“How come this here one’s only got seven?” one of them demanded.

“Because one of ’em damn well broke, because you damn well used cheap-shit wood when you made it,” answered the lieutenant whose bunk that was. His accent was identical to Cantarella’s, though he looked Irish rather than Italian. He also had the New Yorker’s way of challenging anything he didn’t like.

Moss didn’t give the guards a hard time. It struck him as cruising for a bruising. He’d seen the guards rough people up. That violated the Geneva Convention, but you couldn’t call them on it. They would say the roughee had it coming, and the camp commandant would back them right down the line.

Here, though, the guards didn’t push things. They grumbled and they fumed and then tramped out of the barracks. “What the hell was that all about?” asked a captain who’d been in Andersonville only a few days.

“Beats me,” somebody else answered-an officer who’d been a prisoner longer than Moss had.

It beat Moss, too. When he got the chance to ask Nick Cantarella, he did. Cantarella started laughing. “I’ll bite. What’s funny?” Moss asked.

“The Confederates know what they’re doing, that’s all,” Cantarella answered. He was still laughing, and didn’t care who heard him. He thought it was funny as hell. “If we’re digging a tunnel, those slats are about the best thing we could use to shore it up.”

“Oh.” A light dawned. “And if they’re not missing, then we’re not digging a tunnel?”

“I didn’t say that.” Cantarella was nothing if not coy. “You said that. With a little luck, the guards think that.”

“Then we are digging a tunnel?” Moss persisted.

“I didn’t say that, either. I didn’t say anything. It’s the waddayacallit-the Fifth Amendment, that’s it.”