angers! good name, b'gosh!' said
he. And wanted to know why we hadn't had a picket-guard at the place
where the road entered the prairie, and why we hadn't sent out a
scouting party to spy out the enemy and bring us an account of his
strength, and so on, before jumping up and stampeding out of a strong
position upon a mere vague rumour--and so on, and so forth, till he
made us all fell shabbier than the dogs had done, and not half so
enthusiastically welcome. So we went to bed shamed and low-spirited;
except Stevens. Soon Stevens began to devise a garment for Bowers which
could be made to automatically display his battle-scars to the grateful,
or conceal them from the envious, according to his occasions; but Bowers
was in no humour for this, so there was a fight, and when it was over
Stevens had some battle-scars of his own to think about.

Then we got a little sleep. But after all we had gone through, our
activities were not over for the night; for about two o'clock in the
morning we heard a shout of warning from down the lane, accompanied by
a chorus from all the dogs, and in a moment everybody was up and flying
around to find out what the alarm was about. The alarmist was a horseman
who gave notice that a detachment of Union soldiers was on its way from
Hannibal with orders to capture and hang any bands like ours which
it could find, and said we had no time to lose. Farmer Mason was in
a flurry this time, himself. He hurried us out of the house with all
haste, and sent one of his negroes with us to show us where to hide
ourselves and our tell-tale guns among the ravines half a mile away. It
was raining heavily.

We struck down the lane, then across some rocky pasture-land which
offered good advantages for stumbling; consequently we were down in the
mud most of the time, and every time a man went down he blackguarded the
war, and the people who started it, and everybody connected with it, and
gave himself the master dose of all for being so foolish as to go
into it. At last we reached the wooded mouth of a ravine, and there we
huddled ourselves under the streaming trees, and sent the negro back
home. It was a dismal and heart-breaking time. We were like to be
drowned with the rain, deafened with the howling wind and the booming
thunder, and blinded by the lightning. It was indeed a wild night. The
drenching we were getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery still
was the reflection that the halter might end us be