The prisoners at Camp Ford were poor. They even thought themselves too poor to borrow. They possessed no supplies to sell; and in manufactures they had not risen above carved pipes and chessmen. They lived on their rations and cooked those rations in the simplest manner. Half of them had no tables, and more than half no table furniture. The plates and spoons did treble duty, travelling about from “shebang” to “shebang” (as they called the hovels they had built) in regular succession. We rated them soundly about their condition, and asked them why they had lived thus; to which they responded by asking us how they could have lived otherwise. We lectured them severely on their not having begged, and above all, on their not having borrowed; and they answered, meekly, that no one would lend them. We lent them money, but they received it timidly, and expressed fears that they would not be able to re-pay it, and doubts as to whether there was anything to buy. “Nobody ever had anything to sell,” they said, “about Tyler.”
151A few days had passed in the work of improving our “shebang,” and we sat one night around the fire moodily, talking over the state of our affairs. We were in the midst of the Christmas holidays, and the contrasted scenes of home pressed rather heavily upon us, and made the present, perhaps, seem darker than it really was.
“Something must be done,” said some one, “to raise these fellows up. They are completely down, and if we don’t get them up, why they will pull us down too.”
“I never saw such fellows,” said a naval prisoner. “They could have got clothing from the Confederates just as easily as we did. Here we come in, thin and pale and weak, and find them healthy and hearty, and yet all down in their boots. They don’t seem to have done anything to keep themselves alive but cook, and not much of that.”
“That’s the remedy,” said a third. “You’ve hit it by accident. ‘Cook’ is the word. Let us give a dinner-party and astonish them.”
“A dinner-party! We should astonish them, so that we’d never hear the last of it.”
“Well, why not? Didn’t some of us ‘celebrate’ the Fourth at Brashear? and didn’t we have a Thanksgiving dinner at Camp Groce? I have great faith in dinners. Why can’t we have a New Year’s dinner here?”
“For the best of all reasons, because there’s nothing to eat. There we had milk and eggs and potatoes and onions and a turkey, and——”
“The turkey was a windfall, and didn’t come till we 152had determined to observe the day, and Dillingham had issued his proclamation.”
“And pumpkin and pecan nuts, and beef.”
“Well, I’m sure we have beef.”
“Yes, we have, look at the stuff, look at it,” and our friend pointed to a dark, dry-looking, fatless lump, that hung from a rafter. “We have got beef, and we have got flour, and sugar, and bacon, and those are all.”
“Something may turn up if we resolve on it.”
“‘Something may turn up!’ Yes, it may, and when it turns up, we’ll give a party.”
All agreed to this common sense conclusion, except two obstinate members of the mess, and they were Lieutenant Dane, of the signal corps, and myself.
On the morrow (the thirtieth of December) we went to the gate, presented our compliments to the sergeant of the guard, and informed him that private business with Colonel Allen, commanding, etc., required a personal interview. The sergeant communicated the fact to a gentleman in butternut, who took his rifle and strolled leisurely over to head-quarters with us. The Colonel smiled pleasantly, and as he wrote out the pass, said in a well-bred way, that he never doubted the honor of his prisoners, though he sometimes had a little fear of their discretion, and that when he was applied to by gentlemen who would be discreet in their intercourse with the country people, it afforded him great pleasure to let them out on parole.
The lieutenant and I returned to our quarters, and 153hung around our necks a couple of canteens and three or four haversacks; we took a basket and bag, received with gravity sundry bits of ironical advice, and then presenting to the sergeant of the guard our pass, stepped out of Camp Ford on parole.
The road carried us into the woods. At the end of half a mile we descended a hill, crossed a little brook, and found ourselves close upon the white house and negro-cabins of a plantation. At the door we encountered a sour-faced, respectable man, with whom we were soon engaged in the following delightful dialogue:
“Good day, sir.”
“Good day.”
“Have you any dried fruit to sell?”
“No.”
“No apples?”
“No.”
“Nor peaches?”
“No.”
“Any eggs?”
“No.”
“Any chickens?”
“No.”
“Couldn’t you spare some potatoes?”
“No.”
“Nothing to sell for cash, at the highest of prices?”
“No.”
“Good day, sir.”
“Good day.”
154It was two miles of dull walking to the next house. A plain-looking old woman appeared and invited us in. As ill-luck would have it, her two sons had been captured at Arkansas Post. Still more unluckily, the two sons, when ill, had been placed in different hospitals, and some surgeon with petty tyranny had refused to let the one brother visit the other. We explained that there were fools in both armies, who treated their own soldiers in the same way. But the old lady said she would forgive everything but that. That was unnecessary cruelty. She then heaped coals of fire upon our unoffending heads by presenting to us a pumpkin, and by authorizing her chief contraband, who bore the fruitful name of “Plenty,” to sell us from his own private stores a bushel of sweet potatoes. Leaving these treasures till we should return, we went on.
At the third house we had the same conversation over that we enjoyed at the first, and as we turned back into the road it began to rain. “Shall we go back or go on?” was the question. “How far did they say it was to the next house, two miles?” “Yes, two miles. If we go on we shall be wet, perhaps frozen. But no matter; that is better than going back and acknowledging a failure. Come on.”
Three miles more, and we came to another house, owned by another old lady. Everything about it was rigidly in order and stiffly neat. There was a startling combination of colors in her parlor; for the floors were unpainted, the walls were white, the ceiling blue, the 155wainscoting red, and the blinds green. Again we were told that there was nothing to sell. But luckily, at the first item on our list, the old lady’s black overseer came in, and being an intelligent contraband, pricked up his ears and asked, what the gentlemen wanted to pay for dried peaches. We inquired what price he asked for them. He reckoned that he had ’bout a peck, and that a peck in these times ought to bring $5; and we thought that $5 was precisely the sum we ought to pay for a peck of peaches. This purchase being happily effected, we ran over the list, but to every item our sable friend “reckoned not,” till we mentioned milk. At that liquid name, a thought evidently struck him. He hadn’t no milk, but he had vinegar—cider-vinegar—he made it his own self, and he reckoned that in these times it ought to bring $1 a quart. We forthwith entrusted him with every canteen, to be filled full of this precious, and indeed, unrivalled fluid. We then re-applied to the old lady to know whether she really couldn’t sell us something. But no, not even our free-handed expenditures and the absence of all Yankee cuteness in us, could bring forth the old lady’s stores.
As we retraced our steps we noticed a small log-house near the road, and a middle-aged woman barbecuing beef under a little shed. “Let us try here,” one of us said; and we went up to the fence and asked for eggs. The woman thought she had a few, and civilly invited us to come in out of the rain. We went in, and found that the house consisted of but one room, and all looked 156wretched and forlorn. Nearly a dozen eggs were produced, and then the woman bethought herself of a certain fowl that might as well be sold, and set her eldest boys to catch him. A great cackling presently announced the fate of the fowl, and the boys, coming in out of breath, informed us that they had run him down. He was a vagabond-looking young cock, who, any one would swear, ought to come to an untimely end, and I felt a moral pleasure as I tied his legs and popped him into the basket.
And now we had the task of walking six miles back in the rain. As we mounted a rocky ridge we noticed near the road some sumach. The sumach had been so scarce at Camp Groce that we thought this a prize. Setting down our baskets, therefore, we went to work picking sumach, and as we filled our haversacks, we talked of the dinner.
“The last haul is a prize, Colonel,” said Lieutenant Dane. “The vinegar is a treasure, and the peaches are worth their weight in Confederate notes. How many shall we ask to dine with us?”
“Yes, it settles the question of dinner. After such luck as this we must go on. I think we can squeeze in six on a side, and one at each end—fourteen in all.”
“Fourteen! Well, now, the question is what shall we have? So far our luck is of a very small pattern—a very small pattern indeed. Ten eggs and one chicken of themselves won’t make much of a dinner for fourteen men.”
157“The fact is, we must make this dinner chiefly out of our own brains. Give it the whole weight of your mind; think intensely, and see if you can’t hit on a way to make a dish or two out of chips.”
“Here’s this sumach—what would you make of it?”
“Look at it philosophically. Analyse it: Taste—acid; Color—red. Now what is there that is acid and red?”
“There are currants for one thing, and there’s something else, I’m sure—oh, cranberries.”
“Then we must make currants and cranberries out of sumach. But for my part I’m greatly distressed about this wretched fowl—what can we do with him?”
“We might boil him, though he is young and will do to roast.”
“What are you thinking of?—one small fowl on a table before fourteen hungry men; ridiculous!”
“Yes, and these healthy fellows have got fearful appetites. They eat like alligators. When they draw three days’ beef they devour it in one, for fear (as they say) that somebody might steal it. Can’t you make a salad of him such as you used to send over to us at Camp Groce? Do you know when we first came there we all thought the dressing was real?”
“Let us see—we have vinegar, to be sure, and some red peppers. But there is not time now to manufacture the mustard, and then we have no milk or butter to make the oil from. No! it’s very sad, but we can’t have chicken salad!”
158“Well, the haversacks are full, so we may as well go on. It rains harder than ever, and that low piece of road will be over our boots in mud and water. I wonder if we shall find the potatoes and pumpkin all safe?”
Our friend “Plenty” duly delivered to us those vegetables when we reached his cabin. Now, a couple of officers trudging along in the mud on a rainy day, laden with a bag of potatoes, a big pumpkin, a couple of overloaded baskets, and several haversacks and canteens, cannot present a very elegant or dignified appearance; nevertheless, a tall man mounted on a ragged-looking steed, and wearing his head stuck through a hole in the middle of his blanket, after the fashion of a Mexican poncha, accosted us as “gentlemen,” and in most courteous terms desired to know whether this was the road to Marshall. He gave just one quick, keen glance that travelled all over us, and rested for a single instant on our shoulder straps.
“I perceive, gentlemen,” said he, without the slightest diminution of courtesy, “that you belong to the other side.”
I nodded an assent.
“And that you are officers?”
I nodded again.
“I presume you are prisoners then, and here on parole?”
Now, wearing a United States uniform at that time in Texas by no means proved that a man was in the United States service; it only indicated that he was a soldier. 159So many prisoners were in their butternut, and so many Confederates in our uniform that a Texan eye rarely looked behind the coat to distinguish the kind of soldier it covered. When, therefore, our tall friend said, “You are on the other side,” and added, “you are officers,” it was plain to us that he had made the close acquaintance of our troops in some other way than through the newspapers.
“I perceive that you are an old soldier,” I said in reply. “And I do not think you are a Texan. Allow me to ask where you are from?”
“I belong to the 1st Missouri Cavalry,” said he, “and I am from Missouri.”
“From Missouri!” I exclaimed. “Why, I was in service there myself during the first year of the war.”
The tall man and I looked steadily at each other in mutual astonishment. The same thoughts were passing through our minds, and he expressed them first and best by saying:
“You know, sir, that if you and I had met this way in Missouri, that first year of the war, only one of us would have walked away, and maybe neither.”
“Yes,” I said, “the war was very bitter there.”
“It was that. No man could have made me believe then that I could ever meet an enemy with the same friendly feelings I have for you, gentlemen.”
Here our friend began to unbuckle his saddle-bags, and after much trouble produced a flat bottle. “A friend,” he said, “gave me this, and I mean to carry it through to Arkansas, if I can, but I must take a drink 160with a gentleman that was on the other side in Missouri, the first year of the war, if I never drink again as long as I live.”
We touched our lips to the detestable poison, and thanked our friend for his courtesy. The “border ruffian” then expressed his great satisfaction at finding we were treated as gentlemen and prisoners of war should be, and said he doubted if he didn’t respect the soldiers on “the other side” rather more than he did a good many folks on his own. Finally he asked our names—gave us his own, which was Woodland—shook hands warmly, and rode off. We shouldered our loads and plodded on, wondering whether the barbarous and brutal trade of war does not of itself inspire men at last with some noble and chivalric sentiments.
These meditations lasted us till we reached the gate. We were somewhat apprehensive that our appearance wo............