When Custer was ready to fight he made his charge; the valiant Rosser fled before it, and never but once stopped running until he reached Mount Jackson, twenty-six miles away. It was a trial of speed, rather than a battle, and that is the reason the engagement is called "Woodstock Races." The Confederates lost everything they had that was carried on wheels, and the Union loss was but sixty killed and wounded. Rodney Gray was not as much of a braggart as Rosser was, but if he had tried to carry his threat into execution he might have been as badly whipped. CHAPTER III. CHEERS FOR "THE STARS AND BARS." If any boy who reads this series of books believes that secession was the result of a sudden impulse on the part of the Southern people, he has but to look into his history to find that he is mistaken. They had not only been thinking about it for a long time, but, aided by some of Buchanan's treacherous cabinet officers, they had been preparing for it. The Secretary of the Navy ordered the best vessels in our little fleet to distant stations, so that they could not be called upon to help the government when the insurgents seized the forts that were scattered along the coast; and the Secretary of War took nearly a hundred and fifty thousand stand of arms out of Northern arsenals and sent them to the South. He did it openly and without any attempt at concealment, and the Southern papers publicly thanked him for so doing. The Mobile _Register_ said, in so many words, that they were much obliged to Mr. Floyd for "disarming the North and equipping the South." After such acts as these on the part of government officials, it is not surprising that private citizens began to take their local affairs into their own hands. A regular system of espionage and ostracism was established all over the South. Everybody who was known or suspected of being opposed to slavery and disunion was not only closely watched, but was denied admission to homes in which he had always been a welcome visitor. Free negroes were given to understand that they could either clear out, or remain and be sold into bondage. Northern men--even those who had long been engaged in business in the South, and whose interests were centered there--were looked upon and treated with contempt, and their lives were made miserable in every way that the exasperated and unreasonable people around them could think of.