Rodney The Partisan Part 22

"You see we have some men with us who are not in uniform, do you not?" said he. "Well, they are the recruits we have picked up since we have been out on this scout. They have been terribly persecuted by the Union men in their settlement, and want us to stop on our way back long enough to burn those Union men out. If we do, it will delay us a day or two; if we don't, and keep lumbering right along, we shall be with the rest of the boys in less than forty-eight hours."

This was what Tom wanted to know; and he decided that when the squad reached the old post-rode and turned up toward the place at which the regiment was stationed, he would go south toward Springfield, and so avoid the risk of meeting d.i.c.k Graham.

"I suppose you know your own business best," said the lieutenant, when Tom announced his decision. "But I'll never go piking off through the country alone so long as I know what I am doing. There's too much danger in it. When you get ready to go into the service, remember that our regiment is one of the very best, and that we are ready to welcome all volunteers with open arms."

The two boys slept under the same blankets that night, but the talking they did was intended for the benefit for those who were lying near them, rather than for each other. Tom sent numberless messages to d.i.c.k Graham, and wanted Rodney to be sure and tell him that he (Tom) would be a member of his company before its next battle with the Yankees; all of which Rodney promised to bear in mind. The squad broke their fast next morning on provisions which they had "foraged" from the Union men whose buildings they had destroyed two nights before, and at eight o'clock arrived at the old post-road where the Barrington boys were to take leave of each other, to meet again perhaps under hostile flags and with deadly weapons in their hands. But there was one thing about it: They might be enemies in name, but they never would in spirit.

"There goes one of the bravest and best fellows that ever lived," said Rodney, facing about in his saddle to take a last look at his friend who rode away with a heavy heart.

"Don't be so solemn over it," said the captain. "Didn't he say he would come back as soon as he could?"

Yes, that was what Tom said; but the trouble was, that when he came again he might come in such a way that Rodney could not shake hands with him.

CHAPTER XIV.

"HURRAH FOR BULL RUN!"

Having decided that he would waste too much time if he turned from his course to punish the Union men who had persecuted his recruits, the captain "kept lumbering right along," and on the afternoon of the next day came within sight of the town in which his regiment had been encamped when he left it to start on his scout; but there was not a tent, a wagon or a soldier to be seen about the place now, and a citizen who came out to meet him, brought the information that the regiment had moved South to join Rains and Jackson, who were marching toward Neosho, a short distance from Springfield: and at the same time he gave the captain a written order from his colonel to join his command with all haste.

"If we had known this before, we might have kept company with your friend Tom," said the captain, as he faced the squad about after a fas.h.i.+on of his own and started them on the back track. "Both sides seemed to be concentrating in the southwestern part of the State, and there's where the battle-ground is going to be."

"Not all the time, I hope," said Rodney.

"Of course not. We'll drive the enemy back on St. Louis, and wind up by taking that city. General Pillow will march up from New Madrid to co-operate with us, and perhaps he will stop on the way to take Cairo. I hope he will, to pay those Illinois chaps for robbing the St. Louis armory."

This was a very pretty programme but the captain thought it could be easily carried out, and the very next day he heard a piece of news which caused him to make several additions to it. As the squad was moving past a plantation house an excited man, who was in too great a hurry to get his hat, rushed down to the gate flouris.h.i.+ng a paper over his head and shouted, at the top of his voice:

"Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Hurrah for Johnston! Hurrah for Bull Run and all the rest of 'em!"

"What's up?" inquired the captain, reining in his horse.

"Here's something that one of Price's men slung at me yesterday while he was riding along," replied the planter, opening the gate and placing the paper in the officer's eager palm. "Aint we walking over 'em roughshod though, and didn't I say all the while that we were bound to do it? A Northern mechanic has got no business alongside a Southern gentleman."

"Have we had a fight?" asked the captain. "I wonder if my regiment was in it."

"No, I don't reckon it was," answered the man, with a laugh. "You see it happened out in Virginny, a few miles from Was.h.i.+ngton. I wish I might get a later paper'n that, for I calculate to read in it that our boys are in Was.h.i.+ngton dictating-"

"Hey-youp!" yelled the captain, who began to understand the matter now.

"Price's men whooped and yelled worse'n that when they went by yesterday," said the man, jumping up and knocking his heels together like a boy who had just been turned loose from school. "That's Davis's dispatch right there. He went out from Richmond to watch the fight, and got there just in time to see the Yankees running."

The officer, who was worked up to such a pitch of excitement that the paper rustled in his trembling hands, glanced over the black headlines to which the planter directed his attention, and then read the dispatch aloud so that his men could hear it. It ran as follows:

"Night has closed upon a hard-fought field. Our forces were victorious. The battle was fought mainly on our left. Our forces were fifteen thousand; that of the enemy estimated at thirty-five thousand."

"And when the Yankees got a-going," chimed in the planter, clapping his hands and swaying his body back and forth after the manner of a negro who had been carried away by some sudden enthusiasm, "they never stopped. It was such a stampede that their officers couldn't do nothing with 'em. The soldiers who were running away from the battle met the civilians who were riding out from Was.h.i.+ngton to see it, and the two living streams of humanity, one going one way and t'other going t'other way, got all mixed up together; and all the while there were our batteries playing onto 'em and our cavalry riding through 'em and sabering first one and then another, till-Hey-youp! I'll be doggone if I can seem to get it through my head, although I have read it more'n a hundred times."

This astounding intelligence almost took away the breath of the men who listened to it. Of course they had known all the while that whipping the North was going to be as easy as falling off a log, but to have their opinions confirmed in this unexpected way almost overwhelmed them. They knew it was bound to come, but they hadn't looked for it so soon. They gazed at one another in silence for a moment or two, and then the shout they set up would have done credit to a larger squad than theirs. The planter, who really acted as though he had taken leave of his senses, joined in, laughing and shaking his head and slapping his knees in a way that set Rodney Gray in a roar. It was a long time before the captain could bring his squad to "attention."

"There's a good deal more in this paper," said he, "and if you will let me have it, I should like to read it to the boys when we go into camp. We belong to Price, and want to catch up with the men who went by here yesterday."

"Then you'll have to skip along right peart," replied the man. "That's the way they were going stopped long enough to drink my well 'most dry, and then went off in a lope. As for the paper, take it along. You don't reckon there's any chance for a mistake, do you?"

"Not the slightest. President Davis knew what he was doing when he sent that telegram to Richmond."

"But fifteen thousand against thirty-five thousand," said the planter, whose excitement had not driven all his common sense out of his head. "That's big odds, and it kinder sticks in my crop. Well, good-by, if you must be going, and good luck to you."

"It doesn't stick in my crop," replied the captain. "I knew we could do it, and we'll whip bigger odds than that, if they keep forcing war upon us. Don't you know that the man who looks for a fight generally gets more than he wants? Forward! Trot!"

Never before had Rodney Gray been thrown into the company of so wild a set of men. If such a thing were possible, they were wilder than those his Cousin Marcy found on his train when he boarded it at Barrington on his way home. The first rational thought that came into his mind was: What a lucky thing that Tom Percival was well out of the way when this news came! Tom would have betrayed himself sure, for he never could have pulled off his hat and shouted and whooped with any enthusiasm when he heard that the cause in which he believed, and for which he was willing to risk his life, had met with disaster. At length the captain, who appeared to have been awed into silence, said slowly:

"I, too, would like to see a later paper than this. If it is true that the Federals were utterly routed and thrown into such confusion that their officers could do nothing with them, our victorious troops must have followed them into Was.h.i.+ngton, and I shouldn't wonder if they were there at this moment, dictating terms of peace to the Lincoln government."

The paper that had been given him, proved to be a copy of the Mobile Register. As the captain talked he ran his eye rapidly over its columns, and finally found an editorial containing a piece of news that caused him to halt his squad and face his horse about.

"Here's something I want to read to you," said he. "Come up close on all sides so that you can hear every word of it. You know that our governor proposed that Missouri should remain neutral, and that a conference was held at the Planter's House in St. Louis to talk the matter over. This is what General Lyon said in reply to the governor's proposition, Now listen, so that you may know who is to blame for the troubles that have come upon us:

"'Rather than concede to the State of Missouri the right to demand that government shall not enlist troops within her limits, or bring troops into the State whenever it please, or move its troops at its own will, I would see every man, woman and child in the State dead and buried. This means war.'

"What do you boys say to that?" continued the captain.

"I say that if the Yankees want war we'll give them more than they'll care to have," answered one of the squad; and all his comrades yelled their approval. "Now while you're reading, captain, suppose you read about that big battle. Let's hear just how bad our fifteen thousand whipped the Yankee thirty-five thousand."

The officer complied and read an account of the battle of Bull Run, which was so highly sensational and so utterly unreasonable, that Rodney Gray's common sense would not let him believe, more than half of it. He hoped and believed that the Southern soldiers had gained a glorious victory over the Lincoln hirelings; but that there could have been so great a difference in the size of the contending armies, did not look reasonable. But the captain put implicit faith in the story.

"It seems that the Federal success in the beginning of the fight was owing to their overwhelming numbers," said he. "But the men on our side were gentlemen who could not be driven by a rabble, and of course they were bound to win in the end. But here is an article that may be of more interest to us. It is ent.i.tled. 'The Situation in Missouri.' You know that Governor Jackson went to Jefferson City and issued a proclamation calling the people to arms, and that Lyon came up the river on steamboats and routed him from there and from Booneville, too. You know all about it, because you were there and so was I. Well, the Northern papers think that that was a blow that secured Missouri to the Union, and that thousands, who have been hesitating which side to take, will now enlist to put down the rebellion. Rebellion! Remember the word. That's what the Lincoln hirelings call the efforts of a free people to maintain their freedom. But listen to what the Register has to say on this point:

"The Northern soldiers prefer enlisting to starvation. But they are not soldiers, least of all to meet the hot-blooded, thorough-bred, impetuous men of the South. They are trencher-soldiers who enlisted to make war upon rations, not upon men. They are such as marched through Baltimore, squalid, wretched, ragged, half-naked, as the newspapers of that city report them; fellows who do not know the breech of a musket from its muzzle; white slaves, peddling watches; small-change knaves and vagrants. These are the levied forces which Lincoln arrays as candidates for the honor of being slaughtered by gentlemen such as Mobile sends to battle. Let them come South and we will put our negroes to the dirty work of killing them. But they will not come South. Not a wretch of them will live on this side of the border longer than it will take us to reach the ground and drive them off.'

"Can we at the front be whipped while our friends at home keep up such heart as that?" cried the excited captain, pulling off his cap and flouris.h.i.+ng it over his head with one hand, while he shook the paper at his men with the other. "Three cheers for brave old Missouri, and confusion to everybody who wants to keep her down."

"Everybody except Tom Percival," thought Rodney, as he threw up his cap and joined in to help increase the almost deafening noise that arose when the officer ceased speaking. "Whatever happens to anybody else I want Tom to come out all right."

After this short delay the squad rode on again, and along every mile of the road they traversed they found people to cheer them and hurrah for the great victory at Bull Run. There were no signs of Union men anywhere along the route, but the blackened ruins they pa.s.sed now and then pointed out the sites of the dwellings in which some of them had formerly lived. Those ruins had been left there by some of Price's men scouting parties like the one with which he was now riding. Rodney had always thought he should like to be a scout, but if that was the sort of work scouts were expected to do, he decided that he would rather be a regular soldier. He wouldn't mind facing men who had weapons in their hands, because that was what soldiers enlisted for; but the idea of turning women and children out into the weather, by burning their houses over their heads, was repugnant to him. There was one piece of news he and the captain did not get, although they asked everybody for it. No one could tell them for certain that the victorious Confederates had gone into Was.h.i.+ngton and dictated terms of peace to the Lincoln government. There were plenty who were sure it had been done, but they had received no positive information of it. The only news they heard on which they could place reliance was that Price had withdrawn from Neosho, and effected a junction with Jackson and Rains at Carthage. That was a point in the captain's favor, for instead of being obliged to make a wide detour to the east and south of Springfield, he turned squarely to the west toward Carthage, and saved more than a hundred miles of travel, as well as the risk of being captured by a scouting party of Yankee cavalry.

The squad reached Carthage without seeing any signs of Siegel's troopers, who were supposed to be raiding through the country in all directions, and when Rodney rode into the camp, which was pitched upon a little rise of ground a short distance from the town, he remarked that he had never seen a stranger sight. The camp itself was all right. The tents were properly pitched, the wagons and artillery parked after the most approved military rules, and all this was to be expected, since the commanding general was a veteran of the Mexican war; but the men looked more like a mob than they did like soldiers. There were eight thousand of them, and not one in ten was provided with a uniform of any sort. The guard who challenged them carried a double-barrel shotgun, and the only thing military there was about him, was a rooster's feather stuck in the band of his hat.

"They're a good deal better than they look," said the captain, when Rodney called his attention to the fact that the sentry "slouched" rather than walked over his beat, and that he didn't know how to hold his gun. "They are not very well drilled yet, but they'll fight, and that is the main thing. Think of Was.h.i.+ngton and his ragam.u.f.fins at Valley Forge the next time you feel disposed to criticise the boys."

"Where is the enemy?" inquired Rodney.

"He is supposed to be concentrating twenty thousand men at Springfield, thirty-five miles east of here." replied the captain. "When McCulloch gets up from Arkansas we'll have a little more than fifteen thousand. But that's enough. We'll be in St. Louis in less than a month. That victory at Bull Run will nerve our boys to do good work when they get at it. Now where shall I go to find my regiment? The colonel is the man I want to report to."

While the captain was looking around to find an officer of whom he could make inquiries, there was a loud clatter of hoofs behind, and a moment afterward a spruce young fellow, handsomely mounted and wearing a uniform that Rodney Gray would have recognized anywhere, dashed by and held on his way without once looking in their direction.

"There he is now," exclaimed the captain, before Rodney had time to speak. "Oh, sergeant!"