We moved to a point near La Fayette, a village in Walker County, Georgia. There, one of my men learned from a country girl he often visited, that the bushwhackers of the district would meet, in order to effect an organization, the next Saturday night, at an old church in or near McLemore's Cove several miles away. The girl was informed that forty or fifty armed men would be present. We could only be assured of the damsel's truthfulness by going into McLemore's Cove. There was great hazard to be incurred. If assailed and overpowered there was only one way of escape, and our force was too weak to cope with that to be organized by the bushwhackers. We held a council of war, and after due deliberation, condemned the proposed expedition. Five of us persisting in the purpose to capture the bushwhackers, finally arranged it that we would secure the co-operation of a cavalry force at the nearest Confederate outpost, and make a vigorous descent upon the country church. Fortune favored us. We had not gone five miles in the direction of the proposed rendezvous before we discovered a solitary horseman, who proved to be the very man we wanted. He came upon us so suddenly, in an abrupt curve of the densely wooded roadside, that he had no opportunity to escape. Covered instantly by five muskets, he dismounted and surrendered without a murmur. We agreed with the prisoner, who was quite fifty years old, such was our eagerness to obtain information, if we found his statements truthful, and if he would give us information we wanted and no more wage war against the South, that we would release him. He assented, and confirmed the story told by Ralph's sweetheart. We found all his assertions correct, and the bargain then made was afterwards faithfully executed. Two men, with this prisoner, were sent to the nearest cavalry encampment. Fifty men were placed at my disposal; the church, while the bushwhackers occupied it, was completely invested; and its occupants, about fifty in number, were captured without firing a gun. They never dreamed of the possible presence, in that remote, inaccessible cove, of a strong body of Confederate cavalry.

Of course, we who participated in the hard march and toils and dangers of this expedition into McLemore's Cove were not a little irritated when, returning to camp, we found that our comrades had done nothing in our absence. They had participated in many country dances. They were telling of the beauty of many maidens, occupants of many cottages and cabins everywhere within ten miles of the village. They had forgotten our existence and inquired most carelessly about the result of the fortunate expedition. We were grievously offended, and proposed, at the earliest opportunity, to punish their timidity and selfishness.

A country dance was organized and appointed for that very evening. We five who had shared in the expedition into McLemore's Cove made no sign, but went quietly to the ball. We danced as vigorously and joyously as the rest till perhaps eleven o'clock. Then, as pre-arranged, three of the five mentioned went unnoticed to a point near the court-house, half a mile distant, and fired a volley of muskets and pistols. Instantly the music was silenced and dancing suspended. Each soldier hurriedly armed himself. No further demonstration of enemies or friends occurring, two of my recusant scouts, blustering monstrously and asserting much fearlessness, said they would go out and discover the cause of the alarm. Accompanied by a fun-loving Irishman, I followed, pursuing a street parallel with that taken by these mock heroes. They went not farther than two hundred yards, and stopped beneath the dense shadow of a great cedar tree. We fired our muskets into the tree-top above their heads. Each thought the other mortally wounded. Both cried out, “They are coming! They are coming!” and fled precipitately. We fired our pistols to accelerate their flight, and heighten the terror of their dismayed comrades. They rushed into the hall among frightened women and unnerved men, unnerved because dangers environing them were unseen and unmeasured. Rapidly girls and beaux of the immediate vicinity ran away to their homes, and there was such a stampede, as “when Belgium's capital had gathered in her beauty and her chivalry.”

My object was accomplished. The men who had refused to go with us into McLemore's Cove were wofully frightened. This Capua in Lombardy which had wrought such fatal paralysis of the soldierly virtues and energies of my scouts, was divested of attractiveness, and next morning, rising before the sun, my men were ready for the execution of any task of toil or feat of daring. I explained the incidents of the night before and stated that soldiers were made worthless by whiskey, dancing, and women, and that, if reform were impossible, I would send them back to the ditches and have others, in their stead, detailed for this free and exciting service.

I should not forget to state that the honest bushwhacker we captured won my confidence to such an extent that I told him how completely my heart had been entrapped by the charms and wiles and graces of pretty, confiding, frank, and fearless Mamie Hughes. To him I entrusted my first letter to Mamie. I retained no copy, but remember that I suggested that she should take advantage of the bushwhacker's thorough knowledge of the country and of his trustworthiness, and accompany him to her own home below Dalton. I confessed to the bushwhacker how thoroughly I was devoted to the charming girl, and promised, if he would conduct her safely to her own home below our lines, I would do him any personal service he might require. I am not sure that my judgment approved the arrangement I made for a meeting with Mamie. If I had loved her less, I would never have proposed her subjection to the dangers and fatigues of such a journey even with such a guardsman. But I had never ceased to think and dream of Mamie's great, lustrous, black eyes and of that limitless confidence I read in them when she looked upon my face and held my hand by the moonlit roadside where the compulsory dance occurred on the cold, bleak hillside not far below the village of Charleston. Every day some soldier, noticing my abstracted manner, said that Mamie Hughes had wrought a marvelous transformation of my conduct and character. When relieved of duties and anxieties incident to my position and to dangers almost always environing us, I stood aloof from my men, no longer participating in their rude sports or occupying a place at some improvised card-table. I was dreaming of Mamie Hughes, and sought solitude, that undisturbed, fancy might reproduce her matchless charms. She had promised never to forget and meet me at her home. From the day on which I transmitted the letter telling her to come, that I must see her again, that I loved her passionately, that I had never been able to dismiss the splendid vision wrought by her presence or repress aspirations excited by the hope that she would love me - from that day I had been a changed man. I was conscious that I had entered upon a new life. I had found one to share it who had already become an inseparable part of my existence.

Wedded life, if marriage be unity, begins before we go to the altar and before the priest utters his meaningless jargon. This is only a ceremony; the fact is accomplished and real wedded oneness begins beneath the moon and stars, as when, on the roadside, Mamie and I met and parted so suddenly that her face and form constituted an imperfect memory, while their effect upon my conduct and emotions wrought such a change in my character and habits that my associates knew that we “twain were one flesh.” They had seen how I was dazed by the wonderful fascinations of the little sprite that sprang, a brilliant, startling vision from dreamland, in the midst of the mountains of East Tennessee.

From many sources I had learned the history of Mamie's family. Her brother was a Union soldier serving under Colonel Cliff. Her father, a life-long Whig, was a devout loyalist or Union man, while she and her mother were enthusiastic rebels. It is a strange fact, soon discovered in traversing these mountainous districts of several coterminous States, that while men were commonly “loyal,” women, more impulsive and sympathetic, and apt to serve the weak against the strong, were ardent “rebels.” Political and partisan considerations involved were never valued by Mamie Hughes. She was born rich and a slaveholder, but never dreamed of the pending conflict as a struggle to maintain or extirpate slavery. She was not of those who went to war because the Union would not suffer southern masters to convey negros in the abstract to an impossible place - Kansas. She would not have given one drop of the blood of those dear to her for the freedom or slavery of all Africans in the South. Fighting was begun, and womanly sympathy impelled Mamie to espouse the cause of the weak and of those she knew and loved. Her father, recognizing, as the daughter and wife did not, ties of partisanship, and listening, as was his wont, to the sturdy, practical, simple eloquence of Andrew Johnson and reading the National Intelligencer, a Whig and conservative newspaper that once entered the home of almost every slaveholder, was an unfaltering, earnest Unionist.