joyed our stay.

In discourse of time the guards who had captured us were detailed to
take us back, and they were given a leave of twenty days in which to do
so, Rocket now being a sergeant.

Our start was made after a farewell that showed far more friendship than
enmity, and we made the fifty miles to Washington in four days, taking
it easy.

Of the nine men who composed this squad eight were positively disloyal
to the Confederacy, but were forced to fight for it because of their
homes and families.

Each one of the eight, at different times, talked very freely to me when
the others were not around, and each one told me that they would never
have held us at the river if the others could have been certainly
depended upon not to report the matter. We got to be very friendly with
these guards, and we were really sorry when it came time to part from
them.

One of our guards was an old man whom his companions called Captain
Payne. He rode a sorry-looking specimen of a horse and was evidently
only a private. Wishing to be friendly, he offered to let me ride his
horse if I would allow him to hold the halter, which offer I promptly
accepted, informing him that he was welcome to hold the halter and the
horse's tail as well if he so desired. As an apology for the limitation
of my actions with his horse, he informed me that he had positive orders
to let us have no chance of escape, and to shoot us without notice if
such an attempt was made.

In the course of conversation I asked him why he was called captain
while being under orders of a sergeant. His reply was that he had been
elected captain of 500 men who had organized to resist the draft and
afterwards joined the Federal army; that they had been informed upon and
the scheme frustrated, he having been forced to compromise between his
neck and the halter by enlisting in the Confederate army as a private.

We were taken up behind on the horses of our guards during part of the
trip, and in one of these rides behind Sergeant Rocket I learned that he
had been in Missouri with Price, but had disliked the job very much, as
had most of his companions. When Price had commenced his retreat he had
simply broken ranks and ordered the men to fall in again at Boggy
Hollow. They had all been forced to shift for themselves, and for three
days he had had nothing to eat. After that they had lived almost
entirely on fresh meat, without salt, for twenty-four days, and the
organization ha