re shot
through the clothes.

"That was like a camp-meeting or an election row," laughed Morgan, when
they were in camp.

"Or an affair between Austrian and Italian outposts," said Hunt.

A chuckle rose behind them. A lame colonel was limping past.

"I got your courier," he said.

"I sent no courier," said Morgan.

"It was Forbes who wanted to charge 'em," said Dan.

Again the Colonel chuckled.

"The Yankees ran when you did," he said, and limped, chuckling, away.

But it was great fun, those moonlit nights, burning bridges and chasing
Home Guards who would flee fifteen or twenty miles sometimes to
"rally." Here was a little town through which Dan and Richard Hunt had
marched with nine prisoners in a column--taken by them alone--and a
captured United States flag, flying in front, scaring Confederate
sympathizers and straggling soldiers, as Hunt reported, horribly. Dan
chuckled at the memory, for the prisoners were quartered with different
messes, and, that night, several bottles of sparkling Catawba happened,
by some mystery, to be on hand. The prisoners were told that this was
regularly issued by their commissaries, and thereupon they plead, with
tears, to be received into the Confederate ranks.

This kind of service was valuable training for Morgan's later work.
Slight as it was, it soon brought him thirty old, condemned
artillery-horses--Dan smiled now at the memory of those ancient
chargers--which were turned over to Morgan to be nursed until they
would bear a mount, and, by and by, it gained him a colonelcy and three
companies, superbly mounted and equipped, which, as "Morgan's
Squadron," became known far and near. Then real service began.

In January, the right wing of Johnston's hungry hawk had been broken in
the Cumberland Mountains. Early in February, Johnston had withdrawn it
from Kentucky before Buell's hosts, with its beak always to the foe. By
the middle of the month, Grant had won the Western border States to the
Union, with the capture of Fort Donelson. In April, the sun of Shiloh
rose and set on the failure of the first Confederate aggressive
campaign at the West; and in that fight Dan saw his first real battle,
and Captain Hunt was wounded. In May, Buell had pushed the Confederate
lines south and east toward Chattanooga. To retain a hold on the
Mississippi valley, the Confederates must make another push for
Kentucky, and it was this great Southern need that soon put John
Morgan's name on t