earing there had been also, but irregular,
depending chiefly on the temper of the captors,--stripping them
sometimes to shirt and drawers, leaving them occasionally jacket and
shoes; so now most were barefooted, most in rags, and some had not even
rags. They had lain on the bare earth, sodden with damp or calcined into
dust, and borne storm and heat helplessly, without even the shelter of a
board, till they were burned and wasted to the likeness of haggard
ghosts; most had forgotten hope, many decency; some were dying, and
crawled over the ground with a woful persistency that it would have
broken your heart to see; they were all fasting, for the day's rations,
tossed to them the afternoon before, had been devoured, as was the
custom, at a single meal, and proved scant at that; and they crowded
wolfishly about the wagons, the most miserable, pitiable mob that ever
had mothers, wives, and sisters at home to pray for them.

The new comers looked on amazed, and "How about Belle Isle now?" they
said bitterly to Drake. He, poor fellow, was having his first despondent
chill, and sneering at himself for having it, after all his fine talk
about "backbone"; and finding reasons for despair thicken, the harder he
tried to make elbow-room for hope, till altogether confounded at the
muddle, he flung up thought, with "Brain's full and stomach's empty, and
it's ill talking between a full man and a fasting," and set about
cooking his rations. "But first catch your hare," cries Mrs. Glass.
Drake had his hare, such as it was, but found something quite as
important lacking,--wood.

"I say, my friend, where do we find fuel?" he asked of a man sitting
quietly on the ground.

"Where the Israelites found the straw for their bricks," was the answer.
"There is no special provision made, unless it be an occasional permit
to forage outside, under----Hold off there!--don't touch that, man,
unless you want to be cooked yourself for supper!--that's the 'dead
line'!"

Drake drew back from a light railing running parallel with the
inclosure, on which he had nearly laid his hand.

"What the Deuse is the dead line?"

"The new way to pay old debts, and put a Yankee out of the world cheap.
Show so much as your little finger outside of that, and the guard nails
you with a bullet; and as they like that sort of thing, they blaze away
whenever they get a chance,--which is once or twice a day,--for our men
expose themselves voluntarily. When Satan said,