I was immediately seized with a wild desire to be in the fight, but my father would not consent to it, on account of my age. He would not hear to my going into the army as a private but promised that if I would wait a year, and was still of the same mind, he would try to get me a commission. As I have said, my sympathies were with the South but it was more convenient for me to take the other side, and at that moment I was not particular about principles. The family were duly horrified one evening when I went home, after some things I needed, and told them I had enlisted. The next day my father bought my discharge and hustled me out to the little town of Woodstock, Illinois, where I was placed in charge of an uncle who was abjured to keep me from going to war, without regard to anything else that might happen. He prevented me from joining an infantry regiment which was then forming but I got away with a cavalry regiment which was raised in that section some months later, and was made one of its officers. We went to Cairo, Illinois, and from there by transport to Pittsburg Landing, where we arrived just in time to take part in the battle which was fought on April 6 and 7, 1862. My regiment was pitted against the famous Black Horse Cavalry of Mississippi and we came together at the gallop. I was riding a demon of a black horse and, with the bit in his teeth, he charged into the line two or three lengths ahead of the rest. A Confederate officer came at me with his sabre raised. I ducked my head behind my horse’s neck and shot him between the eyes, but just as my pistol cracked his sword cut through my horse’s head to the brain and the point of it laid open my right cheek, from the ear almost to the chin. The horse fell on my leg and held me there, unconscious. In the evening I was picked up and sent to the general hospital, where I stayed for three weeks. When I was discharged from the hospital I was too weak for active service so I was sent into the Tennessee mountains in charge of a detachment to intercept contraband which was being sent into the South from Cincinnati. We had been there about ten days when, early in the morning, one of the patrols brought in a fine-looking young man, who had been arrested as a spy. There was a refinement about the prisoner that aroused my suspicions, and during the day I satisfied myself that “he” was a woman. While she would not acknowledge her identity, I had reason to believe, and always have been sure in my own mind, that she was none other than Belle Boyd, the famous Confederate spy. I was born with a fondness for women, which then was strong within me, and besides, my heart was with her cause. Therefore it is without apology that I say I arranged things so that she escaped the next night through a window in the shed in which she was confined.