ir." That was a
compliment that Jim and me acknowledged on behalf of the northern army.
He couldn't have paid our regiment a higher compliment if he had
studied a week. Then he said: "I was a fool to be in this fight. I was
a prisoner and was only exchanged last week. I might have remained at
home on a furlough, but when our army came along yesterday, and the boys
said there was going to be a fight, I took my sisters mule, the only
animal on the place, and came along, and now I am a cripple." I looked
at the mule, and I said to Jim, in a whisper, "I hope to die if it isn't
the angel's mule. That must be her brother." Jim was going to ask him
what his name was, when we neared the place, where our regiment was
forming and the surgeon of our regiment came along, and I said, "Doc, I
wish you would take this young fellow and fix up his arm nice. He is a
friend of mine. Take him to our regimental hospital." Then we went
back to the regiment, the prisoners were taken away, and after marching
around through the woods for an hour we rode back to our camp, and the
battle was over. Two or three hours later I went over to the regimental
hospital and found the black-eyed confederate with his arm dressed, and
he was talking with our boys as though he belonged there. Some one asked
how he happened to be there, and the old doctor said he believed he was
a relative of one of our officers. Anyway he was going to stay there. I
gave him a bunch of sutler cigars, and left him, and an hour later the
"angel" showed up, pale as death, and wanted some one to go with her to
the battle held to help find the body of her dead brother. She said he
had arrived home from the North the morning before, and had gone into
the fight, and when the Confederates came back, defeated, past their
plantation, her brother was not among them, and she knew he was dead.
I have done a great many things in my life that have given me pleasure,
but no one that I remember of that made me quite so happy as I was to
escort the girl who had been so kind to me, to the hospital where her
brother was. His wound was not serious, and he sat on a box, smoking a
cigar, telling the boys the news from Wisconsin. He had just come from
there, where he was a prisoner, and he couldn't talk enough about the
kindness of the "people of the nowth." His sister almost fainted when
she found him alive, then hugged him until I was afraid she would
disturb his arm, and then she sat by him and heard