“You don’t know any thing about it, uncle.  Thousands of men have been forced into the rebel army, and I don’t blame them for getting out of it the best way they can.  I should do so.”

“That may be.  Tom; that may be,” added the veteran, taking off his cap and rubbing his bald head, as though a new idea had penetrated it.  “I didn’t think of that.”

“He’s a brave man, whoever he is, and whatever he is.”

“He must want to get away from ’em pretty bad, or he wouldn’t have run that risk.  I shouldn’t wonder if they hit him.”

“Perhaps he is wounded, and gone into the woods there to die,” suggested Tom.

“Halloo!” shouted some one in the rear of them.

“There’s your man,” said Hapgood.

“Halloo!” cried the same voice.

“Halloo, yourself!” shouted Hapgood in reply to the hail.

The party halted, and after waiting a few moments, the rebel deserter came in sight.  He was apparently a man of fifty; and no mendicant of St. Giles, who followed begging as a profession, could have given himself a more wretched and squalid appearance, if he had devoted a lifetime to the study of making himself look miserable.  He wore a long black and gray beard, uncut and unkempt, and snarled, tangled, and knotted into the most fantastic forms.  His gray uniform, plentifully bedaubed with Virginia mud, was torn in a hundred places, and hung in tatters upon his emaciated frame.  On his head was an old felt hat, in a terribly dilapidated condition.  He wore one boot and one shoe, which he had probably taken from the common sewer of Richmond, or some other southern city; they were ripped to such an extent that the “uppers” went flipperty-flap as he walked, and had the general appearance of the open mouth of the mythic dragon, with five bare toes in each to represent teeth.

As he approached, the unthinking soldiers of the party indulged in screams of laughter at the uncouth appearance of the whilom rebel; and certainly the character in tableau or farce need not have spoken, to convulse any audience that ever assembled in Christendom.  Rip Van Winkle, with the devastations and dilapidations of five-and-twenty years hanging about him, did not present a more forlorn appearance than did this representative of the Confederate army.

“What are you laughing at?” demanded the deserter, not at all delighted with this reception.

“I say, old fellow, how long since you escaped from the rag-bag?” jeered one of the men.

“What’s the price of boots in Richmond now?” asked another.

“Who’s your barber?”

“Silence, men!” interposed Tom, sternly, for he could not permit his boys to make fun of the wretchedness of any human being.

“We’ll sell you out for paper stock,” said Ben Lethbridge, who had just returned from three months’ service in the Rip-Raps for desertion.

“Shut up, Ben!” added Tom.

“Dry up, all of you!” said Corporal Snyder.