utious lookout from the upper east windows
for any indications of suspicion on the part of the Confederates. In
this extreme caution was necessary, both to avert the curiosity of
prisoners in those east rooms, and to keep out of the range of bullets
from the guards, who were under a standing order to fire at a head if
seen at a window, or at a hand if placed on the bars that secured them.
A sentinel's bullet one day cut a hole in the ear of Lieutenant Hammond;
another officer was wounded in the face by a bullet, which fortunately
first splintered against one of the window-bars; and a captain of an
Ohio regiment was shot through the head and instantly killed while
reading a newspaper. He was violating no rule whatever, and when shot
was from eight to ten feet inside the window through which the bullet
came. This was a wholly unprovoked and wanton murder; the cowardly
miscreant had fired the shot while he was off duty, and from the north
sidewalk of Carey street. The guards (home guards they were) used, in
fact, to gun for prisoners' heads from their posts below, pretty much
after the fashion of boys after squirrels; and the whizz of a bullet
through the windows became too common an occurrence to occasion remark
unless some one was shot.

Under a standing rule, the twelve hundred prisoners were counted twice
each day, the first count being made about nine in the morning, and the
last about four in the afternoon. This duty was habitually done by the
clerk of the prison, E.W. Ross, a civilian employed by the commandant.
He was christened "Little Ross"[13] by the prisoners, because of his
diminutive size. Ross was generally attended by either "Dick" Turner,
Adjutant Latouche, or Sergeant George Stansil, of the 18th Georgia, with
a small guard to keep the prisoners in four closed ranks during the
count. The commandant of the prison, Major Thomas P. Turner (no relative
of Dick's), seldom came up-stairs.

[Footnote 13: "Little Ross" was burned to death, with other guests, at
the Spotswood House, Richmond, in 1873.]

To conceal the absence of the five men who were daily at work at the
tunnel, their comrades of the party off digging duty resorted, under
Rose's supervision, to a device of "repeating." This scheme, which was
of vital importance to hoodwink the Confederates and avert mischievous
curiosity among the uninformed prisoners, was a hazardous business that
severely taxed the ingenuity and strained the nerve of the leader