Roxy Hastings — page 81: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

72 ROXY HASTINGS. CHAPTER XIII. THE RAFFLE FOR LIFE. At the time of which we write the prisoners in the hands of the Confederates were not as numerous as they became at a later period of the war, and yet there were large num- bers in Richmond, for some of the more southern recepta- cles for them had not yet been opened. They were confined in various parts of the city, in places of greater or less se- curity, but were everywhere, of course, carefully guarded. There were no field officers among the little company of which Lieutenant Lee formed one, nothing above the rank of captain, and their prison was in the second story of a stone warehouse, across the windows of which iron bars! had been placed, giving it in all respects a prison aspect. Part of the lower story of the building was occupied as a recruiting station, and was always more or less filled by soldiers, and a sentinel was always on duty in the rear yard, which was inclosed by a high wall. On the day after they had been startled by the rumor of the new danger which impended over them the tidings were confirmed in a way which left them no hope of its being untrue. : Their attentive keeper, Hess, brought a city paper, when he came in with their rations, and said, as he handed it to one : their number, with his finger upon a selected para- graph: : ‘I don’t want to scare nobody, but there it is, in black and white, what I told you about yesterday. You can see for yourself. The President ain’t a-goin’ to let your Yankee generals have it all their own way, quite.” A Captain Hall took the paper and read the following paragraph : . ‘We stated yesterday that the War Department has au- thentic intelligence that Lieutenant Gray, formerly of this city, has been arrested as a spy in General Halleck’s de- partment of the Union Army, and that his conviction and execution are considered certain notwithstanding the lieu- tenant did not enter the enemy’s lines voluntarily, but was _decoyed within them while on a reconnoissance with two ecomicbooks (e(e)