“Say, Guard, can’t you give a fellow a chew of tobacco?”

To which the guard replied: 

“Yes; come right across the line there and I’ll drop you down a bit.”

The unsuspecting prisoner stepped across the Dead Line, and the guard—­a boy of sixteen—­raised his gun and killed him.

At the North Side of the prison, the path down to the Creek lay right along side of the Dead Line, which was a mere furrow in the ground.

At night the guards, in their zeal to kill somebody, were very likely to imagine that any one going along the path for water was across the Dead Line, and fire upon him.  It was as bad as going upon the skirmish line to go for water after nightfall.  Yet every night a group of boys would be found standing at the head of the path crying out: 

“Fill your buckets for a chew of tobacco.”

That is, they were willing to take all the risk of running that gauntlet for this moderate compensation.

CHAPTER LXXI.

December—­rations of wood and food grow less daily—­uncertainty as to the mortality at Florence—­even the government’s statistics are very deficient—­care fob the sick.

The rations of wood grew smaller as the weather grew colder, until at last they settled down to a piece about the size of a kitchen rolling-pin per day for each man.  This had to serve for all purposes—­cooking, as well as warming.  We split the rations up into slips about the size of a carpenter’s lead pencil, and used them parsimoniously, never building a fire so big that it could not be covered with a half-peck measure.  We hovered closely over this—­covering it, in fact, with our hands and bodies, so that not a particle of heat was lost.  Remembering the Indian’s sage remark, “That the white man built a big fire and sat away off from it; the Indian made a little fire and got up close to it,” we let nothing in the way of caloric be wasted by distance.  The pitch-pine produced great quantities of soot, which, in cold and rainy days, when we hung over the fires all the time, blackened our faces until we were beyond the recognition of intimate friends.

There was the same economy of fuel in cooking.  Less than half as much as is contained in a penny bunch of kindling was made to suffice in preparing our daily meal.  If we cooked mush we elevated our little can an inch from the ground upon a chunk of clay, and piled the little sticks around it so carefully that none should burn without yielding all its heat to the vessel, and not one more was burned than absolutely necessary.  If we baked bread we spread the dough upon our chessboard, and propped it up before the little fire-place, and used every particle of heat evolved.  We had to pinch and starve ourselves thus, while within five minutes’ walk from the prison-gate stood enough timber to build a great city.