MY period of service in the cavalry was about to expire. I was not tired of the cavalry service; on the contrary, I was very much in love with it. Any full-blooded man must have been so under such leadership as Stuart’s.
But for reasons pertaining to Joe, I had sought and obtained a transfer to the artillery.
Joe was just sixteen.
The infantry regiment in which he had gone out had been so cut to pieces in a fierce fight that it was dissolved. Joe and a bullet-riddled flag were about all there was left of it.
Therefore Joe had enlisted in a battery of artillery. He was as brave a fellow as is made, and as cantankerous and self-assertive as a brave boy is apt to be. I felt it necessary to be with him to keep him from being unnecessarily killed or court-martialled, and to exercise over him that mature, paternal influence which the superior age of twenty-one justified.
This was my last night of cavalry service. It was late autumn in 1861. The company was ordered on picket at Fairfax Court House. The enemy was very urgent just then, and gave us a good deal of trouble on the picket lines.
I was ordered to a post underneath a very broad and low spreading tree, so that when I sat upon my horse I was not visible from the thicket in front, and would not have been even if it had been broad daylight.
That thicket was full of sharp-shooters, and when I went on post about seven o’clock in the evening, I was instructed to preserve absolute silence in self-protection, and warned that it would probably not be possible to relieve me until morning.
My mare was a restless creature at ordinary times, but she had learned the whole art of picket duty. If I had been anywhere else, she would have champed the bit, and pawed the ground, and snorted in her restlessness. Standing there at night, with a bullet whistling over her head every minute or two, she was as still as the traditional mouse.
I sat there all night on her back with pistols drawn, and in a silence such as nobody but a picket thus placed ever maintains.
Just as the day was dawning, or rather just as the gray in the eastern sky began to suggest the possibility of dawn, a sergeant crawling on his belly approached me from the rear. In a whisper I called out, “Who goes there?” He, also in a whisper, let me know his identity. He had come to order my withdrawal from the post.
Not until we had reached a point a hundred yards in the rear was anything further said. There I found the company drawn up in line with Charlie Irving at its head.
“Many shots from the thicket?” asked Charlie.
“Two or three to the minute,” I answered, “throughout the night.”
“All right,” he replied, “we’ll scoop those fellows in; they’re getting to be obnoxious.”
Then in a low tone he told us precisely what we were to do, and we were to do it without further orders. He was to lead, of course, but he wanted to give as few commands as possible, in order to make his movement successful.
Silently we moved off over the soft turf to the left. Crossing the road below the thicket we struck a gallop and quickly surrounded the space occupied by the sharp-shooters. It was the work of but a few minutes to close in upon and capture them. Two of our saddles were emptied in the operation, and five of the sharp-shooters were left unburied in the brush; the rest we took with us to headquarters, another company having replaced us on picket.
Among the prisoners was one little fellow, apparently not over fifteen or sixteen years of age. His features were clear cut and delicate and his clothing was worn as if it had belonged to somebody else.
When we had got well to the rear and the daylight was broad, Charlie Irving looked at the little fellow and said: “How old are you, my boy?”
“Twenty-two,” he replied, “but I’m a girl.”
That girl was sent back under a flag of truce. We didn’t know what else to do with her.