As the pickets had seen the enemy, and the Colonel had not, the men considered that the former knew more of their number. As for the gallant Corporal Diggs, after one ineffectual attempt to spring on a tall horse, he ran rapidly away to the woods as fast as his short legs would carry him, which Seth Williams afterward declared was faster than any horse could. It was in vain that the officers attempted to rally their men. The blue-coated soldiers of Captain Wardle, after the first fire, came galloping into view out of the woods, and, dismounting, fell into line of battle just in the edge of the cleared space where Corporal Diggs, not two minutes before, had been entertaining the entire camp with his eloquence. They poured another volley into the camp, which awoke the echoes of the forest and seemed to the terrified recruits to shake the Twin Mountains to their very center. They then charged down on the enemy. "Oh, Lordy, Lordy, have mercy on my soul!" gasped Corporal Diggs as, impelled by the roar of fire-arms in his rear, the whistling of bullets among the trees, and the thunder of plunging horses on every side, he went over the ground at a rate of speed which almost took away his breath. He ran as he never did before. He crushed through underbrush, tore through thorns, dodged under limbs, and leaped logs, in a manner that would have astonished any one who took into consideration the shortness of his legs. He was leading the entire force, as, in his speech a few minutes before, he had said he would. He was the first to start, and as yet was ahead of any footman. Many of the horses, about four hundred in number, which had been picketed about the camp, had broken loose during the firing and were running, plunging, and snorting through the thick woods, much to the terror of poor Diggs, who imagined a Union soldier on every horse, and supposed that there could not be less than fifty thousand of them. On, on, and on he ran, for about three miles, when, coming up to a steep bank of the creek, he found it impossible to check his headlong speed, and tumbled head first into it. Down into the mud and water he went, sticking his head so deep into the latter, that it was with some difficulty he extricated himself. When he washed the mud out of his eyes, he espied a drift a few feet away, and going to it managed to conceal himself amid the brush and logs. "Oh! Lordy! Lordy! have mercy on me! Oh, I know I shall be killed!" "Thump, thump! crash, crash! splash!" It was simply one of the frightened horses that had broken away from the camp, but it put Corporal Diggs in extreme terror as he supposed it to be a regiment of Union cavalry. "Oh, I ought never to have engaged in this unholy cause! I thought I was in error. I'll leave the Southern army sure, if ever I get out of this." For hours Corporal Diggs was kept in a state of perpetual terror by fleeing men and horses. CHAPTER XI. MR. TOMPKINS' PERIL.