20 miles away. Many a time Susan had risen at dawn, done her farm work
and walked the 20 miles in rain.
This time there was news. Her husband, wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg, was in the hospital at Grafton. “Condition serious.” Susan Taylor did not need the admonition—“Come at once.”
She left her little daughter with her parents, started for the river on the other side of which she must take the train for Grafton.
But no boat could cross the river, it was full of lumber jams. Nobody was crossing. But the bumping, bucking logs did not stop young Mrs. Taylor. Eliza’s feat had nothing on Susan’s.
She leaped to the nearest vantage point; to the next; to the next and in this way skipping from log to log, she crossed the river. She arrived at the hospital safely, reached her husband’s side—
No, he did not die. He recovered sufficiently to serve other soldiers in the hospital to the end of the war. Susan herself became a nurse. She was hospital cook as well. Her skill in both services helped to restore many a sick and suffering soldier.
She became “Aunt Susan” and the saga of her marvelous journey across the dancing logs of a lumber jam was passed from cot to cot throughout the big war hospital.
