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1015
to the front and outran them. Just at that moment, though, that I got out of the range of small arms they turned a cannon or two loose on me, and a shell struck a mudhole off to my left and spattered mud and water all over me. Before that my horse and I must have been making at least forty miles an hour, but when that mudhole was torn up by the roots and flung at us and over us we turned on enough power to carry us at the rate of a mile a minute.
"In Middle Tennessee one day, while I and six others were tearing up a railroad, an old citizen rode up and informed us that a fellow would soon come along riding in a buggy with a lady, who, although dressed in citizen's clothes, was really a Yankee soldier. It was hard lines on him to be taken from the company of his handsome companion, and he pleaded hard not to be and when we insisted he got mighty mad about it. Three years later, down in North Carolina, he was one of the Federals who captured me, he himself taking the butcher-knife I carried in my bootleg from me and saying to me, 'One of you rangers took my coat off my back when a lot of you captured me in Middle Tennessee, taking me out of the buggy in which I was riding with a lady, and if I knew you were the man I'd cut your throat with your own knife.' Naturally I did not care to acknowledge just then that I was even with the party that captured him and, as I kept my face turned away from him, he did not recognize me as spokesman of the party.'
"While we were around Rome, Ga., a party of Yankees were out a mile or so from town trying to round up a bunch of cattle. To catch them, Captain Shannon left me and Bill Lynch at one end of a lane while he went around to the other. As the Yankees entered the lane Bill and I charged them, our object being to drive them into Shannon's clutches. But they did not drive. Instead they turned on us and shot Bill Lynch off his horse and left me for a minute or more not only alone