eavers in mud up to their thighs and under a murderous fire to get
their guns out. Many a man had been killed tugging at trail or wheel
when the day was against them; but not a gun had ever been lost. At last
the evil day arrived. At Winchester a sudden and impetuous charge for
a while swept everything before it, and carried the knoll where the old
battery was posted; but all the guns were got out by the toiling and
rapidly dropping men, except the Cat, which was captured with its entire
detachment working at it until they were surrounded and knocked from the
piece by cavalrymen. Most of the men who were not killed were retaken
before the day was over, with many guns; but the Cat was lost. She
remained in the enemy's hands and probably was being turned against
her old comrades and lovers. The company was inconsolable. The death of
comrades was too natural and common a thing to depress the men beyond
what such occurrences necessarily did; but to lose a gun! It was like
losing the old Colonel; it was worse: a gun was ranked as a brigadier;
and the Cat was equal to a major-general. The other guns seemed lost
without her; the Eagle especially, which generally went next to her,
appeared to the men to have a lonely and subdued air. The battery was
no longer the same: it seemed broken and depleted, shrunken to a mere
section. It was worse than Cold Harbor, where over half the men were
killed or wounded. The old Captain, now Colonel of the battalion,
appreciated the loss and apprehended its effect on the men as much as
they themselves did, and application was made for a gun to take the
place of the lost piece; but there was none to be had, as the men
said they had known all along. It was added--perhaps by a department
clerk--that if they wanted a gun to take the place of the one they had
lost, they had better capture it. "By----, we will," they said--adding
epithets, intended for the department clerk in his "bomb-proof", not
to be printed in this record--and they did. For some time afterwards in
every engagement into which they got there used to be speculation among
them as to whether the Cat were not there on the other side; some of
the men swearing they could tell her report, and even going to the rash
length of offering bets on her presence.

By one of those curious coincidences, as strange as anything in fiction,
a new general had, in 1864, come down across the Rapidan to take
Richmond, and the old battery had found a hill-t