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Altsheler, Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander), 1862-1919

"A Story of Lee's Great Stand"

He shouted to his horse and made him run
faster.
A bullet struck the pommel of his saddle and glanced off. A boy in an
orchard had fired it. A load of bird-shot, a handful it seemed to Harry,
flew about his ears. A bent old man who ought to have been sitting on
a porch in a rocking chair had discharged it from the edge of a wood.
A squirrel hunter on a hill took a pot shot at him and missed.
Harry was furious with anger. Decidedly this was no place for a visitor
from the South. He did not detect the faintest sign of hospitality.
Men and women alike seemed to dislike him. A powerful virago hurled a
stone at his head, which would have struck him senseless had it not
missed, and a farmer standing by a fence had a shotgun cocked and ready
to be fired as he passed, but Harry, snatching one of the useless pistols
from his belt, hurled it at him with all his might. It struck the man a
glancing blow on the head, felling him as if he had been shot, and then
Harry, thinking quickly, acted with equal quickness.
He reined in his horse with such suddenness that he nearly shot from the
saddle. Then he leaped down, seized the shotgun from under the hands of
the fallen man, sprang on his horse and was away again, sending back a
cry of defiance.


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