Evening star., 1928-11-04
Civil War Produced Some Secret Service Adventures Which Rank Among the
Most Thrilling History Ware-G Lafayette Baker and Mosby,
Chief of Rangers, We're Known to Capital

to him when sword blade came poking
into the hay all about him.
1t must have taken almost super
human self-control to keep from moving
out of the way of those sword thrusts
and thereby betraying himself. Every
one will understand his relief when ne
finally heard the cavalryman nearest
him say:
He amt in here, that's sho'l'
He came at last to the shore of the
Potomac River where only four miles
across the water lay safety in the Union
ranks.
1t says something about the ordeal he
survived, the fact that when, several
days later, he stumbled out of leaky
boat on the Union shore of the Potomac
he remained lying in the mud of his
landing.
He lay there unable to summon an
other bit of strength from the heart
and the muscles he had taxed so usuri-
ously on his adventure.
When in the morning Union patrol
found him he was shaking from head
to foot. But 1t was with the malaria
he had caught and not from any further
fear.
What he told Gen. Scott and his
value to the Union armies, for Abraham
Lincoln made him provost general and
later brigadier general in charge of the
Secret Service for both the War and
State Departments.
And 1t Is in the capacity of chief
of the Secret Service that he enters
into our next story in which two woman
spies PLAYED a part in one of the most
brilliant of war adventures.
Fairfax Court House In Vir-
ginia was in the hands of the Union
troops, but one would not think so from
the picture 1t made by night in the
mansion occupied by Gen. Stoughton.
War is hard and the soldier is entitled
to whatever ease and charm he can find
In the course of it.
Fairfax Court House was well within
the Union lines and the enemy was
busy elsewhere; the town was like a
garden of femininity and the Southern
bellies seemed not to harbor too much
enmity to the young Federal officers
who paid them court
So there was much music, lights
cleaned and uniforms in blue danced
and sat out between dances with hoop
skirts of every pretty hue.
Gen Stoughton himself was no stern
disciplinarian. He was mediocre
soldier and it was not talent that made
him, after the exploit am about to re-
late, one of the most talked of men in
the Civil War. In his justification let
me say only that his men were Just as
much lulled by the supposed safety OF
their military position as he himself
was.
But among the guerrilla parties rang
ing the indeterminate territory where
L.
the see-saw Of even battle was q
slightly built man on horseback at the
head Of troop of horsemen. The par
ties varied in number from 25 to $50.
according to the daring Of the exploit
they were planning.
The more rash their plans the fewer
men there were in them
The leader of the one in this in
stance, a bantam of man with a
high forehead. keen sparkling blue
ewes, with the thin-lipped mobile mouth
of a man of action, wiry and restless,
had been an attorney when the war
broke out.
And the man broke out of his office
with the gladness of a prisoner at
last set free.
\ Up to the moment the bugle sounded
poetry had been his only release; he
went adventuring with Byron's pirates,
crusaded with SCOTS mailed knights,
followed Napoleon through the dazzling
pages of his history-only to find him
self cooped within walls lined with
sheepskin- bound volumes of law.
X X X X
THEN the cannon sounded at Fort
Sumter and John Mosby became a
man delivered. He fairly leaped into
the fight. But he was tired of dis
cipline and to enlist under commander
was not his mood.
So he offered his services to the
Confederacy on the condition that he
would be given a free rein-the free
rein of a leader of picked irregular
cavalry waging guerrilla warfare wher-
ever and whenever he saw his chance.
So rich was the promise of his per-
sonality to those young Southerners
who loved romance of action that In
short while he had at his beck and
call 300 daredevils on horseback.
Mesby's Rangers people began to call
them, For within "a hours after that
troop vaulted into it's saddles 1t gave
the whole country something to talk
about. Mosby had picked speciality
for himself and his men-kidnaping
Union officers and their men from in
side the Union lines
In some town we'll within the Union
lines some fairly important officer
sleeping comfortably in bed would wake
with start and find that it was
slightly built man in Confederate gray
who had rudely shaken him out of his
sleep.
An army revolver pointed at his
head; crisp orders only time enough
to throw on a minimum of clothes;
from a score to a hundred mounted
men in gray waiting outside horse
for the prisoner and other horses for