In the course of this, they had fired on us; but I have no memory of that. I had squeezed the trigger of my own gun, and to my amazement, it had fired and kicked back into my shoulder with the force of an angry mule; and then I was adding my own voice to the crescendo of sound, hurling more vile language than I ever thought I knew, sobbing and shouting, and aware that if I had passed water before, it was not enough, for my pants were soaking wet.

I would have stood there and died there if left to myself, but Cousin Simmons grabbed my arm in his viselike grip and fairly plucked me out of there; and then I came to some sanity and plunged away with such extraordinary speed that I outdistanced Cousin Simmons by far. Everyone else was running. Later we realized that the redcoats had stopped their charge at the wall. Their only hope of survival was to hold to the road and keep marching.

We tumbled to a stop in Deacon Gordon's cow hole, a low-lying bit of pasture with a muddy pool of water in its middle. A dozen cows mooed sadly and regarded us as if we were insane, as perhaps we were at that moment, with the crazy excitement of our first encounter, the yelling and shooting still continuing up at the road, and the thirst of some of the men, which was so great that they waded into the muddy water and scooped up handfuls of it. Isaac Pitt, one of the men from Lincoln, had taken a musket ball in his belly; and though he had found the strength to run with us, now he collapsed and lay on the ground, dying, the Reverend holding his head and wiping his hot brow. It may appear that we were cruel and callous, but no one had time to spend sympathizing with poor Isaac -- except the Reverend. I know that I myself felt that it was a mortal shame for a man to be torn open by a British musket ball, as Isaac had been, yet I also felt relieved and lucky that it had been him and not myself. I was drunk with excitement and the smell of gunpowder that came floating down from the road, and the fact that I was not afraid now, but only waiting to know what to do next.