Before daylight our host visited us, and finding that we suffered from the weather, placed us in a little warm storehouse, close beside the public road. To our question, whether the Guards had ever searched it, he replied:
"Oh, yes, frequently, but they never happened to find anybody."
An Energetic Invalid.
After we were snugly ensconced in quilts and corn-stalks, Davis said:
"What an appalling journey still stretches before us! I fear the lamp of my energy is nearly burned out."
I could not wonder at his despondency. For several years he had been half an invalid, suffering from a spinal affection. For weeks before leaving Salisbury, he was often compelled, of an afternoon, to lie upon his bunk of straw with blinding headache, and every nerve quivering with pain. "Junius" and myself frequently said: "Davis's courage is unbounded, but he can never live to walk to Knoxville."
The event proved us false prophets. Nightly he led our party—always the last to pause and the first to start. His lamp of energy was so far from being exhausted that, before he reached our lines, he broke down every man in the party. I expect to suffer to my dying day from the killing pace of that energetic invalid.
XIV. Saturday, December 31.
Spent all this cold day and night sleeping in the quilts and fodder of the little store-house. At evening, Boothby's party went forward, as the next thirty-five miles were deemed specially perilous.