“Well, sir, you can put my name down for that convention,” said the man, getting upon his feet and going to work upon his wood-pile. “I’ve got so down on the rebels that I am willing to do anything I can to bother them. I’ve got two brothers in jail up there now.”
“You said something about bridge burning,” said Leon, and he didn’t know whether he made a mistake or not. “Perhaps you had a hand in it.”
“Perhaps I did,” answered the man with a laugh. “And I tell you I had to dig out as soon as I got home. So you see I dare not go back there.”
“What’s the punishment?”
“Death,” answered the man. “And they don’t give you any time to say good-bye to your friends. They don’t even court-martial you, but string you up at once.”
The man said this in much the same tone that he would have asked for a drink of water. Leon was surprised that one who had passed through so many dangers as that man had could speak of it so indifferently. But then he looked like a man who would have been picked out of a crowd to engage in business of that kind. He was large and bony, the ease with which he handled his axe was surprising, but his face was one to attract anybody’s attention. It was a determined face—a face that wouldn’t back down for any obstacles. If the Union men in Tennessee were all like him, it was a wonder how the rebels got the start of them.
“I can’t give you as good a place here as I could at home,” said the man, as his wife came to the door and told him that supper was ready. “At home I have a commodious house, and you could have a room in it all to yourself. Here I have nothing but this little tumble-down shanty to go into. It leaks, but I will soon get the better of that. Molly, this young man is Union all over, and he has come down here to tell of a convention that is to be held at Ellisville to take this county out of the State. Whoever heard of such a thing? I am going to that meeting, sure pop.”
His wife was greatly surprised to listen to this, but she accepted the introduction to Leon, and forthwith proceeded to make him feel at home. There were two children, but they had been taught to behave, and did not try to shove themselves forward at all. Taken altogether, it was a comfortable meal, and before it was over Leon learned some things regarding this man that he wouldn’t have believed possible. He had come all the way through the rebel State of Mississippi by telling the people he met on the way that he was going to see some friends, and had, by chance, struck Jones county, the very place of all others he wanted to be.
“I must confess it was pretty pokerish, sometimes,” said the man. “The rebels had sent on a description of me as the man who helped burn their bridges, and now and then I had to get under the bundles of clothing and cover myself up there, leaving my wife to guide the horses. But I had my rifle all right, and it would have gone hard with the men who discovered me.”
The evening was passed in this way listening to the man’s stories, and when Leon went to bed in a dark corner of the room he told himself that he had got into a desperate scrape, and that he had got something to do in order to get out of it. He had never dreamed that men could be down on their neighbors in that way, and here this man had all he could do to keep from being shot.