Not until several hundred miles had been placed between their fainting feet and Charleston did the hapless fugitives feel a sense of freedom. Often their fears and alarms were causeless, but they suffered loss of vitality all the same. Sometimes seeming misfortunes proved to be blessings. One night a pack of dogs chased them into a crowded village, and they took refuge in a graveyard vault. There Captain Drake found a copy of a local newspaper, warning the people to be on guard for escaped Union prisoners. The escaped prisoners themselves got the benefit of the hint. At another time some Confederate cavalrymen chased them on the high-road, and they escaped by getting into a dense wood, where the horses couldn't follow. While wandering about, they fell in with a loyal mountaineer, who took them to his home, fed them, and directed them to other Unionists.
Many of the men met with in the mountains were of the class known as "lyers out," deserters from the Confederate army, and fugitive conscripts. A hundred or more of these men were persuaded to join Drake's party on their tramp toward the Union lines. Thus reinforced with guides and armed companions, the prospects of the runaway prisoners began to brighten. But they were not out of the woods by a long way, as the sequel proved.
When the fugitives drew near the Union lines the danger of capture increased, for a cordon of mountain rangers patrolled the region to head off any fortunate ones who got thus far on the journey homeward. The mountains were simply barren wastes, the few cabins had to be shunned, and the only food to be obtained was wild game which the rifles of the "lyers out" brought down. In the uplands the poor fellows were hounded by "rangers," and in the valleys mounted Confederates dashed about on all sides.
At length the party reached the vicinity of Bull's Gap, a railway pass through the mountains, and guarded by Union troops as an outpost of Knoxville. The chief scout announced that the gap was fifteen miles from the foot of the hill whence it was first sighted, and that, once reached, the refugees would be safe. The news stimulated the men anew, and they started down the mountain with their eyes riveted on the gap, for fear, as Drake says, it would take wings and flee. Alas! alas! The unexpected happens in war if nowhere else.
The gap didn't exactly take wings and flee, but the ubiquitous General Breckenridge, with an army at his back, fell like a thunderbolt upon the Union garrison at the pass, defeated and routed the entire force and hurled them backward at mounted double-quick pace toward Knoxville; and, presto! the gap was closed in the very faces of the yearning-eyed, broken-bodied pilgrims. Think of it—at the end of those terrible weeks of endurance and suffering, to find a hostile army springing across the path at a bound, and its scouts and patrols beating every byway and bush in the region for the luckless strays of the fleeing enemy!
A young woman of the mountains volunteered to scout toward the gap and bring news to the refugee camp. She simply learned that Breckenridge was sweeping the country of Union troops and marching upon Knoxville.
At the same time it was discovered that a band of Confederate partisans were on the trail of the fugitives, and to escape this new danger they found comparative shelter in a ravine. Two of the men who had leaped from the car with Drake, Captains Todd and Grant, ventured out to obtain rations, which were sadly needed, as they were all living on dry corn. During the night mounted men attacked the bivouac, and the refugees scattered, every man for himself. At the end of a week they fell in with a cavalry patrol, and were once more, after forty-nine days' wandering, under the protection of the Stars and Stripes.
ATTEMPTS AT ESCAPE FROM ANDERSONVILLE.
Escapes from Andersonville, except through the portals of death—that is, complete escape to the Union lines—were exceedingly rare. Hundreds, through one device or another, succeeded in getting outside of the stockade, but the prison was so strongly surrounded with guards and forts and quarters occupied with zealous attendants, that it was difficult for a prisoner to elude the detective on the outside even when he had succeeded in passing the main barrier. Adding to this the existence of the deep swamps and vast forests just beyond the camp precincts, in which a stranger to the locality would be only too sure to lose his way, it will be seen that to enter Andersonville was indeed to leave "all hope behind." The favorite method of attempting escape was by tunnelling, for the great extent of the camp area, some twenty-five acres, and its crowded condition, made the work of excavation, without danger of discovery by the guards and keepers, comparatively easy. Another favorable circumstance was the fact that prisoners were allowed to dig wells to supply drinking water, and the grounds were everywhere dotted with piles of fresh earth that had been thrown up in consequence.
In order to excavate a tunnel, the prisoners contemplating escape would commence a lateral shaft a few feet below the mouth of one of these wells, located near the stockade; and as the work was done at night, the earth thus removed was carried in small quantities and deposited on the piles of fresh earth thrown out from the newly sunken wells. The tools used were of the rudest kind—tin plates, cups, and knives with which to loosen the earth, and bare hands to scoop it into the haversacks, or bags improvised from clothes and pieces of blanket; and in this manner these tunnels were frequently extended, not only beyond the stockade, but even beyond the outer line of prison guards. Yet, although hundreds passed out—as many as one hundred escaped through one tunnel in a single night, late in 1864—they were invariably brought back; sometimes through the treachery of spies, who mingled with the prisoners, and at other times by hunters with their dogs, who were constantly patrolling the vicinity of the camp, and, in fact, the entire region, in search of deserters from the Confederate army and runaway slaves, as well as fugitive prisoners. Not one well-authenticated case of a prisoner getting out through a tunnel, and making his way North, is to be found on record.