The leader of a band of guerrillas, by the name of Anderson, ordered his gang to shoot into, and stop, a train of cars on the North Missouri Railroad. In one of the coaches he found twenty-two unarmed United States soldiers that, on account of sickness, had been furloughed. They were on their way to their homes and loved ones. He ordered them all out of the car, robbed them, stood them in a row and shot them. Some of the bodies he scalped, others he put across the track and ran the engine over them. He afterwards attacked a hundred and twenty men of the 39th Missouri Volunteer Infantry, and having stampeded their horses, shot every one of them in cold blood. A few days later he was recognized by General Price as a Confederate captain, and with the gentle admonition that he must behave himself, was sent out to destroy railroads.[111] But this carnage went on. It was the culmination of horrors in Missouri. All the barbarism that had gone before was now eclipsed. No other State of the South was so harried by lawless, irresponsible armed men. They did not wage war, and were entitled to none of the amenities of war as conducted by civilized nations. In St. Louis we were as yet safe. But we breakfasted and supped on horrors. Our hearts bled for our suffering brethren in the State. We did what we could to help them; but we were able to effect very little. The persistent rumors that a large army of invaders would soon sweep into our State from the South made us apprehensive that there might at no distant day be fighting at our own gates. At last these rumors of invasion were followed by the ingress of a veteran rebel force under the command of General Price. They came up from Arkansas. On the 24th of September, General Shelby, one of Price’s division commanders, with five thousand men and several pieces of artillery, was reported as just south of Pilot Knob, about eighty-five miles from St. Louis. It was the vanguard of an army of at least fifteen thousand men. Excitement ran high among us. We had no force at all adequate to our protection. As we have already seen, most of the soldiers in and around St. Louis had been sent to the front. Of this state of things, the rebel general had undoubtedly been informed. He expected to capture our city, and, comparatively defenceless as we were, we thought that his expectation would probably be realized; at all events, we could not see why it should not be. Still we all deeply felt that we must do our utmost to save that for which we had so successfully contended for more than three years.