“I can’t give you as good a breakfast as I could once,” added Mr. Faulkner. “Bacon, eggs, corn-bread and coffee—I am almost out of coffee, now that I think of it. I shall be all out if you haven’t got some in those wagons you captured yesterday. Go on and get your breakfast, the whole of you. There’s many a better man than you and I dare be who is living on worse food, and he’s just as good a Union man as though he stood in our ranks.”
Leon went into the dining-room and found his father and Mr. Knight sitting there by themselves, and he concluded that it was a good time to talk to them about the rebels who were kept under guard.
“I have been thinking about them all the morning,” said Mr. Sprague, when Leon had explained things to him, “and I don’t see the need of keeping them under guard any longer; do you, Knight?”
“No, I don’t. I say let them out.”
“Well, I will go back with you and turn them loose,” said Mr. Sprague. “That will be the way we’ll work it. As fast as any rebels come in here and say they are on our side we’ll take their weapons and horses away from them, if they have any, and hold them until they prove that they are just as they should be.”
“Well, what do you say to my going down to Dawson’s house after his mother?” said Leon.
“What do you think about it, Knight?”
“Why I say let the boy go. He has proved long ago that he knows how to handle himself in a tight place; yesterday, for instance; and he will be just as safe as he would be here in camp. By the way, Leon, we have given your father a new title. He says the Secretary of War is too long for him, and so we have promoted him to Colonel. He likes that better. Maybe if you conduct yourself all right he will make you aid-de-camp.”
We are sorry to say that Mr. Knight did not pronounce this word correctly, and if there had been some boys like you, who are fresh from their books, they would have seen a good many other words whose spelling bothered him. But he knew one thing that had evidently slipped the President’s mind. If his father had been promoted to colonel, Leon thought that was being promoted backwards. But then this thing would not last more than a year or two, and it did not make much difference to him what people said about it. He got no money for the position he held, none of the officers got any, and he was willing to do what he could for the sake of the county.
“I don’t care if my father never promotes me to anything,” said Leon. “If he will let me stay close by him, so as to be on hand if anything happens to him, I shall be satisfied.”