"It was at Gettysburg also that Jim had seen Harry Rodes. The last time that Jim had seen him before that was just before leaving college, when Rodes had been elected president of the Hasty Pudding; this time he was lying in the grass, where it was red. There was like news of several other old chums.
"'As for your humble servant,' Jim wrote, 'he has only succeeded in getting himself ignominiously jugged by your Johnnies.' I heard, long afterwards, how he had been captured, pinned under his dead horse, with a broken sabre, and three of our men to his score. 'This is not so much fun,' he went on, 'as that night in the Newton jail, which perhaps you may remember, Tom. You got me into that, you riotous companion and perverter of my youth.' I remembered that scrape of our Sophomore year very well, but I had a strong impression that it was Jim who upset the officer of the law. He told us he could stand Libby, however, well enough, if he only had a little smoke, and asked if we could not give aid and comfort to the invader in the shape of tobacco. At this Randolph exclaimed: 'Jim Standish without his pipe! That is a real case of suffering among the prisoners!' The letter wound up with an injunction to answer it at once and tell all about ourselves and the other boys on our side, and with the hope that we should all be at the next triennial dinner.
"As soon as we had read the letter we went off and spent all our savings in tobacco. That was the only cheap thing in Richmond in those days, and we got enough to last Jim for months, though I have no doubt that he at once gave most of it away. Then we got some paper, and wrote him all we knew of the Harvard men on our side of the fence. We could give an equally good account of them, too; for though, as disobedient children, Alma Mater has frowned on us, she never had cause to blush. We finished the letter before it was time for us to go back to camp, and sent it with the tobacco to Jim. We promised to try again to see him, but neither of us could get leave for a long time. If we had there would have been little chance of our getting into Libby; and if we had gotten into Libby, we should not have found Jim there."
As the speaker paused Stoughton asked, "Why? did he es——" and then stopped, inwardly cursing himself, as he noticed a look that was coming into the face of the narrator. But the latter at once relieved him immensely by continuing.
"Yes, he escaped—very soon after our visit. A lot of prisoners got out together, Jim among them. The news was sent to all the troops near Richmond and instructions to keep a sharp lookout for them. Jim managed to get to our very outer lines, and one pitch-dark night tried to run the picket. The officer in command saw him in the brush and challenged him. Jim, trusting to the darkness and his old hundred-yard records, tried to make a dash for it. The officer fired and shot—shot him down like a dog."
The speaker's cigar had apparently gone out, and no one looked at him while he relit it. They looked at the walls where the firelight danced over the rollicking play-bills of thirty years ago. In a moment the graduate spoke again:
"As I leaned over the dearest friend I ever had, we recognized each other and he smiled. I took his head in my lap and he died holding my hand."
"Then you saw him before he died? Were you with the picket?" asked Gray.
"Yes.—I commanded the picket."