“I can’t stay to dinner, Captain,” I said; “we have a wagon to unload; but I’ll try a piece of the dodger.”
I took a piece and walked out. The gentlemen of the “shebang” said nothing. But afterward there was a story told of the affair. It was this:
“The dodger was the whole of the dinner.”
IX.
A DINNER.
The prisoners at Camp Ford were poor. They even thought themselves too poor to borrow. They possessed no supplies to sell; and in manufactures they had not risen above carved pipes and chessmen. They lived on their rations and cooked those rations in the simplest manner. Half of them had no tables, and more than half no table furniture. The plates and spoons did treble duty, travelling about from “shebang” to “shebang” (as they called the hovels they had built) in regular succession.
We rated them soundly about their condition, and asked them why they had lived thus; to which they responded by asking us how they could have lived otherwise. We lectured them severely on their not having begged, and above all, on their not having borrowed; and they answered, meekly, that no one would lend them. We lent them money, but they received it timidly, and expressed fears that they would not be able to re-pay it, and doubts as to whether there was anything to buy. “Nobody ever had anything to sell,” they said, “about Tyler.”
A few days had passed in the work of improving our “shebang,” and we sat one night around the fire moodily, talking over the state of our affairs. We were in the midst of the Christmas holidays, and the contrasted scenes of home pressed rather heavily upon us, and made the present, perhaps, seem darker than it really was.
“Something must be done,” said some one, “to raise these fellows up. They are completely down, and if we don’t get them up, why they will pull us down too.”
“I never saw such fellows,” said a naval prisoner. “They could have got clothing from the Confederates just as easily as we did. Here we come in, thin and pale and weak, and find them healthy and hearty, and yet all down in their boots. They don’t seem to have done anything to keep themselves alive but cook, and not much of that.”
“That’s the remedy,” said a third. “You’ve hit it by accident. ‘Cook’ is the word. Let us give a dinner-party and astonish them.”