Page:War; or, What happens when one loves one's enemy, John Luther Long, 1913.djvu/32

 III

WHAT WAS GOING ON IN VIRGINIA

ELL, it had been unsettled on the border, even before the election of Lincoln, and six months after Dave went away to college in Virginia, the war trouble broke out in earnest. It was about even down our way, till after the battle of Bull Run. Then there were many more secessionists than Unions. There were three fights inside of three weeks at the store, and in every one the Unions got licked. I was in the first one. That's the reason I wasn't in the other two.

Dave used to write funny letters from college, about rebels and Unions and we'd all laugh at 'em. But a little after Bull Run he wrote one which worried me some. He said that his class—all but him—had voted to go into the army of Virginia, but that he'd told 16