When a person is hunted down he can accomplish some wonderful feats in quick traveling, even if the difficulties to be overcome are distressingly innumerable.
I had forgotten all about the sore foot, on which I had limped to the house the night before. My wrist, on which the window sash had fallen, was most painful and threatened to give me trouble. Though I had been on a terrible jaunt for twenty-four hours previously, I did not at that time feel tired, sleepy, or even hungry.
There was the one idea in my head--to make all the speed possible, and increase the distance between myself and Manassas. I had come upon a peculiarly sickening smell, that made me a little sick at the stomach, when all of a sudden I was startled, and my blood chilled, by a rustling noise in front of me; glancing ahead, in a terror of fright, I saw gleaming through the darkness something that I thought and believed might be the glaring eyes of a bloodhound. That dread was in my mind, but in the next instant the eyes had disappeared; with a rushing, rustling noise, the object, whatever it was that owned the terrible eyes, ran off through the woods.
For the moment I was so stunned that I could scarcely move forward or backward; but, on second thought, realizing it was probably some wolfish dog that I had surprised while feeding upon the carcass of a dead sheep, I gathered courage to move ahead. As it was in my path, I was obliged to approach it, despite the sickening odor which was everywhere around. In a hot, sultry August night it was like--well, old soldiers can imagine what it was like. Desirous of avoiding the stench as much as possible, I was climbing over a log rather than walk too close to where I supposed the eyes had been; hurrying along, holding my breath, with one hand to my nose, what was my horror to find that I had stepped from the top of the log right down on to the decaying body of--_a man_! O, horror of horrors! I can not write of it. I've never even told the story to my best friends. It has been too dreadful to contemplate; but the naked, disgusting facts are, that I stepped down on to the soft object--my foot slipped, as it would from a rotten, slimy substance, throwing me partly down, as I had one hand on my nose, and, in my efforts to recover myself, plunged both my hands into the soft, decaying flesh of the head, causing the hair to peel off the scalp.