ich showed above the top of the
bank, entirely cut away by Minie-bullets, so that when she jumped in the
recoil her wheels smashed and let her down. This covered all old scores.
The other guns had been cut down by shells or solid shot; but never
before had one been gnawed down by musket-balls. From this time all
through the campaign the Cat held her own beside her brazen and bloody
sisters, and in the cold trenches before Petersburg that winter, when
the new general--Starvation--had joined the one already there, she made
her bloody mark as often as any gun on the long lines.

Thus the old battery had come to be known, as its old commander, now
colonel of a battalion, had come to be known by those in yet higher
command. And when in the opening spring of 1865 it became apparent to
the leaders of both armies that the long line could not longer be held
if a force should enter behind it, and, sweeping the one partially
unswept portion of Virginia, cut the railways in the southwest, and a
man was wanted to command the artillery in the expedition sent to meet
this force, it was not remarkable that the old Colonel and his battalion
should be selected for the work. The force sent out was but small; for
the long line was worn to a thin one in those days, and great changes
were taking place, the consequences of which were known only to the
commanders. In a few days the commander of the expedition found that
he must divide his small force for a time, at least, to accomplish his
purpose, and sending the old Colonel with one battery of artillery to
guard one pass, must push on over the mountain by another way to meet
the expected force, if possible, and repel it before it crossed the
farther range. Thus the old battery, on an April evening of 1865, found
itself toiling alone up the steep mountain road which leads above the
river to the gap, which formed the chief pass in that part of the Blue
Ridge. Both men and horses looked, in the dim and waning light of the
gray April day, rather like shadows of the beings they represented than
the actual beings themselves. And anyone seeing them as they toiled
painfully up, the thin horses floundering in the mud, and the men, often
up to their knees, tugging at the sinking wheels, now stopping to rest,
and always moving so slowly that they seemed scarcely to advance at all,
might have thought them the ghosts of some old battery lost from some
long gone and forgotten war on that deep and desolate