With shouts and oaths that were heard by the two men with distinctness, the guerrillas dashed after them, while they kept on with break-neck speed, now through a gully, then over a broken fence, and sinking in the furrows of fields that had been plowed in the long ago, now past a ruined building that rose up black and forbidding in the weird moonbeams, and then the lights gleamed friendly from one that was occupied. What the end of this John Gilpin ride would have been, it is hard to say, for the guerrillas were gaining on them, but at a turn in the road a dozen blue-coats were seen coming toward them. The pursuing foe fired a few wild shots, which were returned with a will, when they wheeled about and fled across the field, and were soon in hiding in the woods. “Tom's cow came near getting me into trouble,” Jim Cleary said, when he finished telling the story to the lieutenant. A few {276}weeks later, when they had reached Knoxville and gone into camp, an old, feeble-looking farmer came into the lines looking for Tom Grant. His hair was grizzled, and his beard uncut, and as Tom came toward him, he was surprised to see the wrinkled brown hand extended as if to clasp that of an old friend. “You don't seem to recognize me,” the man said awkwardly. “You haven't forgotten the little sick gal and her mammy down in the country a hundred miles or so?” “You're not the man who showed us so much kindness when you knew the guerrillas were on our track?” Tom asked. “The very same. You see a gray wig and a butternut suit make quite a farmer outen me. I'll never forget you, stranger, nor how you saved my baby. She was the only gal we had left--we'd lost three, and when she took to that milk so, and you told me to keep the cow, why, I couldn't hold still. I'd had it in my heart to kill you both, that night. I had only to whistle and I'd have brought the whole band about your ears. The little gal--Eda, we call her--began to pick right up on that milk, and now she's as peart as any child you ever saw. My woman says to me--'Martin, go and tell that young fellow the good turn he has done us.' I've followed your trail for nearly a hundred mile to tell you that you will never be forgotten in our home, and I'll never raise a gun against a Yank again.” {277} [Illustration: 0286] A WAR STORY. [Illustration: 9287] HEN {278}the war broke out, Helen and Marie Mason, twin sisters, were left at home with no protector save two old slaves, Dan and Lois. Their father had given every dollar he had to the cause of the South. The two girls had grown up without a mother's care, for she had died when they were ten years old, and their father had mourned her so deeply that he had never thought of giving them a new mother. But they were not spoiled--they lived in this simple little home, tenderly guarded by their father, and all their needs had been carefully looked after by the two old slaves, who would have laid down their lives for them.