The man was not in uniform, and was not armed.  He was a stranger in the country; that was all we ever found out about him.  The thought of him got to preying upon me every night; I could not get rid of it.  I could not drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed such a wanton thing.  And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be just that—­the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.  My campaign was spoiled.  It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped for this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I for a child’s nurse.  I resolved to retire from this avocation of sham soldiership while I could save some remnant of my self-respect.  These morbid thoughts clung to me against reason; for at bottom I did not believe I had touched that man.  The law of probabilities decreed me guiltless of his blood; for in all my small experience with guns I had never hit anything I had tried to hit, and I knew I had done my best to hit him.  Yet there was no solace in the thought.  Against a diseased imagination, demonstration goes for nothing.

The rest of my war experience was of a piece with what I have already told of it.  We kept monotonously falling back upon one camp or another, and eating up the country—­I marvel now at the patience of the farmers and their families.  They ought to have shot us; on the contrary, they were as hospitably kind and courteous to us as if we had deserved it.  In one of these camps we found Ab Grimes, an Upper Mississippi pilot, who afterwards became famous as a dare-devil rebel spy, whose career bristled with desperate adventures.  The look and style of his comrades suggested that they had not come into the war to play, and their deeds made good the conjecture later.  They were fine horsemen and good revolver-shots; but their favourite arm was the lasso.  Each had one at his pommel, and could snatch a man out of the saddle with it every time, on a full gallop, at any reasonable distance.

In another camp the chief was a fierce and profane old blacksmith of sixty, and he had furnished his twenty recruits with gigantic home-made bowie-knives, to be swung with the two hands, like the machetes of the Isthmus.  It was a grisly spectacle to see that earnest band practising their murderous cuts and slashes under the eye of that remorseless old fanatic.

The last camp which we fell back upon was in a hollow near the village of Florida, where I was born—­in Monroe County.  Here we were warned, one day, that a Union colonel was sweeping down on us with a whole regiment at his heels.  This looked decidedly serious.  Our boys went apart and consulted; then we went back and told the other companies present that the war was a disappointment to us and we were going to disband.  They were getting ready, themselves,