Tom Strong, Lincoln's Scout / A Story of the United States in the Times That Tried Men's Souls

by Alfred Bishop Mason

Of his three temporary companions, one finally reached our lines, one was shot within a few hundred yards of his goal, and one was recaptured. Of the 109 who escaped from Libby, 48 were caught and thrust back into prison.

Tom walked along the river bank, prying in the welcome darkness for a boat. It would not have been difficult to steal it, if he could have found it. But at this point the James is wide and shallow and full of miniature rapids. It was utterly bare of boats. The boy's search could not be carried on after dawn. He spent that day hidden in a clump of willows by the waterside. The excitement of the night had kept him up. Now the reaction from it left him limp and miserable and hungry as he never remembered being hungry before. It was hard work to "grin and bear it," but at least he tried to grin and he reminded himself a thousand times through that long, long day that he was much better off than if he were still a prisoner in Libby.

That night he followed the bank until he was below the city, still without finding a boat. There had been plenty of boats along this part of the river the morning before, but as soon as the escape from Libby had been discovered, all boats had been seized by the military authorities, to prevent their being used by the fugitives. They had been taken to a point below the town. As Tom wormed himself cautiously near this point, very cautiously, for he heard voices upon the bank above his head, and also the crackle of a camp-fire, he saw in the gray dawn a flotilla of boats just below him. At first sight, his heart leaped into his mouth with joy. At the second sight, it sank down into his boots. For above the boats he saw a big Confederate camp and beyond them he saw a half-dozen small craft, negroes at the oars and armed men at bow and stern, patrolling the river. Hope left him. He crawled into a hiding-place in the bank. He was so hungry that he cried. But not for long. Stout hearts do not yield to such weakness long. If he could not escape in a boat fashioned by man's hands, why not in one fashioned by God? The early spring freshets of the James were making the river higher every hour. He saw in cautious peeps from the hole where he had hidden great trees from far-off forests, uprooted there by the high water, come plunging down mid-channel like battering rams. He noted that the patrol-boats gave these dangerous monsters a wide berth. If a trunk of a tree were to ram them or if the far-flung branches were to strike them, their next patrol would be at the bottom of the river. On a sandbank not a hundred yards from the boy's lair a big oak had stranded. It lay quite still now, but it evidently would not do so for many hours, for the rising water lapped higher and higher against it. Tom made up his mind that that tree should be his boat—if only it were still there when it was dark enough for him to swim out to it. Through the daylight hours he watched it with lynx eyes, fearing lest it were swept along towards the sea before he could shelter himself in it. And through these daylight hours he grew ever more faint with hunger, until he told himself that he must have food, at any risk, at any cost. Without the strength it would give, he felt he could not possibly swim even the hundred yards that lay between him and the now tossing tree. There is truth in the line:

"Fate cannot harm me; I have dined today."

It is too much to do to face Fate on an empty stomach. Napoleon said that an army traveled on its belly. Men must have food if they are to march and fight.

A Confederate soldier sauntered along the shore and stopped just in front of the boy's hiding-place. He had a rude fish-pole. Either he knew how to fish, or the James River fish were very hungry. A string of a dozen hung from his shoulder. The sight of them was too much for Tom to stand. A raw fish seemed to him the most toothsome morsel in the world. He knew he was courting certain capture, but he was starving. He would pretend to be a Confederate himself. He spoke to the soldier, not out of the fullness of his heart, but out of the emptiness of his stomach.

"I'm hungry," he said, "give a fellow a fish, will you?"

The soldier turned with a start. He was a tall, gaunt man, an East Tennessee mountaineer, who had started to join the Union army when a Confederate conscript-officer seized him and sent him South, under guard, to serve the cause he had meant to fight against. East Tennessee was, as a rule, loyal to the Union. The men from there who were found in the Confederate army were like the poor peons who are supposed to "volunteer" in the Mexican army. "I send you fifty volunteers," wrote a Mexican mayor to a Mexican general, "please return me the ropes." Jim Grayson had not been tied up with a rope, but he had had a bayonet behind him, when he was put into the Confederate ranks. He was a man of intelligence and of rather more education than most of his fellow mountaineers. Many of them could not even read and write. Grayson had learned both at a "deestrik skule" and had actually had a year, a precious year, at a "high skule." The last thing he had read before starting to fish that morning had been the printed handbills that had been flung broadcast by the Confederate authorities, announcing the escape of 108 men and one boy from Libby Prison and offering rewards for their recapture. And the first thing he thought as he saw Tom in his hole in the bank was that he was probably the boy of the handbills. He meant to give the fellow a fish, of course, but if he found the fellow was that boy he also meant to do what he could to help him go where he himself wanted to go, to the Union lines.

"Sholy, I'll give you a fish," he said. "You can have all you want. I'll light a fire and cook some for you."