He urged me to go on with him, promising to carry my haversack and do all the buying, taking the risk of recapture, if I would furnish the money. I showed him my legs, and told him that I would only be a hindrance to him, and would wait there until my companions came up.
Finally, after talking the matter over, I agreed that if my comrades did not come within an hour, I should think they had got ahead of me, and would go on with him, for this night at least. We sat there and waited until about one o’clock, and, as they did not come, I started on with him, feeling like a new man after the good lunch and the rest. Captain Alban, who was a large, strong man, six feet high and in robust health, took my haversack. This lightened me up a good deal, and I was too plucky to let him think I could not keep up, and so I stubbed along, notwithstanding my swollen legs and feet, and that night we put in seventeen miles, after I met him, before we went into camp.
CHAPTER XV.
how to roast a chicken—a good square meal once more—on the tramp again—we meet a darkey who furnishes us supper and chickens from his master’s hen coop—surprised by two white men while eating breakfast—passing through walhalla—avoiding some cavalry.
When we made camp on this, the twelfth day of my tramp, it was back of a plantation, in a large woods, near a spring. We always made our camp near good water, if possible. Here I showed the captain how to cook a chicken; and for the benefit of camping parties I give the receipt here, which, if followed, will, I assure them, afford as fine a dinner as can be made from a chicken.
Bending over a small sappling about two inches through at the butt, I fastened the top to the roots of a tree, and then trimmed off the branches. From the centre of the bow thus formed, I hung the chicken by means of a limb with a hook on the lower end, so that the chicken nearly reached the ground. Then building a fire in a circle around the fowl, with dry twigs and bark, as a blacksmith would to heat a wagon tire, I soon had a chicken as finely browned as ever was cooked in an oven. I salted it as it roasted and within an hour I ate the first satisfactory meal I had eaten in eleven days, roast chicken and corn bread, with a tin cup full of cold water. After a good sleep which lasted until nearly dark, I felt like a new man, and only for my swollen and inflamed feet and legs, would have felt fit to endure anything.
We started out at dark, having made a supper of the remains of the chicken and some corn bread, and, before daylight had made twenty miles, though my legs kept getting worse, if possible, and pained me so that at times I could scarcely keep from crying out in my agony.