All through that fight I was scared nearly to death.  I hardly knew anything, I was so frightened; but you see, nobody knew that but me.  Next day General Polk sent for me, and praised me for my bravery and gallant conduct.  I never said anything, I let it go at that.  I judged it wasn’t so, but it was not for me to contradict a general officer.

Pretty soon after that I was sick, and used up, and had to go off to the Hot Springs.  When there, I got a good many letters from commanders saying they wanted me to come back.  I declined, because I wasn’t well enough or strong enough; but I kept still, and kept the reputation I had made.

A plain story, straightforwardly told; but Mumford told me that that pilot had ‘gilded that scare of his, in spots;’ that his subsequent career in the war was proof of it.

We struck down through the chute of Island No. 8, and I went below and fell into conversation with a passenger, a handsome man, with easy carriage and an intelligent face.  We were approaching Island No. 10, a place so celebrated during the war.  This gentleman’s home was on the main shore in its neighborhood.  I had some talk with him about the war times; but presently the discourse fell upon ‘feuds,’ for in no part of the South has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer between warring families, than in this particular region.  This gentleman said—­

’There’s been more than one feud around here, in old times, but I reckon the worst one was between the Darnells and the Watsons.  Nobody don’t know now what the first quarrel was about, it’s so long ago; the Darnells and the Watsons don’t know, if there’s any of them living, which I don’t think there is.  Some says it was about a horse or a cow—­ anyway, it was a little matter; the money in it wasn’t of no consequence—­none in the world—­both families was rich.  The thing could have been fixed up, easy enough; but no, that wouldn’t do.  Rough words had been passed; and so, nothing but blood could fix it up after that.  That horse or cow, whichever it was, cost sixty years of killing and crippling!  Every year or so somebody was shot, on one side or the other; and as fast as one generation was laid out, their sons took up the feud and kept it a-going.  And it’s just as I say; they went on shooting each other, year in and year out—­making a kind of a religion of it, you see —­till they’d done forgot, long ago, what it was all about.  Wherever a Darnell caught a Watson, or a Watson caught a Darnell, one of ’em was going to get hurt—­only question was, which of them got the drop on the other.  They’d shoot one another down, right in the presence of the family.  They didn’t hunt for each other, but when they happened to meet, they puffed and begun.  Men would shoot boys, boys would shoot men.  A man shot a boy twelve years old—­happened on him in the woods, and didn’t give him no chance.  If he had ‘a’ given him a chance, the boy’d ‘a’ shot