Then rousing one of the sleeping soldiers, whom he called aside and gave some private directions as to my care and keeping, he courteously told me to make myself comfortable, and apologized for the accommodations.
I was a prisoner, and I knew full well that to be escorted back through the Rebel armies with this officer's report that I had been "found at their outposts going in the direction of the enemy," would excite a suspicion that would be sure to set on foot a closer examination, and this would result in my certain detection; because the first thing they would do would be to show my forged endorsement from General Beauregard's Chief-of-Staff for his further endorsement; and I could not, of course, stand an examination into my immediate antecedents, nor explain my statements, and this would also discover my operations in the telegraph office.
As I lay down alongside of the armed Rebel trooper for a rest, I resolved that, come what might, I should not go back a prisoner—that it would be preferable to be shot trying to escape rather than to be hanged as a spy.
CHAPTER XII.
ANOTHER ESCAPE, ETC.
As I lay me down to sleep on the front porch of the little old house, close beside an armed Rebel soldier, and not very distant from two other aroused troopers, I realized in a manner that I can not describe that I was not only a prisoner, but that I was most likely suspected of being a spy who had been captured in the very act of escaping from their own into their enemy's lines. I felt all the worse from the reflection that my unfortunate predicament resulted solely from a want of caution or discretion; that had I been content to suffer more patiently the delays and annoyances which were necessarily to be encountered while tramping in the darkness through the fields and briar bushes in avoiding the highways, I might have passed the danger line a moment later, to have reached our own lines safely enough a little later in the night. I had actually passed all the Rebel pickets, both of infantry and cavalry. I learned from the talk of the men into whose hands I had run myself, that they were merely a detached scouting party, who were at that particular point at night, as I surmised, to receive communications from their friends who were inside our lines during the daytime.
This arrangement was for the accommodation and convenience of their spies in our army—enabling them to come out to this rendezvous under cover of the night to deliver their mail or supply information.
I gathered these facts from the big fellow who had me in charge, who, it was courteously observed by the officer, "would make me as comfortable as possible," after the manner of a jailor the night before a hanging.
The outpost was not only a branch postoffice for the Rebel couriers, but there was a previously-arranged system of signals with some one at the college, by which any important advances or other movement of our forces could have been quickly announced, and that would have been well understood by the party stationed there to observe this.