danger, she begged him to leave her and make good his escape. He finally
agreed to do this and with Reagan, the members of his staff and Burton
Harrison, his Secretary, started for the Florida coast.

The day was one of dismal fog and rain and the party lost the way,
turning in a circle, and at sunset met Mrs. Davis and her company at the
fork of the road near the Ocmulgee River.

The President and staff traveled with his wife next day and made
twenty-eight miles. At Irwinsville their presence was betrayed to the
Federal cavalry, his camp surrounded by Colonel Pritchard, and the
Confederate President and party arrested.

The soldiers plundered his baggage, tore open his wife's trunks and
scattered her dresses. In one of these trunks they found a pair of new
hoopskirts which Mrs. Davis had bought but never worn. An enterprising
newspaper man immediately invented and sent broadcast the story that he
had been captured trying to escape in his wife's hoopskirts. His enemies
refused to hear any contradiction of this invention. It was too good not
to be true. They clung to it long after Colonel Pritchard and every man
present had given it the lie.

They had traveled a day's journey toward Macon, the headquarters of
General Wilson, when an excited man galloped into the camp waving over
his head a printed slip of paper.

"What is it?" Davis asked of his guard.

The guard seized and read the slip and turned to the Confederate
Chieftain and his wife.

"Andrew Johnson's proclamation offering a reward of $100,000 for the
capture of Jefferson Davis as the murderer of Abraham Lincoln!"

A cry of anguish came from the faithful wife.

The leader touched her shoulder gently.

"Hush, my dear. The miserable scoundrel who wrote that proclamation knew
that it is false. He is the one man in the United States who knows that
I preferred Abraham Lincoln in the White House to him or any other man
the North might elect. Such an accusation must fail--"

The wife was not comforted.

"These men may assassinate you!"

The soldiers crowded about their defenseless prisoner and heaped on him
the vilest curses and insults. He made no answer. The far-away look in
his eagle eye told them only too plainly that he did not hear.

Colonel Pritchard in his manly way made every effort to protect him from
insult. Within a short distance of Macon, the prisoners were halted and
their escort drawn up in line on either side of the road. Colonel
Pritc