f PAGE fTHE PINEHURST OUTLOOK fff 4
.re. V S) ' ffl
THE DESERTER'S CHRISTMAS
THE SUM TOTAL
BREEZES
OF
WARM SUNSHINE
SOFT SOUTHERN
AND
Shredded Whole Wheat
IS HEALTH.
What the breezes and sunshine of the South are to the outward physical
frame, the nourishment contained in Shredded Whole Wheat is to the inward
physical.
Shredded Whole Wheat is made of the pure, whole wheat, cleansed to per
fection, divided into delicate, easily assimilated shreds, and baked to a scien
tific degree.
The body that rejects other forms of food will accept, assimilate and
thrive on
SHredded Whole Wheat
It is
Concentrated Life
Two Shredded Wheat Biecuits with milk or cream and a little fruit will supply all
the energy needed for a half day's work at a cost of five or six cents. Try it for ten
mornings and you will feel brighter, stronger and happier. Your GROCER sells it.
. 4 ' " " " . t f t , .- ' 7
kf U'lHII I'M
r it , JJL;,1L-Jttr n JEST
ir 1 1 4t:it h i is ii fc'iir 4 n mute Hi iJiao " II
tmimA wgayir iim tijiim miTmi m mm rr in iih3- 'r'-'- ''l, -r --T-., ..
THE HIGHLAND PINES INN
Weymouth Heights, Southern Pines, N. C.
THE Highland Pines Inn is a new hotel, Southern Colonial style, with modern
conveniences and luxurious appointments. Has 60 rooms en suite with private
bath. Excellent orchestra. Nightly concerts and many social events.
Accomodations for 200 or 250 guests. Open December 1st to May 1st. Charmingly
situated on Weymouth Heights with extensive and delightful views in all directions.
Behind the Inn are the 2,000 acres of the great Weymouth Woods, among whose
giant long leaf pines run many miles of hard, picturesque and well-kept roads, the
freedom of which is accorded the guests of the Tnn. The Southern Pines Countrv
r-il.-l. 1 J! n ... "
liuu gon course nve minutes walk irom the hotel. Auto bus service to the Pine-
hurst Country Club. For rates and reservations address :
n m -
i. Kr&am&r Lessees ana managers m. H. Turner
Southern Pines, North Carolina
Try FU LEI HAN'S For
X-MAS NOVELTIES
Laces, Embroideries and Fancy Goods
Jeivelry, Silverware and Bronzes
TROPHIES FOR ALL OCCASIONS
At The Carolina and Department Store Building
of the Old South
Strang-e Story
Ity Col. Fred A. Olds
middle distance were filled with their
huts and tents, and the trees in the
background mark the place where the
mines of black lead, or plumbago, lie
among the high and rugged hills through
which a swift stream, very mountainlike,
makes its way. No one would ever dream
that, in this lead mine region, startliugly
near the place where soldiers who were
punished for minor ollences worked, get
ting out the material for the Confederate
War Department, in a cave the existence
of which was unsuspected, the most dar
ing deserters in this part of North Caro
lina lived for more than two years ; liter
ally lived on the community, and though
sought for ceaselessly were never found.
There were seven of these desperate
men, who risked so much to escape the
service that their State demanded of them .
They were armed with rifles which they
had in some way secured, but yet were
generally afraid to use, because of the
noise they made, and so they depended
upon the knife to do their work in killing
hogs and other animals for food. Thiee
of these men were married and their
wives contrived to locate in the neighbor
hood and to earn a most precarious liv
ing. One of them had two children, twin
girls, and it was on account of a remark
made by one of these children that the
strangest Christmas dinner ever given in
the State was brought about; a dinner
not eaten in the daytime, but in the
night. These women, in the Confed
eracy but not of it, loved their men,
who occupied the same strange position;
those cave-dwellers, who underwent
practically as much risk to maintain
what they called their liberty as did the
men at the front, who were in action
almost daily. The cave was roomy
enough and so set in the hillside, with a
southern exposure or slope, that the men
never suffered by reason of the cold, and
at the entrance a couple of flat rocks
gave no hint of footsteps. By day a
stone practically filled the already small
entrance and forbade the passage of even
a dog, should one come prowling there,,
while there was nothing to attract human
attention in the least. If by any chance
a light was made in the cave at night it
made no showing at the low entrance,
and for a light either a wick in hog lard
or balls of the sycamore tree, floating in
lard, were used. The pains those men
took to guard their secret and that of the
cave were amazing. They had bedding,
stolen from many a house, not too near
but often miles away, and some of it
brought to the cave in the night time by
the three wives,who became as daring and
resourceful as the deserters themselves.
These men developed incredible qualities,
it is said, of seeing in the dark and of
hearing, and almost a sixth sense of
direction ; instinct, let us say, which aided
them wonderfully. The savage in the
WE ARE now getting
far enough away from
the civil war to secure a
perspective view ; to see
its many sides; to im
agine at least its myriad
sorrows ; that pitiful
war, literally between
brothers, and the cause
of which will perhaps forever be in dis
pute, since while one part of the people
say slavery was at the bottom of it all,
others bitterly deny this and declare
much higher purposes were at stake.
Sorrowful as was the war to those who
participated in it most actively, at the
front, and to those who endured so much
and wrought so much, at home, yet it
was worse still for others than it was for
these doers, for throughout the South,
here and there, in small numbers, there
lurked men whose one object in life was
to keep out of service. These men were
deserters and in no war ever waged in all
this world of ours has that name been
applied with more of contumely than to
the men who shirked a sworn duty and
who became at once traitors to any cause ;
outcasts, really rebels and in many cases
thieves, and who became the veriest of
wild beasts, hiding by day and prowling
at night, a terror to any community near
their hiding places.
And this is to be a story, if you please,
about the Deserters' Christmas. Deser
tion is one phase of the war we have not
loved to dwell upon. The writer re
members in his boyhood having seen a
man pointed out as a deserter from a
North Carolina regiment, who had been
in hiding until peace came, and who then
left the State, returning some years later
only to find his ignominy stamped upon
him quite as plainly as those dreadful
letters which the branding-iron used to
set forever upon the foreheads of mur
derers and others who by a most narrow
chance escaped the gallows. People
looked at this man ; he had no footing,
no place in the public esteem, and he
could never recover his lost balance in the
Commonwealth. So it was but natural
that, forty-two years after the war had
ended, when the writer's attention was
called to the fact that there was a deserter
in the North Carolina Soldiers' Home at
Raleigh, he lost no time in telling the
directors, who held a court martial or
court of inquiry ; the fact was proved and
the man summarily dismissed, to the
great comfort of the honorable soldiers
in whose company this disreputable
associate had been temporarily thrown.
People coming into Raleigh from the
westward on the trains, observe to the
northward a wide, stretching field of
cotton, with a great barn rising in its
center; in the middle distance rather blood came back to them in larsre decree
low undergrowth, and far away, rising I and so, in summer and winter alike, in
like plumes, the foliage of lofty pines.
That foreground was in the great civil
war the drill-ground of many thousands
of the splendid troops North Carolina
trained for combat. The woods in the
fair weather and foul, they lurked by
day and went afield and depredated at
night, taking in meat cooked by their
faithful women, who were worthy of a
better cause and a finer aspiration.
i