In the society of the earnest and cordial Texas acquaintances whom I had found—or who had found me—I had wholly overlooked the little circumstance that had occurred during the night at the theater, when, it will be remembered, I had been pleasantly approached after the dismissal by a couple of Confederates who said they had met me in Texas the preceding winter. I was then that evening in the company of the Colonel, who knew me only as a Marylander, and by an entirely different name than that by which the Texans addressed me, and it will be remembered that I then declined to be recognized as ——, and had, perhaps, rather curtly repelled their courteous advances.
As I sat at camp dinner on an improvised bench in front of the tent with my friends, with consternation I saw approaching me the very chap whom I had snubbed in the vestibule of the theater. The appearance of this tall fellow at the time, in his gray clothes, had about such an effect on me at the dinner table in that company in broad daylight as a ghost might produce when alone somewhere near midnight. He had his staring eyes fixed right on me. There was no mistaking it.
My dangerous predicament rushed to my mind at once. Luckily for me, perhaps, we were all seated at the table, so the fellow had politeness enough not to intrude himself upon the crowd, but walked on past us keeping his eye searchingly, and I felt sternly, fixed on me. I lost my appetite, which a moment previously was ravenous, and, as soon as I could decently do so, meekly suggested that, as I had a long way to go, I'd better leave them at once.
"O, no; we are going to escort you back to your camp on a horse, as we agreed to do."
That was very kind, of course, but if there was any one thing that I did not want to happen just then, was any farther attention to be paid to their guest. I declined the proffered kindness with so much earnestness that it might have had the effect of quieting the matter had not one of the fellows observed:
"Well, I'm going to town to-night anyway, and you can wait awhile and ride that far."
I have no doubt that the conversation between myself and the Texas Confederates that evening (in the light of subsequent events), would be interesting to any of them yet living who may see this narrative, and if I were able to put it down here in detail it might also be interesting to the ordinary reader.
I remember all that occurred during the half hour that followed the dinner hour. Could I forget that banquet?
While my newly-found old friends were arranging among themselves a programme to spend the evening in Richmond with me as their guide, my searching glances detected that my tall theatre acquaintance had gathered a group of half a dozen of his comrades around himself, and, as I imagined, he was earnestly explaining to them his experience with me at the theatre door.
Of course, I must have imagined the worst; who would not have done so under the same conditions? He probably did not suspect my true character at all, and was, perhaps, only entertaining his associates with an account of what he, no doubt, termed the shabby treatment that I had accorded him, as compared with what he was witnessing in my intercourse with the other boys. It had, however, another dangerous effect of calling the attention of a great many of the regiment to their visiting comrade in gray—the Maryland refugee—who was, by a stretch of the imagination, almost as far from home as were the Texans, because, as they said, in their sympathetic way, when speaking of their absence and distance from home: