civil war book

Actually a short history of a fellow named Mosby's involvement in the civil war. Not the kind of stuff I read but it came at the end of a rather long collection of SF stories and I have a bit of an irrational obsession with finishing books I have started.

The excerpt quoted below struck me. No Idea if it is factual but it has the ring of truthful if stylized trivia.

"This mounted chase, in the best horse-opera manner, came thundering down a road past a schoolhouse just as the pupils were being let out for recess. One of these, a 14-year-old boy named Cabell Maddox, jumped onto the pony on which he had ridden to school and joined in the pursuit, armed only with a McGuffy's Third Reader. Overtaking a fleeing Yank, he aimed the book at him and demanded his surrender; before the flustered soldier realized that his captor was unarmed, the boy had snatched the Colt from his belt and was covering him in earnest. This marked the suspension, for the duration of hostilities, of young Maddox's formal education. From that hour on he was a Mosby man, and he served with distinction to the end of the war."

Rebel Raider
by H. Beam Piper

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19194/19 ... 9194-h.htm

Found this entry at findagrave.com

"Born on July 17th, 1848, the lad Henry joined Mosby's boys, when on February 20th, 1864, he tossed his school books and joined the skirmish going on at Blakeley's Grove School House near Upperville, Virginia."

Interesting story.

FredHayek wrote: Interesting story.

The whole book is about 50 pages. It is also free. Towards the end of his life he was friends with George Patton as a cadet. The implication being that is where he learned some lessons on mobility and superior firepower.

Fred at one time weren't you talking about being or at least knowing Civil War reenactors?

I have studied a lot of Civil War history but never got into reenacting.

History is full of wonderful stories, I especially enjoy the stories that celebrate those who displayed incredible bravery (or maybe misguided stupidity but lived despite their actions). I suppose that some stories such as this one are prone to a certain degree of puffery, even so it makes the story interesting and peeks my curiosity. Thanks for the tip on the book, even better that it's free!

Bob - how did you get this onto your kindle?

I didn't. The story comes included in the book I have been reading. This book. I downloaded into the kindle. Don't know if some of the free sites will download to kindle. If you find out anything about that please let me know. There are some books I have looked for that are not on Kindle. In fact I now have two paperbacks I got from Amazon in my que.

Have to try that next. Make sure I still can. I have not touched a real book since we got the tablets. The only thing I miss is knowing the size of the book before starting. I had no idea the book below has a billion pages.

http://www.wildsidepress.com/The-H-Beam ... _6003.html

The Gutenburg site has a link to download to a Kindle but I can't find what the process is, and when I downloaded the .mobi file to my computer I can't open it.

When you download to your kindle from places other than Amazon, how do you do it? Sorry to be so dense.

Mtn Gramma wrote: The Gutenburg site has a link to download to a Kindle but I can't find what the process is, and when I downloaded the .mobi file to my computer I can't open it.

When you download to your kindle from places other than Amazon, how do you do it? Sorry to be so dense.

No need to be sorry. I will join you in denseness and raise you some inability to communicate clearly.

Everything I have downloaded to my kindle has been thru Amazon. There is probably a way to highlight something in the kindle and send it to my laptop so I can paste it here but I do not know how.

When there was something I wanted to paste here I googled the book, found a free copy and copied it from there. I used the "find" function on my chrome browser to find a key word in what I want to quote. So far it has worked well.

One of the non kindle books I want is on a site called "torrent". I think it will download to kindle but it wanted to download some soft ware to my computer so I gave it a pass. I am not sure if that site is ligit or some kind of bootleg site but I am always hinkey about accepting downloads.

Thanks for the explanation. I don't want to download software either, so will stick with Amazon for now.

Just checked - I can download it from them free. Hubby will be happy.