missed.

Unfortunately, however, two or three of them were recaptured and again
incarcerated in Libby. The Richmond authorities thereupon telegraphed to
Colonel Smith, asking how those officers escaped from Danville. Smith,
surprised, ordered a recount. The trapdoor did its duty. "All present!"
Finally he answered, "No prisoner has escaped from Danville." The rebel
commissary of prisons at Richmond, Gen. J. H. Winder, then telegraphed
the names of the recaptured officers. Smith looks on his books: there
are those names, sure enough! The mystery must be solved. He now sends
his adjutant to count us about noon. We asked him what it meant. He told
us it was reported that several officers had escaped. We replied,
"That's too good to be true." He counted very slowly and with
extraordinary precision. He kept his eye on the staircase as he
approached it. Six officers flew up the ladder as we huddled around him.
It was almost impossible to suppress laughter at the close, when he
declared, "I'll take my oath no prisoner has escaped from this prison."
But there were those names of the missing, and there was our
ill-disguised mirth. Smith resorted to heroic measures. He came in with
two or three of his staff and a man who was said to be a professor of
mathematics. This was on the 8th of November, 1864. He made all officers
of the lower room move for a half-hour into the upper room, and there
fall in line with the rest. His adjutant called the roll in reality.
Each as his name was read aloud was made to step forward and cross to
the other side. Of course no one could answer for the absent six. I
doubt if he ever learned the secret of that trapdoor. The professor of
mathematics promised to bring me a Geometry. About two weeks later,
November 24th, he brought me a copy of Davies's _Legendre_.

On the 9th of December, while our senior officer, General Hayes, was
sick in hospital, the next in rank, Gen. A. N. Duffie, of the First
Cavalry Division of Sheridan's army, fresh from the French service, with
which he had campaigned in Algeria, where he was wounded nine times,
suddenly conceived a plot to break out and escape. Two companies of
infantry had arrived in the forenoon and stacked their arms in plain
sight on the level ground about twenty rods distant. Duffie's plan was
to rush through the large open door when a water party returning with
filled buckets should be entering, seize those muskets, overpower the
guard, immediately liber