tags;
and, being travelled only by the inhabitants, appeared to outsiders
"to jes' peter out," as the phrase went. This territory was known by
the unpromising name of Holetown.

Its denizens were a peculiar but kindly race known to the boys as
"poor white folks," and called by the negroes, with great contempt,
"po' white trash." Some of them owned small places in the pines; but
the majority were simply tenants. They were an inoffensive people, and
their worst vices were intemperance and evasion of the tax-laws.

They made their living--or rather, they existed--by fishing and
hunting; and, to eke it out, attempted the cultivation of little
patches of corn and tobacco near their cabins, or in the bottoms where
small branches ran into the stream already mentioned.

In appearance they were usually so thin and sallow that one had to
look at them twice to see them clearly. At best, they looked vague and
illusive.

They were brave enough. At the outbreak of the war nearly all of the
men in this community enlisted, thinking, as many others did, that war
was more like play than work, and consisted more of resting than of
laboring. Although most of them, when in battle, showed the greatest
fearlessness, yet the duties of camp soon became irksome to them, and
they grew sick of the restraint and drilling of camp-life; so some of
them, when refused a furlough, took it, and came home. Others stayed
at home after leave had ended, feeling secure in their stretches of
pine and swamp, not only from the feeble efforts of the
conscript-guard, but from any parties who might be sent in search of
them.

In this way it happened, as time went by, that Holetown became known
to harbor a number of deserters.

According to the negroes, it was full of them; and many stories were
told about glimpses of men dodging behind trees in the big woods, or
rushing away through the underbrush like wild cattle. And, though the
grown people doubted whether the negroes had not been startled by some
of the hogs, which were quite wild, feeding in the woods, the boys
were satisfied that the negroes really had seen deserters.

This became a certainty when there came report after report of these
wood-skulkers, and when the conscript-guard, with the brightest of
uniforms, rode by with as much show and noise as if on a fox-hunt.
Then it became known that deserters were, indeed, infesting the piny
district of Holetown, and in considerable numbers.

Some of the