“But, Wing, there was danger in that.”
“Sir, there was danger in every step of the expedition. I was prepared to meet it.”
“Brave boy! But suppose you had met with people who knew the person of this William Gill.”
“Sir, I had to risk that, and to use some little address. On coming to a farm-house, at the close of the day, for instance, I would be taken at once by my uniform to be a confederate soldier, and I would be received and treated kindly. Soon I would take an opportunity of asking my entertainers if they knew a family of the name of Gill. Almost invariably it happened that they knew no such family personally; though in some instances they knew of them. I would express myself sorry for that, as I was a connection of that family myself and had been in hopes of meeting friends on my road. When my entertainers betrayed suspicion of me, which was very seldom, I showed Gill’s pass, which at once dissipated all their doubts.”
“Well, and what did you hear from these people?”
“Plenty of abuse of the Yankees, Colonel, which was quite natural, and in which I joined so boisterously and with such seeming malignity as sometimes even to provoke an apology for these same Yankees from their confederate foes. ‘Some of them Union fellows were not so very bad, after all,’ the rebels admitted.”
“Well, but about the Free Sword?” inquired Colonel Rosenthal.
“I heard nothing for the first two days. Near noon, on the second day of my journey, I fell in with a party of our foragers. I was stopped immediately as a rebel. But I took out my quid of water-proof skin, and unrolled and exhibited your pass, and told my story. I passed the night with them, and from them I learned that on the preceding night they had surrounded the house of a certain notorious bushwhacker named Gill, with orders to arrest him and his sons; that they had been fired upon from the windows of the house, and several of their number wounded and two killed; that they had then fired the house and burned out the bushwhackers. The father and one son were killed in the fight that followed, and the other son was taken prisoner. There was another son, they said, who had been captured some six weeks before. I explained to the men that this first captured son was the one I was personating, and that the affair of the previous night would aid me very much in keeping up the character. In the morning I left them and went on my journey, striking deeper into the forest.”
“I hope you soon struck the trail of the Free Sword.”
“Sooner than I expected. Look you, sir: I did not spare my flesh and blood. I gashed myself with several wounds, to make it appear that I had been in a fight. Nor did I spare the Confederate uniform. I burned and scorched it in several places, to make it seem that I had barely escaped with my life from the burning homestead.”