“Probably.”

Cable nudged the sorrel with his heels and rode off down the yellow sweep of hillside, sitting erect and tight to the saddle with his right knee touching the stock of a Spencer carbine, his right elbow feeling the Walker Colt on his hip, and keeping his eyes on the adobe now, thinking: This could be a scout. This could be the two and a half years still going on…

As soon as he had made up his mind to enlist he had sold his stock, all of his cattle, all two hundred and fifty head, and all but three of his horses. He had put Martha and the children in the wagon and taken them to Sudan, Texas, to the home of Martha’s parents. He did this because he believed deeply in the Confederacy, as he believed in his friends who had gone to fight for it.

Because of a principle he traveled from the Saber River, Arizona Territory, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, taking with him a shotgun, a revolving pistol and two horses; and there on June 21, 1862, he joined J. A. Wharton’s 8th Texas Cavalry, part of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s command.

Three weeks later Cable saw his first action and received his first wound during Forrest’s raid on Murfreesboro. On September 3, Paul Cable was commissioned a captain and appointed to General Forrest’s escort. From private to captain in less than three months; those things happened in Forrest’s command. Wounded twice again after Murfreesboro; the third and final time on November 28, 1864, at a place called Huey’s Mills-shot from his saddle as they crossed the Duck River to push Wilson’s Union Cavalry back to Franklin, Tennessee. Cable, with gunshot wounds in his left hip and thigh, was taken to the hospital at Columbia. On December 8 he was told to go home “the best way you know how.” There were more seriously wounded men who needed his cot; there would be a flood of them soon, with General Hood about to pounce on the Yankees at Nashville. Go home, he was told, and thank God for your gunshot wounds.