Two things:

1. Yes, I am slaving away on the third and last volume of the "Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri" series. I finished 1864 and am currently working in March 1865 and only have to go through June 1865, so I might actually make my latest deadline in a few weeks, this time. We will see. Thanks for asking.

2. Kirby's remark about lead flying made me think of something, although in guerrilla fighting I wonder how frequent is the following instance. Way back in the past (at least my past) my issue weapon was a .38 Colt, six-shot, snub-nose revolver--yes, a "cop gun" or "pop gun," if you prefer. When we would shoot those "paperweights" on the range, they shaved lead every time, but the hits didn't hurt us much. But, this makes me wonder if those "wheel guns" back in the 1860s shaved lead out of the cylinger and receiver, too, and those heavy sidearms had a bigger slug to shave than I did with my puny .38.

Further, a bad thing about handguns has always been the tendency in a desperate situation to point that muzzle any old place and end up shooting yourself or one of the "friendlies." It may sound funny at first blush, but when armed men who obviously know what they are doing are racing for you shooting accurately, keeping calm and counting your shots is sometimes the last thing on your mind, and you MAY have a tendency, as Vietnam vets call it, to "pray and spray." What I am saying is that a combatant in panic tends to pull his shots off, sometimes way off. A cop friend many years ago while chasing a suspect around a corner of a building walked into a fuscillade of 9mm slugs the suspect unloaded on him from ambush, and after hit by five of those, was found hanging by his arm off a chain-link fence barely conscious by his partner who had to take cover because the wounded cop was shooting off what was left in his piece all over the place. The partner had to approach his critically-wounded partner and first disarm him before he could get help to save him from bleeding out. The cop survived, by the way, and so did the partner, at last report.

Well, my point of this diatribe is that in a tought fight--and with the "no quarter" rule in effect in guerrilla fighting in Missouri, they were all tough--the strangest things happen when a bunch of guys are shooting up the countryside, and it is not hard to come back "slightly wounded," and hope nobody presses the shootee very hard about how it happened. This Christmas season and you watch for the 28th time that movie about "the kid with the BB gun" and laugh when the kid shoots his BB at the metal sign and it comes back on him--well don't. Don't tell anyone, but it happened to me, but it wasn't a metal sign. It wasn't a BB, either. Have I made my point?

Bruce Nichols