sing us of being escaped prisoners, refusing to listen to
reason, and ordering us to fall in and move on ahead of them toward the
nearest headquarters. Then we pleaded and made all sorts of future
promises if they would let us go on about our business, but they were
obdurate, and we sadly filed off toward the road, being promised a dose
of lead if we tried to run.

Our reflections were now far from pleasant, and for a time we were much
depressed, but there was no use of crying, and so we gradually recovered
our spirits and hoped for the best.

CHAPTER XI.

THE BACK TRACK.

The location of our recapture was about ten miles from Boston, Texas,
and our captors were taking us to that place.

On the way we stopped at a farmhouse to get a drink, and I begged the
woman for some thread with which to mend my clothes. She searched around
and found a ball, giving me several lengths of thread from it. I then
asked her for some patches, and she hunted up a pair of old pants of
very small size, evidently a boy's pair. They were corduroy, and it
seemed a shame to cut them up, but she said it was all she could do.
While she had been gone for the pants I had stolen a ball of thread,
which had been left within reach, and I felt some qualms of conscience
over it, but necessity had urged me to do it, and I left the matter for
necessity to settle with conscience. The pants were carefully stowed
away for future use.

Proceeding on our way, we killed time and enlivened our weary tramp by
telling stories. One of our captors developed a capacity for lying which
was simply astounding. He was not a graceful, elegant liar, telling
stories that you might doubt, but could not dispute, but was one of the
class of liars who distort facts that are well known and calmly make
statements which you know are false. His stories were all upon the
subject of eating and big eaters. We stood it until he told a story in
which he claimed that he knew a man who had cooked and eaten, at one
meal, a rock fish weighing thirty-six pounds, clinching the matter by
asserting that he knew it to be a fact, inasmuch as he had seen it done.
Then we concluded to shut the mouth of such an egregious and palpable
liar.

Burnbaum asked me about my friend down in Baltimore, who was such an
enormous eater, and, after some persuasion, I told the following story:

A colored man, called Eating Tom, stopped at a dining stall kept by a
widow in Marsh Market one fine mor