My friends told me that I whipped both of them, and I
suppose their friends told them that they had whipped me. All I know is,
they both run, and I was bloody from head to foot, from where I had been
cut in the forehead and face by the canteens. This all happened one dark
night in the month of July, 1864, in the rifle pit in front of Atlanta.
When day broke the next morning, I went forward to where I had shot at
the "boogaboo" of the night before, and right there I found a dead Yankee
soldier, fully accoutered for any emergency, his eyes wide open. I
looked at him, and I said, "Old fellow, I am sorry for you; didn't know
it was you, or I would have been worse scared than I was. You are
dressed mighty fine, old fellow, but I don't want anything you have got,
but your haversack." It was a nice haversack, made of chamois skin.
I kept it until the end of the war, and when we surrendered at Greensboro,
N. C., I had it on. But the other soldiers who were with me, went
through him and found twelve dollars in greenback, a piece of tobacco,
a gun-wiper and gun-stopper and wrench, a looking-glass and pocket-comb,
and various and sundry other articles. I came across that dead Yankee
two days afterwards, and he was as naked as the day he came into the
world, and was as black as a negro, and was as big as a skinned horse.
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