 113]

I rode up as near to the engine as my horse would go and told the
engineer I wanted him. He turned a cock somewhere, and a jet of steam
came out towards me that fairly blinded me and the horse, and I couldn't
see the engine any more. My horse turned tail, the engineer threw a lump
of coal and hit me on the head, and I went away and told the colonel the
engineer wouldn't come, and beside had scalded me with steam, and hit me
with a lump of coal. The colonel said the engineer could be arrested
for such conduct. Pretty soon the train was on fire, and one of our boys
clubbed the engineer, got on the engine and run it on to a side track
and ditched it, and brought the engineer up to headquarters, where I had
quite a talk with him about squirting steam and throwing lumps of coal
at peaceable persons. Then the railroad, bridge was set on fire, and
it looked cruel to see the timbers licked up by flames, but when the
burning trestle fell into