Recalled by Him, who all our prayers hath heard,
Bring the reward in Heaven.”
When the minds of many men are given wholly to one subject, it is incredible how many expedients they can devise. Yet no expedient could be devised to comply with one condition which the calmer judgments imposed, and which was thus allegorically expressed by one of our friends in the guard, “When General Green spreads his tents, there will be plenty of good recruits join him;” which meant, “You had better wait till the leaves are out.”
At length, in the latter part of March, ere the buds were fully blown, the impatience of fifteen officers broke through their discretion. They divided into three parties, and made their preparations carefully. Old haversacks were mended, and new ones made. Suspicious articles of dress were exchanged. Some beef was saved and dried; hard-tack was baked, and panola made. This last article was recommended by the Texans. It consists of corn-meal browned to about the color of ground coffee, with a liberal allowance of sugar stirred in. Its advantages are that it requires no cooking, and contains a large amount of nutriment in proportion to its bulk and weight.
The parties were soon ready to start. But the Texan atmosphere is dry and clear, with cloudless nights. One evening, while the colors of sunset were still glowing upon the western sky, an officer came to me, and pointing to a black cloud that was rising from the horizon, said, “If that cloud comes up overhead, we will make the attempt.” It was a bad hour, in every way; for darkness had not yet succeeded day, and the moon was already throwing her pale light upon the eastern clouds. Yet this cloud might not come again for weeks, and its dark shadow was too precious to be lost.
A gay party assembled in the “shebang” nearest to the southern side of the stockade. They had a fiddle and banjoes and castanets, and all the vocal minstrelsy of the camp. They roared Irish songs, and danced negro break-downs, and the little cabin shook with the tumult of their glee. Down at the farther corner of the enclosure, where all was gloom and quiet, two men crawled on the ground to the stockade. They were about thirty feet apart, and a rope lay between them. The sentry on the outside heard the merriment in the “shebang,” and as all was quiet on his beat, he walked up to look at the Yankee’s fun. He passed the two men. The second twitched the rope; the first quickly rose, and dug with all his might. A few minutes, and the hole was deep enough to allow a post of the stockade to be canted over, so as to leave a narrow aperture between it and its neighbor. The man laid down his spade, signalled to some one behind him, and began to squeeze himself through the opening. Fourteen others rose from the ground, and one by one, trembling with impatient eagerness, pressed through and followed him. They crossed the sentries’ path, ran up a little hill that fronted the stockade, and disappeared beneath the trees beyond. The second of the two men still lay upon the ground. The last of the fifteen was to have twitched the rope, and this man was to have replaced the post. But who, at such a time, ever looked behind to see if he were last? The signal was not given! Within the “shebang” still rose the racket, and still the sentry stood grinning at the Yankee antics. But from the other direction came the tramp of the next guard-relief!
Among those who waited and listened, and saw nothing, there was intense suppressed excitement. In vain one or two moved round, begging the little groups to break up—to stifle their earnest whispers—to resume the ordinary hubbub of the evening—to laugh—to sing—to do anything. In vain a young lieutenant, who was both a wit and vocalist, burst forth with—
“Roll on, silver moon!
Light the traveller on his way.”
The groups broke up, but re-formed; the whispers stopped for a moment, and then went on.