k's shoulders, I got near
enough to read that we were thirty-four miles from Columbia, having
averaged not quite twelve miles a night.

[Illustration: ESCAPED PRISONERS SEARCHING FOR THE ROAD AT NIGHT.]

Being now out of provisions, much of our time was spent in looking for
sweet potatoes along the road. Sometimes we would see a nice patch in
front of some wayside house; but almost every house had a dog or two, and
they ever seemed on the alert for tramps; and it was quite a risk to
attempt to dig sweet potatoes with those dogs making such a racket, and we
were often glad enough to get away without being detected, and even
without the desired potatoes. How those dogs would bark! It seemed as
though they would arouse the whole neighborhood with their eternal
yelping. I took a solemn oath during that journey that if I ever lived to
get free, I would thereafter shoot every dog I could find, and I pretty
near kept that oath, too. We were not so much afraid of their biting us as
we were that they would be followed by their masters with loaded guns; and
often we would make a detour of a mile, rather than have attention
attracted to us by those yelping curs.

The fifth night of our tramp was cloudy and dark, so much so that the
little North Star, that had thus far been our guide, as well as the full
moon that had lighted up our road, was completely hidden from our view,
and we were left to grope our way as best we could. In the darkness we
came to where the roads forked, and although there was a guide board, it
was in vain that I tried by mounting Captain Hock's shoulders and lighting
matches, to read the directions, to find which road led in the right
direction.

After talking the matter over, and consulting our little map as well as we
could by the aid of lighted matches, we took the road to the right, and
although it may seem paradoxical, for this once right was wrong.

We traveled on this road two or three miles, when we were satisfied that
we should have taken the other fork, but thinking we would come to a road
soon that bore in the right direction, we kept plodding along in the
darkness and finally in the rain, and when near daylight we went into
camp, we only knew we were in the woods somewhere in South Carolina, but
in what particular portion of that state we could not tell. Of one thing
we were satisfied, and that was that we were tired out and half starved.
We spread our blankets on the wet ground and, with