hogs, and for that reason they would see that the hogs ate Willie White's body. With repeated threats against anyone who wanted to bury his body, they ordered the two old men to move off as prisoners. A squad was sent to burn my father's house. As they marched along towards Memphis they met a regiment of infantry, when squads were set to work burning houses and killing stock and chickens.
When they reached Horn Lake depot, the stores and depot and the beautiful Mayfield home were burned. They awoke Mrs. Mayfield and her little children about midnight, and after the house was in ashes, said: "We will kill anyone who gives you shelter."
In the meantime Mrs. White had been hunting a place of shelter, and after walking about four miles through fields and creek bottoms, expecting every moment to be overtaken and probably murdered, she and her daughter and Willie White's widow and Linnie reached the home of a relative just before daylight, but in a state of exhaustion and collapse.
Before arriving at Memphis, the Federals released my father and Esquire Gillespie, and they returned home on foot. My father found his home in ashes, and my sister being cared for by the old family servants. They admonished my father and Esquire Gillespie "to be very careful, and not let any more 'rebels' shoot their men; if they did, no excuse would spare their lives."
Notwithstanding their threats, my father called to his aid one of his old negro men and went in search of young White's body. They found him lying by a tree, where he had been horribly murdered. He had six bullet holes in his head, one in each eye, and six saber cuts on his body, besides wounds on his shoulders.
Fatiier and the old servant brought him home and kept him until his brother-in-law came out from Memphis under a flag of truce, when the three dug a grave and laid him to rest.
Mary L. Hutchinson.
Horn Lake, Miss., November 4, 1886.
