I will here say I was in the bloodiest and most hopeless battles of the war, and I have had a pretty steady diet of Indian fighting since the war, having been surrounded by half-frozen Indians of various tribes in Montana and Dakota, and chased and been chased by red hot Apaches in Arizona and New Mexico, but never have I undergone such nerve-trying work as was that trip I made as a Union spy, the account of which I am telling. There was never at any time more danger than I met afterward, but there was no let up. Every nerve was strung to its highest tension and kept there, every sense was held alert. There was never present the enlivening enthusiasm of battle, which warms a man's blood to deeds of heroism; there was no emulation to keep up one's courage; there was always the demoralizing necessity of keeping out of the way of danger; there was ever present the fretting fact that self-preservation only could insure success. No man is anxious to be killed. No matter how strongly he is imbued with a sense of duty and honor and of love for his country, he is pretty certain to feel that her good will be better secured if he is on the boards to look after it, than it would be if he had laid down his life at her shrine. He prefers to live, but at the same time he does not want his personal safety to be a matter of perpetual concern. I was not a coward, but I felt decidedly averse to being shot. I had started out to do something and I wanted to do it; I had already concluded that there was no "right time" for a spy to be killed. He does not want to be shot until he has found out what he seeks to know, and then not until he has told it. It was about three o'clock when I finally stumbled on an oat stack in an odd little clearing, far out from sight of the owner's windows. I let my horse take his dinner, while I kept guard and ate a sandwich. In order to let him make as good a meal as possible I delayed as long as my impatience would let me and then nearly made him break his neck and mine too, by trying to canter him down a place about as steep as Jordalemet and nearly as slick, in order to make up for lost time. The country which had been comparatively level and well settled for some distance back through the valley, became rough again as I neared the mountains, and I had to make my way more slowly and cautiously. I seemed to have run out of the stream of Rebels. I determined to question the first person I met. Before long I saw a weak minded looking man driving a few sheep along a narrow path, and coming from the opposite direction. "Howdy, stranger?" I began. "Howdy?" he returned. "You're pretty fortunate to get through with them sheep, without their being turned into mutton." "Met nobody to turn 'em; ain't nobody up that way."