Page:1861 vs 1882. "Co. Aytch," Maury grays, First Tennessee regiment; or, A side show of the show (IA 1861vs1882coaytc00watk).pdf/167

Rh let come what will. I raised my gun, placed it to my shoulder, took deliberate aim, and fired, and waugh-weouw, the most unearthly scream I ever heard, greeted my ears. I broke and run to a tree near by, and had just squatted behind it, when zip, zip two balls from our picket post struck the tree in two inches of my head. I hallooed to our picket not to fire that it was "me," the videt. I went back, and says I, "Who fired those two shots?" Two fellows spoke up and said that they did it. No sooner, was it spoken, than I was on them like a duck on a june-bng, pugnis et calcibus. We "fout and fit, and gouged and bit," right there in that picket post. I have the marks on my face and forehead where one of them struck me with a Yankee zinc canteen, filled with water. I do not know which whipped. 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 accoutred 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 surrenedredsurrendered [sic] 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. He had mortified. I