Of the three captives, Will Mather, Jimmie, and Tom, the latter had suffered the least as a prisoner of war. A strong Freemason, he had found friends at Columbia, where chance threw in his way a near relation of his dead wife and a former classmate. Though firmly believing in the Southern cause, Joe Haskell from the first befriended Captain Carleton, whom he finally helped to escape, giving him money, and so far as he was able, directions where to go and whom to ask for aid. Tom’s imprisonment had been of short duration, and thus it was, with vigor unimpaired and spirits unbroken, that he found himself free on that very night when Will Mather lay sleeping in the cave among the mountains of Tennessee. But that “Refuge of Safety” was many, many miles away, and Tom’s route to the land of freedom was a longer and far more dangerous one than Will’s had been. Still Tom had in his favor health and strength, together with a knack of passing himself off as a Southerner whenever an opportunity was presented, and so for a week or more he proceeded with comparatively little trouble; but at the end of that time dangers and difficulties beset him at every step, while more than once death or recapture stared him in the face, either from the close proximity of his pursuers, or the pertinacity of the bloodhounds which were set upon his track. Escape at times seemed impossible, and Tom’s courage and strength were beginning to give way, when one night, toward the last of June, he found himself in a negro cabin, and an occupant of a bed whose covering, though impregnated with the peculiar odor of the sable-hued faces around him, seemed the very embodiment of sweetness and cleanliness to the tired and footsore man, who nearly all his life had slept in the finest linen, with lace or silken hangings about his bed. For linen now there was a ragged quilt, and the bed was festooned with cobwebs, while from the blackened rafters hung bundles of herbs and strings of peppers, alternated here and there with the grimy articles of clothing which old Hetty had washed that day for her own “boys,” and in consequence of the rain had hung in her cabin to dry. Coarse, heavy shirts they were, but Tom, as he watched them drying on the pole, fell to coveting the uncouth things, and thought how soft and nice they would feel on his rough flesh. Then he thought of home and Rose, and wondered what she would say could she look in upon him in that negro hut, with all those stalwart boys sitting by, while Hetty, their mother, cooked the corn-cake, and fried the slice of bacon for supper. Two sat just where Tom could see them, while the third was near the door, keeping a constant watch on the circuitous path leading from the cabin to a large dwelling on the knoll,—“Marsr’s house,”—where to-night a number of young people were assembled in honor of the return of the son and heir, Lieut. Arthur, who had been in so many battles, and had a taste of prison life at the North.