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.
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