L. P. Brockett, The camp, the battlefield, and the hospital: or, lights and shadows of the great rebellion

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[51] their names, and lecturing the old man severely, Corporal Pike rode away. He soon overtook a comrade from his own regiment, and feeling ill, stopped with his friend and another Union soldier at the house of a citizen, near Meridian, to pass the night. Here an attempt was made during the night to assassinate him, but being awake and seeing one of the assassins raise and aim his gun at him through the window, he fired his pistol, and wounded the assassin, probably mortally. His comrades carried him off, and Pike was not again disturbed. The next morning he reached Huntsville.

General Mitchel immediately sent him to ascertain the rebel force at Bridgeport, Tennessee. He reached she vicinity without any notable adventure, ascertained the number and position of the rebel troops, made his report and sent it by a Union officer who had escorted him nearly to Bridgeport, told the officer he would remain in the mountains till the Union army came to take Bridgeport. Here, after some adventure, escaping once from the rebel pickets only by shooting the sergeant, and running the gauntlet of the fire of the squad; he was taken prisoner, partly in consequence of his own carelessness. He was taken first to Bridgeport, and thence to Chattanooga, where he was confined in the jail, where were, at that time, in the dungeon twenty-one men from the Second, the Twenty-first, and the Thirty-third Ohio regiments, whose adventures are related elsewhere in this work.¹ After considerable suffering here, Corporal Pike was removed ;o Knoxville to another jail, where he was confined in an iron cage. Here he was told that he was