The Yankees had come on, and, discovering them, halted.  Morgan himself stepped out in the road and shot the officer riding at the head of the column.  His men fell back without returning the fire, deployed and opened up.  Dan recognized the very tree behind which he had stood, and again he could almost hear Richard Hunt chuckling from behind another close by.

“We would be in bad shape,” said Richard Hunt, as the bullets whistled high overhead, “if we were in the tops of these trees instead of behind them.”  There had been no maneuvering, no command given among the Confederates.  Each man fought his own fight.  In ten minutes a horse-holder ran up from the rear, breathless, and announced that the Yankees were flanking.  Every man withdrew, straightway, after his own fashion, and in his own time.  One man was wounded and several were shot through the clothes.

“That was like a camp-meeting or an election row,” laughed Morgan, when they were in camp.

“Or an affair between Austrian and Italian outposts,” said Hunt.

A chuckle rose behind them.  A lame colonel was limping past.

“I got your courier,” he said.

“I sent no courier,” said Morgan.

“It was Forbes who wanted to charge ’em,” said Dan.

Again the Colonel chuckled.

“The Yankees ran when you did,” he said, and limped, chuckling, away.

But it was great fun, those moonlit nights, burning bridges and chasing Home Guards who would flee fifteen or twenty miles sometimes to “rally.”  Here was a little town through which Dan and Richard Hunt had marched with nine prisoners in a column—­taken by them alone—­and a captured United States flag, flying in front, scaring Confederate sympathizers and straggling soldiers, as Hunt reported, horribly.  Dan chuckled at the memory, for the prisoners were quartered with different messes, and, that night, several bottles of sparkling Catawba happened, by some mystery, to be on hand.  The prisoners were told that this was regularly issued by their commissaries, and thereupon they plead, with tears, to be received into the Confederate ranks.

This kind of service was valuable training for Morgan’s later work.  Slight as it was, it soon brought him thirty old, condemned artillery-horses—­Dan smiled now at the memory of those ancient chargers—­which were turned over to Morgan to be nursed until they would bear a mount, and, by and by, it gained him a colonelcy and three companies, superbly mounted and equipped, which, as “Morgan’s Squadron,” became known far and near.  Then real service began.