Page 127 - Arkansas Confederate Women

110 Confederate Women of Arkansas

had no time to delay, as Federal scouts might at any time
overtake us, and either kill him or imprison us all.

The roads were awfully bad and our first night out we had
to sit up in a log cabin. The owner was a poor woman with five
dirty children, her husband in the war, and she had only fat

meat and cornmeal. I tried to cook my first meal, but made such
a miserable failure that Mr. Lecroy came to my rescue and fin-
ished after I had blistered my hands and almost burnt my

face.

After a narrow escape from drowning in a swollen slough
we at last arrived on the third day at the camp, where I at
once became the heroine of a number of old Tige's men, as he

was familiarly called. He, G-en. Cabell, complimented me on
my bravery, and Mr. Lecroy on his strategy. Here at last I

found happiness once more, and often rode horseback with my

old soldier friends or watched the brigade on dress parade.

' My happiness did not last long, however. In a few weeks

.

Gen. Cabell with his brigade was ordered away, and I was forced
to go farther south. I went to Mr. James' cousin's plantation
at Dercheat, Union county, the home of Maj. D. 0. Kyle,

where I remained until Mr. Browley came for me and accom-
panied me back to the "Clift place" five miles from Benton,
where my mother and sister Fannie Wills, with the rest of the
children, had refugeed after our home in Benton was burned.

a nicety of brutality.

That was the time my mother had been taken prisoner at

daybreak, one cold, sleety morning and marched in her gown,

barefooted, to a Federal wagon, where she was placed before the

house was fired and driven a mile on their way to Little Rock,
when the Federal soldiers told her to look back at her home.
She looked back and saw forked flames that seemed to lick the
sky, when one of the men began to curse her and said: "Your

—d d rebel young ones are burned up." She did not know any

better until after she reached Little Rock. Chief Justice Eng-

lish, his wife and Miss Sophia Crease met my mother in a car-

riage with a permit obtained ingeniously from G-en. Steele to
allow her to remain a prisoner at the home of Chief Justice