"Here, sir," Tom's voice piped up.
"Do you know this man?"
"Yes, sir." Tom told the story of Jake Johnson on the Izzard plantation.
There was an ominous low growl from the audience. Yankee overseers of Southern plantations were not exactly popular in that crowd of Northern officers. And evidently this particular overseer had been lying. But Colonel Rose lifted his hand and said:
"Silence. No violence. What we do will be done decently and in order." After this impressive speech, he suddenly yelled: "Ah, you would, would you?" and choked Johnson with every pound of strength he could put into the process. He had just seen him slip a bit of paper into his mouth and he meant to know what that paper was. It was plucked out of the spy's throat as he gasped for air. Upon it the spy's pencil had written:
"Plot to escape. Lieutenant Strong knows about it. Think Colonel Rose heads it."
It was to have been Jake Johnson's first report in his new business of being a spy. It put an end to all business on his part forever. Gagged and tied, he was pushed across the big room, while Tom watched uncomprehendingly, wondering what was to be done with the writhing man. Suddenly he understood, for he saw it done. Johnson was pushed into a window. Two kneeling men held his legs and another, standing beside him but screened by the wall, pushed him in front of the window. The Confederate sentry below obeyed his orders. There was no challenge, no warning. He aimed and fired at the prisoner who was breaking the laws of the prison by looking out of the window. What had been Jake Johnson, Yankee, negro-overseer, Confederate conscript, volunteer spy, fell in a dead heap to the floor of Libby. Gag and bonds were quickly removed, so there was nothing to tell the Confederates the real cause of the man's death when they came to remove the body. They had unwittingly executed their own spy.
It was right that the man should die, but the shock of seeing him done to death was too much for Tom. Weakened by the fatigues and hardship of the long captivity during which he had been carried from Ohio to Virginia and worn out by the sufferings of life in Libby and by the toil of the tunnel, the boy collapsed when Jake Johnson did and for a few moments seemed as dead as the man was. He was taken to the hospital-room, but the hospital in Libby was usually only the anteroom of the graveyard at Libby. One of the scarcest things in the Confederacy, the home of scarcity, was a good doctor. The armies in the field needed far more doctors than there were in the whole South, at the outbreak of the war. Medical schools were quickly created, but the demand for doctors so far outran the supply that by this time ignorant country lads were being rushed through the schools, with reckless haste, so that they were graduated when they knew but little more than when they began. A so-called surgeon was handling his scalpel six months after he had been handling a plow. Some of them barely knew how to read and write. It was inevitable that the prison hospitals should be manned by the poorest of the poor among the graduates of these wretched schools. A fortunate chance, fortunate that is for Tom, gave him, however, care that was both skilful and tender.