WE had marched nearly all night, in order to join Jeb Stuart at the time appointed. This was in the early summer of 1861.
We regarded ourselves with more or less of self-pity, as sleep-sacrificing heroes, who were clearly entitled to a full day’s rest.
Jeb Stuart didn’t look at it in that way at all. He was a soldier, while we were just beginning to learn how to be soldiers. These things make a difference.
We hadn’t got our tents pitched when he ordered us out for a scouting expedition under his personal command.
Our army lay at Winchester. The enemy was at Martinsburg, twenty-two miles away. Stuart, with his four or five hundred horsemen, lay at Bunker Hill, about half-way between but a little nearer to the enemy than to his supports. That was always Stuart’s way.
In our scouting expedition that day, we had two or three “brushes” with the enemy—“just to get us used to it,” Stuart said.
Finally we went near to Martinsburg, and came upon a farmhouse. The farm gave no appearance of being a large one, or one more than ordinarily prosperous, yet we saw through the open door a dozen or fifteen “farm hands” eating dinner, all of them in their shirt-sleeves.
Stuart rode up, with a few of us at his back, to make inquiries, and we dismounted. Just then a slip of a girl,—not over fourteen, I should say—accompanied by a thick-set, young bull-dog, with an abnormal development of teeth, ran up to us.
She distinctly and unmistakably “sicked” that dog upon us. But as the beast assailed us, the young girl ran after him and restrained his ardor by throwing her arms around his neck. As she did so, she kept repeating in a low but very insistent tone to us: “Make ’em put their coats on! Make ’em put their coats on! Make ’em put their coats on!”
Stuart was a peculiarly ready person. He said not one word to the young girl as she led her dog away, but with a word or two he directed a dozen or so of us to follow him with cocked carbines into the dining-room. There he said to the “farm hands”: “Don’t you know that a gentleman never dines without his coat? Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? And ladies present, too! Get up and put on your coats, every man jack of you, or I’ll riddle you with bullets in five seconds.”
They sprang first of all into the hallway, where they had left their arms; but either the bull-dog or the fourteen-year-old girl had taken care of that. The arms were gone. Then seeing the carbines levelled, they made a hasty search of the hiding-places in which they had bestowed their coats. A minute later they appeared as fully uniformed, but helplessly unarmed Pennsylvania volunteers.
They were prisoners of war at once, without even an opportunity to finish that good dinner. As we left the house the young girl came up to Stuart and said: “Don’t say anything about it; but the dog wouldn’t have bit you. He knows which side we’re on in this war.”
As we rode away this young girl—she of the bull-dog—cried out: “To think the wretches made us give ’em dinner! And in their shirt-sleeves, too!”