e wounded men on horse litters and one dead man tied to his
saddle.

The sutlers at Dranesville had heard the firing and were about to move
away when Mosby's column appeared. Seeing the preponderance of blue
uniforms, they mistook the victors for prisoners and, anticipating a
lively and profitable business, unpacked their loads and set up their
counters. The business was lively, but anything but profitable. The
Mosby men looted them unmercifully, taking their money, their horses,
and everything else they had.

* * * * *

All through the spring of 1863, Mosby kept jabbing at Union lines of
communication in northern Virginia. In June, his majority came
through, and with it authority to organize a battalion under the Scott
Law. From that time on, he was on his own, and there was no longer any
danger of his being recalled to the regular Army. He was responsible
only to Jeb Stuart until the general's death at Yellow Tavern a year
later; thereafter, he took orders from no source below General Lee and
the Secretary of War.

Even before this regularization of status, Mosby's force was beginning
to look like a regular outfit. From the fifteen men he had brought up
from Culpepper in mid-January, its effective and dependable strength
had grown to about sixty riders, augmented from raid to raid by the
"Conglomerate" fringe, who were now accepted as guerrillas-pro-tem
without too much enthusiasm. A new type of recruit had begun to
appear, the man who came to enlist on a permanent basis. Some were
Maryland secessionists, like James Williamson, who, after the war,
wrote an authoritative and well-documented history of the
organization, Mosby's Rangers. Some were boys like John Edmonds and
John Munson, who had come of something approaching military age since
the outbreak of the war. Some were men who had wangled transfers from
other Confederate units. Not infrequently these men had given up
commissions in the regular army to enlist as privates with Mosby. For
example, there was the former clergyman, Sam Chapman, who had been a
captain of artillery, or the Prussian uhlan lieutenant, Baron Robert
von Massow, who gave up a captaincy on Stuart's staff, or the
Englishman, Captain Hoskins, who was shortly to lose his life because
of his preference for the saber over the revolver, or Captain Bill
Kennon, late of Wheat's Louisiana Tigers, who had also served with
Walker in Nicaragua. As a general thing, the n