A Confederate soldier sauntered along the shore and stopped just in front of the boy's hiding-place. He had a rude fish-pole. Either he knew how to fish, or the James River fish were very hungry. A string of a dozen hung from his shoulder. The sight of them was too much for Tom to stand. A raw fish seemed to him the most toothsome morsel in the world. He knew he was courting certain capture, but he was starving. He would pretend to be a Confederate himself. He spoke to the soldier, not out of the fullness of his heart, but out of the emptiness of his stomach. "I'm hungry," he said, "give a fellow a fish, will you?" The soldier turned with a start. He was a tall, gaunt man, an East Tennessee mountaineer, who had started to join the Union army when a Confederate conscript-officer seized him and sent him South, under guard, to serve the cause he had meant to fight against. East Tennessee was, as a rule, loyal to the Union. The men from there who were found in the Confederate army were like the poor peons who are supposed to "volunteer" in the Mexican army. "I send you fifty volunteers," wrote a Mexican mayor to a Mexican general, "please return me the ropes." Jim Grayson had not been tied up with a rope, but he had had a bayonet behind him, when he was put into the Confederate ranks. He was a man of intelligence and of rather more education than most of his fellow mountaineers. Many of them could not even read and write. Grayson had learned both at a "deestrik skule" and had actually had a year, a precious year, at a "high skule." The last thing he had read before starting to fish that morning had been the printed handbills that had been flung broadcast by the Confederate authorities, announcing the escape of 108 men and one boy from Libby Prison and offering rewards for their recapture. And the first thing he thought as he saw Tom in his hole in the bank was that he was probably the boy of the handbills. He meant to give the fellow a fish, of course, but if he found the fellow was that boy he also meant to do what he could to help him go where he himself wanted to go, to the Union lines. "Sholy, I'll give you a fish," he said. "You can have all you want. I'll light a fire and cook some for you." "I can't wait," gasped Tom, wolf-hunger in his gleaming eyes. "I'm starving." He tried to reach out for the fish and collapsed in utter weakness. With food at last within his grasp, he was too far gone to take it. Jim Grayson had been very hungry more than once in his thirty years of hard life. He saw that Tom was telling the truth. "Hush," he whispered, for he had caught sight of some fellow soldiers on the bank, not a hundred feet away. "Hush, sumbuddy's comin'. You mus' take little pieces first. I'll cut one up for you." He was drawing out his knife from a deep pocket when the soldiers stopped on the bank above their heads and shouted down, asking him to give them some fish too. "Sholy," laughed Jim. "Here's some for you-uns."