But a Nemesis in this case, as in many others, was lurking near.  Bands of Confederates and scouts had scattered themselves on the flanks and rear of the enemy; old men and boys and disabled veterans were lying in wait in many thickets and out of the way places, ready to pounce upon the unsuspecting freebooters and give to them their just deserts.  Was it any wonder that so many hundreds, nay thousands, of these Goths failed to answer to Sherman’s last roll call?  Before the sun was many hours older, after the burning of the Loner homestead, the dreaded “bushwhackers” were on the trail of the vandals.

For years afterwards people, from curiosity, came to look at a heap of human bones in a thicket near, bleached by winter’s rain and summer’s sun, while some of the older men, pointing to the ghostly relics, would say, “Those are the remains of Sherman’s houseburners.”  And such were the scenes from the Saltkahatchie to the Cape Fear.  Who were to blame?

Sherman now directs his march towards Winnsboro and Chester, still in the four great parols, burning and plundering as they go.  It seems that in their march through Georgia they were only whetting their appetites for a full gorge of vandalism in South Carolina.  After their carnival of ruin in Columbia the Federals, like the tiger, which, with the taste of blood, grows more ravenous, they became more destructive the more destruction they saw.  Great clouds of black smoke rose up over the whole county and darkened the sky overhead, while at night the heavens were lit up by the glare of the burning buildings.  The railroad tracks were torn up and bridges burned, the iron being laid across heaps of burning ties, then when at red heat, were wrapped around trees and telegraph posts—­these last through pure wantonness, as no army was in their rear that could ever use them again.

While that part of Sherman’s Army was crossing Broad River at Alston and Freshley’s, and the other near Ridgeway, General Hampton wrote General Beauregard to concentrate all his forces at or near the latter place by shipping Hardee and all forces under him at once by railroad—­Stephenson’s Division of Western men, now with Hampton and all the cavalry to fall upon the Fifteenth Corps, under Blair, and crush it before the other portions of the army could reach it.  He argued that the enemy was marching so wide apart, the country so hilly, and the roads in Fairfield County almost impassable, that one wing of the army could be crushed before the other could reach it.  But General Beauregard telegraphed him, “The time is past for that move.  While it could have been done at the Edisto or Branchville, it is too late now.”