y aunt and her
three daughters very forlorn and unprotected. When I left she gave me
the pistol which her son Robert, colonel of the Twenty-eighth Virginia
Regiment, was wearing when he fell in Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. In
our care were the loaded wagons, negro men, lowing cows, and bleating
sheep.

That afternoon, after exchanging my gray for a fleet-footed cavalry
horse ridden by one of the officers, I rode back from our place of
hiding, some miles south of Liberty, to reconnoiter; but, after passing
through the town, met General McCausland at the head of his brigade
falling back toward Lynchburg, and rode back a short distance with him
to return to my party of refugees, who meantime had moved farther on.
Next day I stopped at a house by the wayside to get dinner, and had just
taken my seat at the table when there arose a great commotion outside,
with cries of "Yankee cavalry! Yankee cavalry!" Stepping to the door, I
saw a stream of terrified school-children crying as they ran by, and
refugees flying for the woods. In a moment I was on my fleet-footed dun,
not taking time to pick up a biscuit of my untasted dinner nor the
pillow worn between my crippled leg and the saddle, and joined in the
flight. I had noticed a yearling colt in the yard of the house as I
entered, and in five minutes after I started a twelve-year-old boy
mounted on the little thing, barebacked, shot by me with the speed of a
greyhound. A hundred yards farther on I overtook some refugee wagons
from about Lexington, whose owners had left them on the road and betaken
themselves to the woods; but there still stood by them a mulatto man of
our town--Lindsay Reid by name--who indignantly refused to be routed,
and was doing his utmost, with voice and example, to stem the tide,
saying, "It is a shame to fear anything; let's stand and give them a
fight!"

A moment later a negro boy rode by at a gallop in the direction from
which the alarm came. In reply to the inquiry as to where he was going,
he called out, "After Marse William." Relying on him as a picket, I
remained in view of the road. In ten minutes he appeared, returning at
full speed, and called out to me, as he rode up, that he had "run almost
into them." They were close behind, and I must "fly or be caught." I was
well alongside of him as he finished the warning, and for half a mile
our horses ran neck and neck. He said he would take me to his old
master's, an out-of-the-way place, several m