Just then we came abreast of a barnyard, upon spying which Utley started on a sharp trot toward it. I had a vision of dogs, flying men, and clews thick enough to capture a regiment. I presume it would have been fully as well if I had kept my own counsel, but here was a man not only endangering his own neck, but putting me in the same fix with him. “Jack Utley, you fool!” I cried to him as loudly as I dared, “don’t you dare to do it. What’s hunger alongside of our liberty?” All I heard was a smothered reply, the tenor of which I could guess without hitting wide of the mark, and he went on his way, while we continued on ours, hearing no sound for upward of three minutes. Then there came to us a loud squawking of a chicken, which was quickly stifled, only to be succeeded by a chorus of similar squawks, the difference in them being their tones, some tenor, others of a lower scale of voice, the whole making a most discordant and disheartening din to our ears. I seemed to see ourselves in a pretty mess. There lay the farm-house, plain in the moonlight, and just in the rear was the barn. Two minutes later Utley came rushing up behind us with a big fowl stuffed under his coat, but a dead one, he having wrung its neck. The curses we flung at him from all sides were like so much water on a duck’s back, his only retort being something about his stomach,--that it had to be considered once in a while. I feared the worst would come of this experience, and so remarked to the whole lot of them. As we went on I thought I heard the slam of a door, and, halting the lads for an instant, listened intently, but heard nothing more like it. After hurrying forward for two miles or more, a deep cut was encountered, through which the track went, curving somewhat to the left where the bank on either side was the highest. Notwithstanding the bright moonlight, there was plenty of shadow at this curve, and not knowing what the darkness might conceal from us, we halted while Hughes went to investigate. He returned in a few minutes, and we could tell by his manner that he had something interesting to relate. “What do you think,” said he, in beginning, “I found at the other end of the cut? There was a shanty with several straw bunks in it. I did the soft-foot and found there wasn’t any one inside, but there had been, for the straw was yet warm from the duffers that had lain in it. A little beyond the shanty, sitting against a pile of ties, I saw two men, smoking pipes, because I could see the fire of the tobacco. On the way back I tripped my foot against something, and, by--, if it wasn’t a rope stretched across the track. It was lucky for me that I hit it just as I did, else there would have been a row.”