“I told you that you ought to let me carry you. Just lie there, major, and I’ll come back for you as soon as I set your wife down. Keep quiet, major,” as Dan swore at the mud and slipped again, “and I’ll pick you up and get you along all right.” As Dan dragged himself up he was a perfect mud man, and he had left the print of himself in the mud behind him. They took us in at the farmhouse, and sent men to help the driver prize the ambulance out of the hole. They scraped the mud off me, and a colored woman washed my clothes and hung them by the fire, so they might be dry by morning. Of course, this process put me in bed at once. Our supper was poor and the bed uncomfortable, but it was the best our hosts could do. After an uncomfortable night we started off again toward Dinwiddie Court-house, which was to be our next stopping-place. As we journeyed on we knew that we were getting into most dangerous quarters. The nearer we drew to Petersburg the nearer we were to the tangle of Federal and Confederate lines; the nearer to skirmishers and scouts from both armies. The night got blacker and blacker--you could not see your hand before you--and the blacker it grew the more frightened old Miles became. Out of the darkness where, invisible, he sat astride the invisible mule he drove, he poured an unceasing stream of complaint. “Arrah! the divil a bit can Oi see where Oi’m goin’. It’s so dark ye couldn’t see a light if there was any. The mules, intilligint crathurs they are, maybe they know where they be goin’. It’s more than the loikes of me does. But what Oi’ve got agin a mule is that they don’t know an honest Amerikin in gray clothes--or mixed rags it is now--from a nasty, thavin’ Yankee.” If we were silent for a few minutes, then Miles spoke out for company’s sake, or asked unnecessary questions perhaps to find out if we were there, and that the Yankees hadn’t spirited us away. “These woods are full of Yankees,” he said. “It’s chock-full of them, it is. An’ it’s so dark, it is, they could just come out here an’ kill us all, they could, an’ we’d never know it.” “Shut your mouth up, you fool!” said my husband, who knew that the woods were full of Yankees. “If we can’t see them they can’t see us, and how are they to know but we are Yankees unless you tell them, you blathering idiot?” “The divil a bit Oi’ll be tellin’ ’em, the nasty blue thaves. Thrust Miles O’Flannigan for thet. But they could just come out o’ them woods, they could, an’ take us all prisoners an’ we’d never know it. An’ the driver’s the fust man they’d git, sure.” At last Dan got out, mounted his horse, and rode in front of the ambulance. “Now,” said he to Miles, “follow me, and if you open your d---- mouth again, I’ll blow your brains out.”