"Arrest the 'Butternuts' as they come into Chicago."
"That I can do; but the leaders are here, with five thousand armed Illini to back them. I must take them. Do you know them?"
"Yes; but I do not know where they are quartered."
At two o'clock the Commandant showed the Rebel officer to his bed, but went back himself, and paced the floor until sunrise. In the morning his plan was formed. It was a desperate plan; but desperate circumstances require desperate expedients.
In the prison was a young Texan who had served on Bragg's staff, and under Morgan in Kentucky, and was, therefore, acquainted with Hines, Grenfell, and the other Rebel officers. He fully believed in the theory of State Rights,—that is, that a part is greater than the whole,—but was an honest man, who, when his word was given, could be trusted. One glance at his open, resolute face showed that he feared nothing; that he had, too, that rare courage which delights in danger, and courts heroic enterprise from pure love of peril. Early in the war, he had encountered Colonel De Land, a former commandant of the post, on the battlefield, and taken him prisoner. A friendship then sprang up between the two, which, when the tables were turned, and the captor became the captive, was not forgotten. Colonel De Land made him chief clerk in the medical department, and gave him every possible freedom. At that time it was the custom to allow citizens free access to the camp; and among the many good men and women who came to visit and aid the prisoners was a young woman, the daughter of a well-known resident of Chicago. She met the Texan, and a result as natural as the union of hydrogen and oxygen followed. But since Adam courted Eve, who ever heard of wooing going on in a prison? "It is not exactly the thing," said Colonel De Land; "had you not better pay your addresses at the lady's house, like a gentleman?" A guard accompanied the prisoner; but it was shrewdly guessed that he stayed outside, or paid court to the girls in the kitchen.
This was the state of things when the present Commandant took charge of the camp. He learned the facts, studied the prisoner's face, and remembered that he, too, once went a-courting. As he walked his room that Friday night, he bethought him of the Texan. Did he love his State better than he loved his affianced wife? The Commandant would test him.
"But I shall betray my friends! Can I do that in honor?" asked the Texan.
"Did you ask that question when you betrayed your country?" answered the Commandant.
"Let me go from camp for an hour. Then I will give you my decision."
"Very well."