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Screensize: 640 x 480 800 x 600 1024 x 768 1280 x 1024 UserName: Password: Format Mode: Basic  Help  Prompt  Format: Font Andale Mono Arial Arial Black Book Antiqua Century Gothic Comic Sans MS Courier New Georgia Impact Lucida Console Script MT Bold Stencil Tahoma Times New Roman Trebuchet MS Verdana   Size 1 2 3 4 5 6   Color Black Red Yellow Pink Green Orange Purple Blue Beige Brown Teal Navy Maroon LimeGreen Message: * HTML is OFF * Forum Code is ON Smilies [blue][font=Comic Sans MS][size=3]That night as we set the fire to blazing, we heard a rustle off to the right... I saw his eyes first and Reb raised his gun at the sight of a black man in the woods with a gun... Charlie had escaped when his Master was killed by a Union raiding party; he had no family left, so he just wandered away, keeping out of sight, heading for a town he had heard of called Nyack where the Underground Railroad was doing the Work of the Righteous... As we sat on either side of the fire, Johnny Reb took out his harmonica and started playing Dixieland.... Well, I may have run, but I was still a Union man thru and thru, so I started in on Glory, Glory Hallelujah.... Charlie musta felt left out cause he started in on a song I had never heard; it sounded like a slave song and was about how all my trials, Lord, would soon be over.... At one point, I stopped, and said, Listen, boys, if we're gonna get along, let's do this thing righteous; one at a time and maybe we can all learn sumthin..... So, the three of us, an unlikely group if there ever was one: an old preacher/deserter, a young boy/deserter and a runaway slave, sitting around a campfire at the top of a cliff over the Hudson River on a cloudless night, sang Dixie, then the Battle Hymn, then All My Trials......... When we were done and the woods fell quiet again, I looked at them and their faces were wet and shiny just like mine.... I passed the bottle to Charlie and nobody said anything for a long while.........[/size=3][/font=Comic Sans MS][/blue]