an. Something glistens in
his eyes. Am I mistaken? Tut, tut, it's nothing but a stump; you are
getting demoralized. What! it seems to be getting closer. There are two
tiny specks that shine like the eyes of a cat in the dark. Look here,
thought I, you are getting nervous. Well, I can stand this doubt and
agony no longer; I am going to fire at that object anyhow, let come what
will. I raised my gun, placed it to my shoulder, took deliberate aim,
and fired, and waugh-weouw, the most unearthly scream I ever heard,
greeted my ears. I broke and run to a tree nearby, and had just squatted
behind it, when zip, zip, two balls from our picket post struck the tree
in two inches of my head. I hallooed to our picket not to fire that
it was "me," the videt. I went back, and says I, "Who fired those two
shots?" Two fellows spoke up and said that they did it. No sooner was
it spoken, than I was on them like a duck on a june-bug, _pugnis et
calcibus_. We "fout and fit, and gouged and bit," right there in that
picket post. I have the marks on my face and forehead where one of them
struck me with a Yankee zinc canteen, filled with water. I do not know
which whipped. My friends told me that I whipped both of them, and I
suppose their friends told them that they had whipped me. All I know is,
they both run, and I was bloody from head to foot, from where I had been
cut in the forehead and face by the canteens. This all happened one dark
night in the month of July, 1864, in the rifle pit in front of Atlanta.
When day broke the next morning, I went forward to where I had shot at
the "boogaboo" of the night before, and right there I found a dead Yankee
soldier, fully accoutered for any emergency, his eyes wide open. I
looked at him, and I said, "Old fellow, I am sorry for you; didn't know
it was you, or I would have been worse scared than I was. You are
dressed mighty fine, old fellow, but I don't want anything you have got,
but your haversack." It was a nice haversack, made of chamois skin.
I kept it until the end of the war, and when we surrendered at Greensboro,
N. C., I had it on. But the other soldiers who were with me, went
through him and found twelve dollars in greenback, a piece of tobacco,
a gun-wiper and gun-stopper and wrench, a looking-glass and pocket-comb,
and various and sundry other articles. I came across that dead Yankee
two days afterwards, and he was as naked as the day he came into the
world, and was