The Maine bugle ... campaign; 1-5 Jan. 1894-Oct. 1898 - Maine.gov

PRISON LIFE AND ESCAPE. 319
cheer for the old lady. We drowned the voices of the guards
and amid cheers and expressions of gratitude to the good
woman and jawing with the guards we had a little pandemonium.
She kept up her expressions of sympathy till we were out of
hearing. I should think she must have been sixty years old
and is probably not living now. How many times I have
thought of her since. Her courage to stand alone in that
crowded rebel town and amid threats, jeers and insults of her
neighbors, offer to us all that was in her power to offer—her
sympathy for us, and express her sorrow for our misery.
We passed on through the town, down to the edge of a pine
forest perhaps a mile from the city of Thomasville. I recollect
of seeing a white negro child in the edge of the town, an albino,
I suppose. A child perhaps ten years old, with full African
features but as white as chalk. We went into camp as I said
before by the side of a pine forest, and in a few days the rebels
began a deep trench around us to set up stockades in, but we
were not destined to stay there long enough to have prison walls
erected around us. It was evident to us that our forces were
troubling the rebels considerably for we were ordered to march
to the Blue Springs, on the Flint River, a distance of sixty-
three miles by the guide board at a cross road we passed.
During my stay in Andersonville I obtained a copy of one of
Lloyds maps of the State of Georgia from an artist comrade of
the One Hundredth New York named James Hoffman. I always
meant to try to escape, and for that reason I studied the map a
good deal, and so when we were ordered to march to the Flint
River I remembered that it was near Albany and that Albany
was either on the Georgia Central Railroador a branch of it, on
which that dread old prison, Andersonville, was situated. I sus-
pectected then that we were to be sent back to Andersonville.
I got it out of one of the more intelligent guards one day on the
march by careful questioning that Andersonville was our des-
tination. Then I determined to try to escape right off. But
the day we started two men with six or more hounds came
along and marched behind us, and before long we heard the