I was soon beyond sight or sound of the cavalrymen, whom I had left in the road. I desired to keep near the roads leading toward Fredericksburg. I assumed that, in pursuing, these men would naturally imagine I had taken the back track to reach the railroad.
I sometimes almost despaired of getting far enough away from the house to prevent capture before daylight would come. When I'd stop for a few moments to untangle myself from the bushes, or to feel my way over a fallen tree, I'd imagine that the curious noises that every one hears in the stillness of the night in the woods were the echoes of the pursuing Rebels.
I feared above all things else that they would procure from some of the neighboring houses some dogs--bloodhounds, perhaps--that would be used to track me through the thicket. In this way a most miserable night passed.
Though I say it, who should not, I had less fear of the Rebels in arms than of the dogs. In all my adventures in their camps, I had preserved secretly, next to my body, the little Colt's five-shooter revolver. I knew how to use it. There were the five loads yet in it, that I had put in before leaving Pennsylvania, and I had resolved that four of them would be used against either Rebels or bloodhounds and the fifth would relieve me from further pursuit.
I admit freely that I was frightened; indeed, I was scared half to death, and would have given the world and all that was in it, if it were mine, to have gotten out of the miserable scrape in which I had voluntarily placed myself. Under such conditions even a frightened boy will become desperate.
I had deliberately determined to sell my life as dearly as possible, and, if they had not killed me, I should most certainly have done the business for myself rather than take any further chances in their hands. This is the way I was feeling while resting for a few moments on an old log.
A picture of myself would show a smooth-faced youngster sitting "like a knot on a log," dressed in three-fourths of a shirt, a pair of torn trousers, one shoe and a half, bare-headed, long tangled hair, and I imagine an expression of countenance that would closely resemble the "Wild Boy of the Woods." I had torn off the greater part of my shirt to bandage a sore foot the evening previously.