Mrs. Catherine Haynes, whose home is near Charleston, Arkansas, is one of the oldest and most interesting of the few remaining women in that section who worked, suffered and endured, for the "Lost Cause."
She is living out her sunset years in the same old family homestead, which was once the scene of so much stirring adventure, and her recollections of those trying days are still fresh and unobscured, though Time is laying his hand heavily now upon her silvered locks.
Six men belonging to Col. McIntosh's regiment were quietly eating breakfast in one of three small cottages, built close to the Haynes' homestead. Mrs. Tobb, a Union woman, Mrs. Roberts, and Mrs. Knott, a widow, were the occupants of the houses. The men were totally unsuspicious of any danger, but were suddenly attacked by a small party, and three of them were shot down in Mrs. Roberts' yard, while the others escaped. The names of the three soldiers killed were: Perkins, Tom Jones, and Milton Hayes, all of them closely related to men widely known in this section of the State. Mrs. Tobb ran alone all the way to the Haynes' home to tell the awful news, and to get assistance in caring for the bodies. There was not a man left on the Haynes' place so Miss Lizzie and Miss Sarah Jane accompanied Mrs. Tobb to the scene of the tragedy, determined that not one of our brave boys should lack a decent burial so long as there were tender, pitying hands to perform the last sad duties.
Nixon's graveyard was a full half-mile distant, but one of them knew of an empty grave which had been dug for the body of a Captain Bean who had been carried back home to Roseville, and buried there instead. There was one available vehicle. It was a small cart, roughly constructed, and mounted upon two old wagon wheels. To this was harnessed the only team oa brace of young steers. With Mrs. Knott driving and two of the other women walking behind to hold the lifeless bodies on the shaky cart, from which they were in imminent danger of falling, the pathetic little procession wended its way to the graveyard. With their own hands they laid the three bodies, uncoffined, in the same grave, and with an old shovel and a rusty spade, these faithful and heroic women put the clods of "earth to earth and ashes to ashes," upon the sacred dead.
Finally worn out with physical exertion and mental emotion, they turned wearily homeward. It was nearing the close of day when at last they arrived, and bright stars, just peeping out from the grey twilight, were soon to shed their cold unfeeling radiance upon the dark tragedies of human life.