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[308] they could and soon were fast asleep. I hitched to a bush close beside the road, kicked the snow off a brush pile and went to sleep on it with my shotgun in my arms. I don't know whether I slept a minute or an hour, but I awoke amid a most infernal din of firearms, clattering of horses' feet and yells. It was a minute or two before I could realize where I was and what it all meant. I saw a detachment of Federal cavalry, about eighty in number, pass me in a sweeping gallop with drawn pistols, coming from the direction of Huntington. Just past me some Confederates had formed and poured a volley into them which sent them flying past me, and I fired both barrels at them at a distance of less than twenty feet with no visible effect. I loaded and capped my gun with fingers so numb I could not feel the caps, mounted and set off in a gallop after the fleeing Yankees. On the road we found one dead Yankee, and met two of our men coming back wounded. One I did not know. He was shot in the head or face and was very bloody. He said: ‘Boys, we whipped them, but they got me!’ The other man was Anderson Hagar, of my company, shot through the lungs, and bleeding from his mouth copiously. According to my theory of the ‘death pallor,’ I decided that neither was mortally wounded. Nor did they die.
Richmond, VA. 1909.
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