back closer to Fairfax after the fight of four
days before. Mosby decided to move up to the Potomac and attack a
Union force on the other side of Dranesville--Captain Josiah Flint's
Vermonters.

They passed the night at John Miskel's farm, near Chantilly. The
following morning, April 1, at about daybreak, Mosby was wakened by
one of his men who had been sleeping in the barn. This man, having
gone outside, had observed a small party of Union troops on the
Maryland side of the river who were making semaphore signals to
somebody on the Virginia side. Mosby ordered everybody to turn out as
quickly as possible and went out to watch the signalmen with his field
glasses. While he was watching, Dick Moran, a Mosby man who had
billeted with friends down the road, arrived at a breakneck gallop
from across the fields, shouting: "Mount your horses! The Yankees are
coming!"

It appeared that he had been wakened, shortly before, by the noise of
a column of cavalry on the road in front of the house where he had
been sleeping, and had seen a strong force of Union cavalry on the
march in the direction of Broad Run and the Miskel farm. Waiting until
they had passed, he had gotten his horse and circled at a gallop
through the woods, reaching the farm just ahead of them. It later
developed that a woman of the neighborhood, whose head had been turned
by the attentions of Union officers, had betrayed Mosby to Flint.

The Miskel farmhouse stood on the crest of a low hill, facing the
river. Behind it stood the big barn, with a large barnyard enclosed by
a high pole fence. As this was a horse farm, all the fences were eight
feet high and quite strongly built. A lane ran down the slope of the
hill between two such fences, and at the southern end of the slope
another fence separated the meadows from a belt of woods, beyond which
was the road from Dranesville, along which Flint's column was
advancing.

* * * * *

It was a nasty spot for Mosby. He had between fifty and sixty men,
newly roused from sleep, their horses unsaddled, and he was penned in
by strong fences which would have to be breached if he were to escape.
His only hope lay in a prompt counterattack. The men who had come out
of the house and barn were frantically saddling horses, without much
attention to whose saddle went on whose mount. Harry Hatcher, who had
gotten his horse saddled, gave it to Mosby and appropriated somebody
else's mount.

As