J. F. LESLIE'S RUSE
This Company K man thought his liberty worth risking something for; captured Aug. 19, '64, he too had been taken to Richmond, "Libby" and Belle Isle, where he informed his comrades he purposed trying the sick dodge by way of the hospital, for he had discerned that the sick and wounded would go first. His friends tried to dissuade him, saying that he would surely be found out and might be made to suffer all the more on account of his attempted cheat. He tried the rebel doctor every morning with his complaints, but was careful to take none of the latter's medicine, throwing all of it away. At last the surgeon, suspecting shamming on the Yankee's part, prepared a Spanish-fly plaster, 4 x 8 inches in size, which could not be disposed of as his medicine had been. Leslie put it on his body, keeping it on all night, and when he visited the doctor in the morning and was asked if it had had any effect he was able to show a blister the full size of the plaster. This convinced the officer that our man was not shamming, for as he said, "Any man who could stand that could not be 'playing it'," so he was sent to the hospital in Richmond, "Yankee, 21," as it was called. On getting there he hardly dared move for fear of being sent back. One morning the hospital doctor, saying that he would give him something to make him sleep, left a potion with the injunction to make sure that it was taken; there was no way open but to take it, but it was spat out the moment the steward passed to the next patient. The look of astonishment on the doctor's face the next morning convinced the patient that it was a dose for final sleep that the surgeon had prepared; at any rate he never came near Leslie's cot again. In a few days the "artful dodger" was paroled, while his comrades were sent to Salisbury and Andersonville where the most of them died.