<h3><SPAN name="CHAPTER_XLIV" id="CHAPTER_XLIV">CHAPTER XLIV.</SPAN></h3>
<div class="chapquot">
<div>
<p>Pray you tread softly, that the blind mole may not<br/>
Hear a foot-fall!</p>
<p class="citation">Tempest.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="chapquot">
<div>
<p>There's but a shirt and a half in all my company, and the
half shirt is two napkins pinned together and thrown over
the shoulders.</p>
<p class="citation">King Henry IV.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Our emaciated condition, hard labor, and the bracing mountain
air, conspired to make us ravenous. In quantity, the pork and
corn-bread which we devoured was almost miraculous; in quality, it
seemed like the nectar and ambrosia of the immortal gods. It was far
better adapted to our necessities than the daintiest luxuries of
civilization. In California, Australia, and Colorado goldmines, on
the New Orleans <span lang="fr">levée</span>, and wherever
else the most trying physical labor is to be performed, pork and
corn-bread have been found the best articles of food.</p>
<p>The Loyalists were all ready to feed, shelter, and direct us, but
reluctant to accompany us far from their homes. They would say:</p>
<p>"You need no guides; the road is so plain, that you cannot
possibly miss it."</p>
<p>But midnight journeys among the narrow lanes and obscure
mountain-paths had taught us that we could miss any road whatever
which was not inclosed upon both sides by fences too high for
climbing. Therefore, we insisted upon pilots.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Money Concealed in Clothing.</div>
<p>Fortunately, I had left Salisbury with a one-hundred-dollar United
States note concealed under the hem of each leg of my pantaloons,
just above the instep, and two more sewn in the lining of my coat. I
had in my portmonnaie
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[Pg 470]</SPAN></span>
fifty dollars in Northern bank-notes, five dollars in gold, and a
hundred dollars in Confederate currency. Davis brought away about the
same amount. We should have left it with our fellow-prisoners, but
for the probability of being recaptured and confined, where money
would serve us in our extremest need. Now it enabled us to remunerate
amply both our white and black friends. Sometimes the mountaineers
would say:</p>
<p>"We do not do these things for money. We have fed and assisted
hundreds of refugees and escaping prisoners, but never received a
cent for it."</p>
<p>Those whom they befriended were usually penniless. We appreciated
their kindness none the less because fortunate enough to be able to
recompense them. They were unable to resist the argument that, when
our forces came, they would need "green-backs" to purchase coffee.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Imminent Peril of Union Citizens.</div>
<p>Every man who gave us a meal, sheltered us in his house or barn,
pointed out a refuge in the woods, or directed us one mile upon our
journey, did it at the certainty, if discovered, of being imprisoned,
or forced into the Rebel army, whether sick or well, and at the risk
of having his house burned over his head. In many cases, discovery
would have resulted in his death by shooting, or hanging in sight of
his own door.</p>
<p>During our whole journey we entered only one house inhabited by
white Unionists, which had never been plundered by Home Guards or
Rebel guerrillas. Almost every loyal family had given to the Cause
some of its nearest and dearest. We were told so frequently—"My
father was killed in those woods;" or, "The guerrillas shot my
brother in that ravine," that, finally, these tragedies made little
impression upon us. The mountaineers never seemed conscious that
they were doing any heroic or self-sacrificing thing. Their very
sufferings</p>
<div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/i008.jpg" width-obs="1000" height-obs="595" class="epub_only" alt="The Escape.—Wading a Mountain Stream at Midnight." title="The Escape.—Wading a Mountain Stream at Midnight." /> <SPAN href="images/i008.jpg" target="_blank"> <ANTIMG src="images/i008thumb.jpg" width-obs="400" height-obs="238" class="noepub" alt="The Escape.—Wading a Mountain Stream at Midnight." title="The Escape.—Wading a Mountain Stream at Midnight." /></SPAN> <p class="caption">The Escape.—Wading a Mountain Stream at Midnight.</p>
<p class="click"><SPAN href="images/i008.jpg" target="_blank">Click for a larger image.</SPAN></p>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[Pg 471]</SPAN></span></p>
<p class="continued">had greatly intensified their love for the Union,
and their faith in its ultimate triumph.</p>
<p>Drowsily wondering at our capacity for sleep, we dozed through the
first day of the New Year, and the fifteenth of our liberty. After
dark we spent two hours in the house before the log fire. The good
woman had one son already escaped to the North—a fresh link
which bound her mother-heart to that ideal paradise. She fed us,
mended our clothing, and parted from us with the heartiest "God bless
you!"</p>
<p>Her youngest born, a lad of eleven years, accompanied us five
miles to the house of a Unionist, who received us without leaving his
bed. He gave us such minute information about the faint, obscure road
that we found little difficulty in keeping it.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Fording Creeks at Midnight.</div>
<p>Through the biting air we pressed rapidly up the narrow valley
of a clear, tumbling mountain stream, whose frowning banks, several
hundred feet in hight, were covered with pines and hemlocks. In
twelve miles the road crossed the creek twenty-nine times. Instead
of bridges were fords for horsemen and wagons, and foot-logs for
pedestrians. Cold and stiff, we discovered that crossing the smooth,
icy logs in the darkness was a hazardous feat. Wolfe was particularly
lame, and slipped several times into the icy torrent, but managed to
flounder out without much delay. He endured with great serenity all
our suggestions, that even though water was his native element, he
had a very eccentric taste to prefer swimming to walking, in that
state of the atmosphere.</p>
<p>At one crossing the log was swept away. We wandered up and down
the stream, which was about a hundred feet wide, but could find not
even the hair which Mahomet discovered to be the bridge over the
bottomless pit. But as canoes are older than ships, so legs are more
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[Pg 472]</SPAN></span>
primitive than bridges. We e'en plunged in, waist deep, and waded
through, among the cakes of floating ice.</p>
<div class="sidenote">"Looped and Windowed Raggedness."</div>
<p>Our wardrobes were suffering quite as much as our persons. We did
not carry looking-glasses, so I am not able to speak of myself; but
my colleague was a subject for a painter. Any one seeing him must
have been convinced that he was made up for the occasion; that his
looped and windowed raggedness never could have resulted from any
natural combination of circumstances. The fates seemed to decree that
as "Junius" went naked into the Confederacy (leaving most of his
wardrobe on deposit at the bottom of the Mississippi), he should come
out of it in the same condition.</p>
<p>Overcoat he had none. Pantaloons had been torn to shreds and
tatters by the brambles and thorn-bushes. He had a hat which was
not all a hat. It was given to him, after he had lost his own
in a Rebel barn, by a warm-hearted African, as a small tribute
from the Intelligent Contraband to his old friend the Reliable
Gentleman—by an African who felt with the most touching
propriety that it would be a shame for any correspondent of
<cite>The Tribune</cite> to go bareheaded as long as a single negro in
America was the owner of a hat! It was a white wool relic of the
old-red-sandstone period, with a sugar-loaf crown, and a broad brim
drawn down closely over his ears, like the bonnet of an Esquimaux.</p>
<p>His boots were a stupendous refutation of the report that leather
was scarce among the Rebels. I understood it to be no figure of
rhetoric, but the result of actual and exact measurement, which
induced him to call them the "Seven-Leaguers." The small portion
of his body, which was visible between the tops of his boots and
the bottom of his hat, was robed in an old gray quilt of Secession
proclivities; and taken for all in all, with his pale, nervous face
and his remarkable costume, he looked like a cross between the Genius
of Intellectuality and a Rebel bushwhacker! </p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[Pg 473]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>Before daylight, we shiveringly tapped on the door of a house at
the foot of the Blue Ridge.</p>
<p>"Come in," was the welcome response.</p>
<p>Entering, we found a woman sitting by the log fire. Beginning to
introduce ourselves, she interrupted:</p>
<p>"O, I know all about you. You are Yankee prisoners. Your friends
who passed last evening told us you were coming, and I have been
sitting up all night for you. Come to the fire and dry your
clothes."</p>
<div class="sidenote">Stories about the War.</div>
<p>For two hours we listened to her tales of the war. The history
of almost every Union family was full of romance. Each unstoried
mountain stream had its incidents of daring, of sagacity, and of
faithfulness; and almost every green hill had been bathed in that
scarlet dew from which ever springs the richest and the ripest
fruit.</p>
<p>Concealment here was difficult; so we were taken to the house of
a neighbor, who also was waiting to welcome us. He took us to his
storehouse, right by the road-side.</p>
<p>"The Guard," said he, "searched this building last Thursday,
unsuccessfully, and are hardly likely to try it again just yet."</p>
<p>Soon, lying near a fire upon a warm feather-bed, we wooed the
drowsy god with all the success which the hungry Salisbury vermin,
sticking closer than brothers, would permit.</p>
<p class="quotdate">XVI. <i>Monday, January 2.</i></p>
<div class="sidenote">Climbing the Blue Ridge.</div>
<p>Before night the guide returned from conducting Boothby's party,
and assured us that the coast was
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[Pg 474]</SPAN></span>
clear. After dark, invigorated by tea and apple brandy, we followed
our pilot by devious paths up the steep, fir-clad, piny slope of the
Blue Ridge.</p>
<p>The view from the summit is beautiful and impressive; but for our
weariness and anxiety, we should have enjoyed it very keenly.</p>
<p>A few weeks before, the Unionist now leading us had sent his
little daughter of twelve years, alone, by night, fifteen miles over
the mountains, to warn some escaping Union prisoners that the Guard
had gained a clue to their whereabouts. They received the warning in
season to find a place of safety before their pursuers came.</p>
<p>We were now on the west side of the Ridge. A heavy rain began to
fall, and, though soaked and weary, we were glad to have our tracks
obliterated, and thus be insured against pursuit.</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"The labor we delight in physics pain;"</p>
</div>
<p>but in this case the effort was so arduous that the panacea was
not very effective. Thomas Starr King tells the story of a little
man, who, being asked his weight, replied:</p>
<p>"Ordinarily, a hundred and twenty pounds; but when I'm mad, I
weigh a ton!"</p>
<p>I think any one of our wet, blistered feet, which, at every step,
sunk deep into the slush, would have counterbalanced his whole body!
Like millstones we dragged them up hill after hill, and through the
long valleys which stretched drearily between. Though not hungering
after the flesh-pots of Egypt, we still thought, half regretfully,
of our squalid Salisbury quarters, where we had at least a roof to
shelter us, and a bunk of straw. But we needed no injunction to
remember Lot's wife; for a pillar of salt would have represented a
fabulous
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[Pg 475]</SPAN></span>
sum of money in the currency of the Rebels; and we had no desire to
swell their scanty revenues or supply their impoverished commissary
department.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Crossing the New River at Midnight.</div>
<p>At midnight we reached New River, two hundred and fifty yards
wide. Our guide took us over, one at a time, behind him upon his
horse. We were probably five hundred miles above the point where this
river, as the Great Kanawha, unites with the Ohio; but it was the
first stream we had found running northward, and its soft, rippling
song of home and freedom was very sweet to our ears. Already our
Promised Land stretched before us, and the shining river seemed
a pathway of light to its hither boundary. Better than Abana and
Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, this was the Jordan, flowing toward all
we loved and longed for. It revived the great world of work and of
life which had faded almost to fable.</p>
<p>At two in the morning we reached the house of a stanch Unionist,
which nestled romantically in the green valley, inclosed on all sides
by dark mountains.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Hospitality and Oratory Combined.</div>
<p>Our new friend, herculean in frame and with a heavy-tragedy voice,
came out where we sat, dripping and dreary, under an old cotton-gin,
and addressed us in a pompous strain, worthy of Sergeant Buzfuz:</p>
<p>"Gentlemen," said he, "there are, unfortunately, at my house
to-night two wayfarers, who are Rebels and traitors. If they knew of
your presence, it would be my inevitable and eternal ruin. Therefore,
unable to extend to you such hospitalities as I could wish, I bid you
welcome to all which <em>can</em> be furnished by so poor a man as I. I will
place you in my barn, which is warm, and filled with fodder. I will
bring you food and apple brandy. In the morning, when these infernal
scoundrels are gone, I will entertain you under my family roof.
Gentlemen, I have been a Union man from the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[Pg 476]</SPAN></span>
beginning, and I shall be a Union man to the end. I had three sons;
one died in a Rebel hospital; one was killed at the battle of the
Wilderness, fighting (against his will) for the Southern cause; the
third, thank God! is in the Union lines."</p>
<p>Here the father overcame the orator; and, with the conjunction
of apple brandy, corn bread, and quilts, we were soon asleep in the
barn. </p>
<hr class="chap" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[Pg 477]</SPAN></span></p>
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