Our first attempt was made about a week after our arrival.  We found two logs on the east side that were a couple of feet shorter than the rest, and it seemed as if they could be successfully scaled.  About fifty of us resolved to make the attempt.  We made a rope twenty-five or thirty feet long, and strong enough to bear a man, out of strings and strips of cloth.  A stout stick was fastened to the end, so that it would catch on the logs on either side of the gap.  On a night dark enough to favor our scheme, we gathered together, drew cuts to determine each boy’s place in the line, fell in single rank, according to this arrangement, and marched to the place.  The line was thrown skillfully, the stick caught fairly in the notch, and the boy who had drawn number one climbed up amid a suspense so keen that I could hear my heart beating.  It seemed ages before he reached the top, and that the noise he made must certainly attract the attention of the guard.  It did not.  We saw our comrade’s. figure outlined against the sky as he slid, over the top, and then heard the dull thump as he sprang to the ground on the other side.  “Number two,” was whispered by our leader, and he performed the feat as successfully as his predecessor.  “Number, three,” and he followed noiselessly and quickly.  Thus it went on, until, just as we heard number fifteen drop, we also heard a Rebel voice say in a vicious undertone: 

“Halt! halt, there, d—­n you!”

This was enough.  The game was up; we were discovered, and the remaining thirty-five of us left that locality with all the speed in our heels, getting away just in time to escape a volley which a squad of guards, posted in the lookouts, poured upon the spot where we had been standing.

The next morning the fifteen who had got over the Stockade were brought in, each chained to a sixty-four pound ball.  Their story was that one of the N’Yaarkers, who had become cognizant of our scheme, had sought to obtain favor in the Rebel eyes by betraying us.  The Rebels stationed a squad at the crossing place, and as each man dropped down from the Stockade he was caught by the shoulder, the muzzle of a revolver thrust into his face, and an order to surrender whispered into his ear.  It was expected that the guards in the sentry-boxes would do such execution among those of us still inside as would prove a warning to other would-be escapes.  They were defeated in this benevolent intention by the readiness with which we divined the meaning of that incautiously loud halt, and our alacrity in leaving the unhealthy locality.

The traitorous N’Yaarker was rewarded with a detail into the commissary department, where he fed and fattened like a rat that had secured undisturbed homestead rights in the center of a cheese.  When the miserable remnant of us were leaving Andersonville months afterward, I saw him, sleek, rotund, and well-clothed, lounging leisurely in the door of a tent.  He regarded us a moment contemptuously, and then went on conversing with a fellow N’Yaarker, in the foul slang that none but such as he were low enough to use.