Soon afterward, this war came on, and Campbell raised a company, got himself appointed its captain, and went into the Confederate service. After a while, he came home on a leave of absence. He and my mother had been on very bad terms for a long time, and things seemed worse than ever. One day, when he had been drinking a good deal, he insulted my mother frightfully, and she turned upon him at last, saying she intended to expose his rascalities and “bring him to book”—that was her phrase—for embezzling my property. Dorothy, I can’t tell you all about that scene. I was so shocked and frightened that it gives me a nightmare even now to recall it. Campbell _killed my mother by choking her to death in my presence_! As I was the only person who saw him do it, I think he would have killed me, too, if I had not run from him. As it was, he followed me presently, and with a pistol in his hand told me I must go with him, adding that if I ever told anybody what had happened he would kill me. He took off his uniform and put on a suit of citizen’s clothing. Then he made me mount a horse, he mounting another, and we rode all night. In the morning we were in a Federal camp. I don’t know what Campbell told the Federal officers, but he satisfied them somehow, and, taking me with him, he went East. He put me in charge of a very ugly old woman and her daughter, somewhere up in the mountains of Pennsylvania, not near any town or even village. Then he went away, and for three years I lived with those people, practically a prisoner. They never for a moment let me out of their sight, and at night I had to sleep in an upper room, a kind of loft, which had no window and no door—nothing but a trap-door over the stairs. Every night the younger woman closed the trap-door, fastening it below. The two women slept in the room beneath. If I could have got away, I should have gone, even if I had been obliged to go into the woods and starve. For the women treated me horribly, and I could not forget the scene when my mother was killed. I thought of her always as she lay there on the floor, dead, with her face purple and—I can’t write about that. Once I tried to escape. By hard work I made a hole in the roof above me, one night, and tried to climb up to it. But I missed my hold and fell heavily to the floor. That brought the two women up the stairs, and after that they took away every stitch of my clothing every night before I went to bed, not leaving me even a nightgown. So I made no further efforts to escape. But I set to work in another way. I had learned that Campbell was now an officer in the Federal army, and I managed to find out how to reach him with a letter, so I wrote to him. I told him I intended to have him hanged for killing my mother, and that it didn’t matter how long he kept me in the mountains; that some time or other, sooner or later, I should get free; and that whenever that time came, I meant to go to a lawyer and tell him all about the crime.