nt, looking up from his writing. "I had
faith in you; I thought you wouldn't betray me; but I trusted your own
life in your own hands, that was all. Too much was at stake to do more.
Your every step was shadowed, from the moment you left this camp till
you came back to it in irons. Two detectives were constantly at your
back, sworn to take your life, if you wavered for half a second."

"Is that true?" asked the Texan in a musing way, but without moving a
muscle. "I didn't know it, but I felt it in the air!"

In the room at the Richmond House, on the table around which were
discussed their hellish plans, was found a slip of paper, and on it, in
pencil, was scrawled the following:--

"COLONEL,--You _must_ leave this house _to-night_. Go to the
Briggs House.

"J. FIELDING."

Fielding was the assumed name of the Rebel who burrowed with Hines out
of town, where not even his fellow-fiends could find him. Did the old
fox scent the danger? Beyond a doubt he did. Another day, and the
Texan's life might have been forfeit. Another day, and the camp might
have been sprung upon a little too suddenly! So the Commandant was none
too soon; and who that reads this can doubt that through it all he was
led and guided by the good Providence that guards his country?

But what said Chicago, when it awoke in the morning? Let one of its own
organs answer.

"A shiver of genuine horror passed over Chicago yesterday. Thousands of
citizens, who awoke to the peril hanging over their property and their
heads in the form of a stupendous foray upon the city from Camp Douglas,
led by Rebel officers in disguise and Rebel guerrillas without disguise,
and concocted by home Copperheads, whose houses had been converted into
Rebel arsenals, were appalled as though an earthquake had opened at
their feet.... Who can picture the horrors to follow the letting loose
of nine thousand Rebel prisoners upon a sleeping city, all unconscious
of the coming avalanche? With arms and ammunition stored at convenient
locations, with confederates distributed here and there, ready for the
signal of conflagration, the horrors of the scene could scarcely be
paralleled in savage history. One hour of such a catastrophe would
destroy the creations of a quarter of a century, and expose the homes of
nearly two hundred thousand souls to every conceivable form of
desecration."[G]

But the men of Chicago not only talked, they acted. They we