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A few weeks later a part of our army made an assault upon the enemy’s left. The attack, which was made upon an unknown position and across unfamiliar ground, was led by our brigade. The ground was so broken and the underbrush so thick that all mounted officers and men were compelled to fight on foot–the brigade commander and his staff included. In the melee Thurston was parted from the rest of us, and we found him, horribly wounded, only when we had taken the enemy’s last defense. He was some months in hospital at Nashville, Tennessee, but finally rejoined us. He said little about his misadventure, except that he had been bewildered and had strayed into the enemy’s lines and been shot down; but from one of his captors, whom we in turn had captured, we learned the particulars. “He came walking right upon us as we lay in line,” said this man. “A whole company of us instantly sprang up and leveled our rifles at his breast, some of them almost touching him. ‘Throw down that sword and surrender, you damned Yank!’ shouted some one in authority. The fellow ran his eyes along the line of rifle barrels, folded his arms across his breast, his right hand still clutching his sword, and deliberately replied, ‘I will not.’ If we had all fired he would have been torn to shreds. Some of us didn’t. I didn’t, for one; nothing could have induced me.”

When one is tranquilly looking death in the eye and refusing him any concession one naturally has a good opinion of one’s self. I don’t know if it was this feeling that in Thurston found expression in a stiffish attitude and folded arms; at the mess table one day, in his absence, another explanation was suggested by our quartermaster, an irreclaimable stammerer when the wine was in: “It’s h–is w–ay of m-m-mastering a c-c-consti-t-tu-tional t-tendency to r–un aw–ay.”

“What!” I flamed out, indignantly rising; “you intimate that Thurston is a coward–and in his absence?”

“If he w–ere a cow–wow-ard h–e w–wouldn’t t-try to m-m-master it; and if he w–ere p-present I w–wouldn’t d-d-dare to d-d-discuss it,” was the mollifying reply.

This intrepid man, George Thurston, died an ignoble death. The brigade was in camp, with headquarters in a grove of immense trees. To an upper branch of one of these a venturesome climber had attached the two ends of a long rope and made a swing with a length of not less than one hundred feet. Plunging downward from a height of fifty feet, along the arc of a circle with such a radius, soaring to an equal altitude, pausing for one breathless instant, then sweeping dizzily backward–no one who has not tried it can conceive the terrors of such sport to the novice. Thurston came out of his tent one day and asked for instruction in the mystery of propelling the swing–the art of rising and sitting, which every boy has mastered. In a few moments he had acquired the trick and was swinging higher than the most experienced of us had dared. We shuddered to look at his fearful flights.

“St-t-top him,” said the quartermaster, snailing lazily along from the mess-tent, where he had been lunching; “h–e d-doesn’t know that if h–e g-g-goes c-clear over h–e’ll w–ind up the sw–ing.”

With such energy was that strong man cannonading himself through the air that at each extremity of his increasing arc his body, standing in the swing, was almost horizontal. Should he once pass above the level of the rope’s attachment he would be lost; the rope would slacken and he would fall vertically to a point as far below as he had gone above, and then the sudden tension of the rope would wrest it from his hands. All saw the peril–all cried out to him to desist, and gesticulated at him as, indistinct and with a noise like the rush of a cannon shot in flight, he swept past us through the lower reaches of his hideous oscillation. A woman standing at a little distance away fainted and fell unobserved. Men from the camp of a regiment near by ran in crowds to see, all shouting. Suddenly, as Thurston was on his upward curve, the shouts all ceased.