He immediately saw the sense of my advice.  Issuing orders to enter the ravine, he dismounted with his men behind the bank.  There we stood off the Indians till the soldiers in the rear, hearing the shots, came charging to the rescue and drove the Indians away.  The rapidity with which we got into the ravine, and the protection its banks afforded us, enabled us to get away without losing a man.  Had the general’s original plan been carried out none of us would have come away to tell the story.  I was summoned to the general’s tent that evening.

“That was a brilliant suggestion of yours, young man,” he said.  “This Indian fighting is a new business to me.  I realize that if I had carried out my first order not a man of us would ever have reached the command alive.”

I said:  “General, do you remember the battle of Tupedo?”

“I do,” he said, with his chest expanding a little.  “I was in command at that battle.”  The whipping of Forrest had been a particularly difficult and unusual feat, and General Smith never failed to show his pride in the achievement whenever the battle of Tupedo was mentioned.

“Do you remember,” I continued, “the young fellow you caught behind a tree, and sent for him afterward to ask him why he did so?”

“Is it possible you are the man who found Forrest’s command!” he asked in amazement.  “I had often wondered what became of you,” he said, when I told him I was the same man.  “What have you been doing since the war!”

I told him I had come West as a scout for General Sherman in 1865 and had been scouting ever since.  He was highly delighted to see me again, and from that time forward, as long as he remained on the Plains, I resumed my old position as his chief scout.

After the battle of Tupedo, Smith’s command was ordered to Memphis, and from there sent by boat up the Mississippi.  We of the cavalry disembarked at Cape Jardo, Smith remaining behind with the infantry, which came on later.  General Sterling Price, of the Confederate army, was at this time coming out of Arkansas into southern Missouri with a large army.  His purpose was to invade Kansas.

Federal troops were not then plentiful in the West.  Smith’s army from Tennessee, Blunt’s troops from Kansas, what few regulars there were in Missouri, and some detachments of Kansas volunteers were all being moved forward to head off Price.  Being still a member of the Ninth Kansas Cavalry, I now found myself back in my old country—­just ahead of Price’s army, which had now reached the fertile northwestern Missouri.

In carrying dispatches from General McNeil to General Blunt or General Pleasanton I passed around and through Price’s army many times.  I always wore the disguise of a Confederate soldier, and always escaped detection.  Price fought hard and successfully, gaining ground steadily, till at Westport, Missouri, and other battlefields near the Kansas line, the Federal troops checked his advance.