Tom got terribly excited, and spit faster than ever, as he said: “Well, by thunder, you are a Yankee.”
I should have laughed if he had been going to shoot me, and I did laugh heartily at his excitement. This made him more excited still, and by the time he had finished reading the paper, he was so excited that I could easily have disarmed him, but the Sergeant sat there, with his pistol ready to shoot if we made any attempt to get away.
I then told them that we were Yankee officers, and that we had for six months suffered the horrors of prison life, that we had escaped from Columbia, and had walked three hundred miles to gain our liberty, and pulling up my pants I showed them my legs, which were swollen to three times their natural size, and very much inflamed, and asked if, after having tramped so far with such a pair of legs, I was not entitled to my liberty. The tears started into Tom’s eyes, his mouth twitched convulsively, he spit with fearful rapidity, and he finally said in a choking voice, “By thunder, I am sorry I ever saw you.”
If I had my way I would let you go, but if we did old Harshaw, who is a bitter Confederate, would report us and we would be shot. And Tom meant what he said; for as will appear further on, he was a Union man at heart. But the Sergeant was unmoved by our distress, and was only too proud to think he had captured two Yankee officers, to contemplate letting us go; so he ordered us to walk between them back to Fort Emory, ten miles. No Sergeant, I said, I am your prisoner, only because my legs gave out; and I shall never walk back. If you want me to go back to Fort Emory, you will have to carry me, for if I could have walked you would not have seen me. He insisted that I start on, but I told him plainly that I would not walk a step, that I had just about as leave he would shoot me right there as to take me back into prison.
Tom finally said, Dick, you take him up behind you, and I will take this big fellow up behind me, and we will get along much faster. To this proposition the Sergeant consented, and we both mounted and started back. If I could have had a chance to have said a dozen words to Alban before starting, without their seeing us, we would not have gone far; but the Sergeant and I rode ahead, followed by Tom and Alban, and if I had made a move to disarm my man, Tom would have been just in a position to have helped him. I was on the alert, thinking that perhaps Alban would pinion Tom’s arms from behind, and give me a signal to do the same for the Sergeant, which I could have easily done.
If I had only known what was going on behind me that night, this narrative would have a different termination. But I did not know Tom Hubbard then, nor did I know how strongly he was attached to the old flag. I learned all this afterwards, and learned to appreciate him, for a true-hearted, loyal man, whose fidelity could always be relied upon, and whose sympathetic nature was as tender as a woman’s. The circumstances which surrounded him, compelled him to assume an allegiance to the Confederacy that his loyal soul revolted at. And there is no man North or South that I would give more to see to-day than this same eccentric Tom Hubbard.
