As I came under the fence he was still leaning motionless against the tree, but to my heated imagination he appeared to have turned and be watching me.  I hardly breathed; the filthy water rippling past me seemed to roar to attract the guard’s attention; I reached my hand out cautiously to grasp a root to pull myself along by, and caught instead a dry branch, which broke with a loud crack.  My heart absolutely stood still.  The guard evidently heard the noise.  The black lump separated itself from the tree, and a straight line which I knew to be his musket separated itself from the lump.  In a brief instant I lived a year of mortal apprehension.  So certain was I that he had discovered me, and was leveling his piece to fire, that I could scarcely restrain myself from springing up and dashing away to avoid the shot.  Then I heard him take a step, and to my unutterable surprise and relief, he walked off farther from the Creek, evidently to speak to the man whose beat joined his.

I pulled away more swiftly, but still with the greatest caution, until after half-an-hour’s painful effort I had gotten fully one hundred and fifty yards away from the Hospital fence, and found Harney crouched on a cypress knee, close to the water’s edge, watching for me.

We waited there a few minutes, until I could rest, and calm my perturbed nerves down to something nearer their normal equilibrium, and then started on.  We hoped that if we were as lucky in our next step as in the first one we would reach the Flint River by daylight, and have a good long start before the morning roll-call revealed our absence.  We could hear the hounds still baying in the distance, but this sound was too customary to give us any uneasiness.

But our progress was terribly slow.  Every step hurt fearfully.  The Creek bed was full of roots and snags, and briers, and vines trailed across it.  These caught and tore our bare feet and legs, rendered abnormally tender by the scurvy.  It seemed as if every step was marked with blood.  The vines tripped us, and we frequently fell headlong.  We struggled on determinedly for nearly an hour, and were perhaps a mile from the Hospital.

The moon came up, and its light showed that the creek continued its course through a dense jungle like that we had been traversing, while on the high ground to our left were the open pine woods I have previously described.

We stopped and debated for a few minutes.  We recalled our promise to keep in the Creek, the experience of other boys who had tried to escape and been caught by the hounds.  If we staid in the Creek we were sure the hounds would not find our trail, but it was equally certain that at this rate we would be exhausted and starved before we got out of sight of the prison.  It seemed that we had gone far enough to be out of reach of the packs patrolling immediately around the Stockade, and there could be but little risk in trying a short walk on the dry ground.  We concluded to take the chances, and, ascending the bank, we walked and ran as fast as we could for about two miles further.