“I once heard about some little boys,” said she, “who were left at home by their parents, who had gone to church. One of them discovered a rat which had taken refuge under a pile of lumber in the yard; but the boys tore away the lumber, splitting about half the boards. The rat then ran under the ash-hopper, and when that was torn down it took refuge under the barn floor. One of the boys ran to the house for matches, in order to burn out the rat; but his little sister, the youngest one in the crowd, cried out: ‘If you burn the rat we will have no barn!‘ The boys saw the force of her reasoning, and made peace with the rat. So I would advise you to make no further efforts toward destroying the Federal barn for such a purpose.” I must confess that this little speech from my wife, given in such good humor, contained a little more good sense than anything I had heard for a long time. It sounded a little like a Union speech, and seemed strange on that account; but, although I had not at first the least idea of ever swerving from my purpose, yet I now determined to follow her advice, for I concluded that as she had waded through the hardships of war with a devotion to me that has but few parallels in the history of mankind, I ought to respect her comfort as well as my own. On the next day I told Capt. Bolin that I consented to his arrangement. He started on to Jacksonport to give in the list of his men, and I started a few days afterwards to the same place, and received my parole on the 26th day of May, 1865, the very day on which General Kirby Smith surrendered at Shreveport. The war now being over, I tried to banish the subject from my mind as much as possible, and soon went to work on the place I still occupied, for no owner had yet returned to claim it. Most of our men were afraid to return to their homes in Missouri while a remembrance of our depredations were still fresh in the minds of the people, and went to farming in different parts of Green county. With what I captured during the war I did not have more than half as much property as I had lost by the hands of the Vigilance mob in Missouri. One might suppose that, from the name my enemies gave me, I might have grown rich by my depredations during the war; but such was not the fact; plunder was only a secondary consideration with me; I resorted to it merely to sustain myself while I pursued my main leading object—that of killing my enemies.