Dick was enraged to see how contentedly the men bore the irksome confinement, the meager food, and harsh peremptoriness of the beardless boys set over them as guards.  Most of the prisoners passed the time in cards, playing for buttons, trinkets, or what not that formed their scanty possessions.  Dick learned that all the commissioned officers of the company with Wesley Boone had been wounded or killed in the charge near the stone bridge.  Wesley had been with the prisoners at first.  He had been struck on the head, and was in a raging fever when his father and sister came to the prison to take him away.  No one could tell where he was now, but Dick knew that he must be in the city, since there were no exchanges, the Confederates allowing no one to leave the lines except women with the dead, or those who came from the North on special permits.

Then he visited the provost headquarters, and was shown the complete list of names recorded in the books there; but Barney’s was not among them.  At the Spottswood Hotel, the day after his coming, he met Elisha Boone, haggard, depressed, almost despairing.  Dick had no love for the hard-headed plutocrat, but he couldn’t resist making himself known.

“How d’ye do, Mr. Boone?  I hope Wesley is coming on well, sir.”

Boone brought his wandering eyes down to the stripling in dull amazement.

“Why, where on earth do you come from?  How is it you are free and allowed in the streets?”

“Oh, I am a privileged person, sir.  I am looking up Company K. You haven’t heard anything of young Moore, Barney, who lives on the Callao road south of Acredale?”

“No, my mind has been taken up with my son”; his voice grew softer.  “He is in a very bad way, and the worst is there is no decent doctor to be got here for love or money; all the capable ones are in the army, and those that are here refuse to take any interest in a Yankee.”

The father’s grief and the unhappy situation of his whilom enemy touched the lad; forgetting Jack’s and Vincent’s warning, Dick said, impulsively: 

“Oh, I can get him a good doctor.  We have friends here.”  He knew, the moment he had spoken the words, that he had been imprudent—­how imprudent the sudden, suspicious gleam in Boone’s eye at once admonished him.

“Friends here?  Union men have no friends here.  There are men here with, whom I have done business for years, men that owe prosperity to me, but when I called on them they almost insulted me.  If you have friends, you must have sympathies that they appreciate.”

Dick knew what this meant.  To be a Democrat had been, in Acredale, to be charged with secret leanings to rebellion.  He restrained his wrath manfully, and said, simply: 

“An old college friend of Jack’s has been very kind to us.”

“Us?  I take it you mean the Spragues.  They are stopping with Jeff Davis, I suppose?  It’s the least he could do for allies so steadfast.”