The wounded had all been dragg'd (to give a better chance
also for plunder,) out of their wagons; some had been effectually
dispatch'd, and their bodies were lying there lifeless and bloody.
Others, not yet dead, but horribly mutilated, were moaning or
groaning. Of our men who surrender'd, most had been thus maim'd or
slaughter'd.
At this instant a force of our cavalry, who had been following the
train at some interval, charged suddenly upon the secesh captors, who
proceeded at once to make the best escape they could. Most of them got
away, but we gobbled two officers and seventeen men, in the very acts
just described. The sight was one which admitted of little discussion,
as may be imagined. The seventeen captur'd men and two officers were
put under guard for the night, but it was decided there and then that
they should die. The next morning the two officers were taken in the
town, separate places, put in the centre of the street, and shot. The
seventeen men were taken to an open ground, a little one side. They
were placed in a hollow square, half-encompass'd by two of our cavalry
regiments, one of which regiments had three days before found the
bloody corpses of three of their men hamstrung and hung up by the
heels to limbs of trees by Moseby's guerillas, and the other had not
long before had twelve men, after surrendering, shot and then hung by
the neck to limbs of trees, and jeering inscriptions pinn'd to the
breast of one of the corpses, who had been a sergeant.
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