The boys followed the man into the negro cabin with slight quakings of conscience, all except Dawson, who had seen so many dead men that he thought nothing of it. He lay there on the floor covered with a blanket, never to move again in this life, with bushy black whiskers spread all down his breast, and dressed in a uniform that had a couple of bars on the collar. He was a fine-looking man, and Leon was wondering how many hearts would break when they heard of his death.
“I hit him right in the heart,” said Giddings, pointing out the mark of his bullet on his coat with as much indifference as he would have shown if it had been a deer instead of a man that was stretched out before him. “Know him, any of you?”
“No, he is a stranger to me. I think the best thing you can do, Mr. Giddings,” said Leon, reverently spreading the blanket over the dead man’s face again, “is to stay here and keep an eye on mother. I didn’t think the rebels would ever trouble her up here.”
“Did you steal much of them?” asked Giddings.
Leon replied that to the best of his knowledge it was pretty near half a million dollars’ worth.
“A half a million? Pshaw! They will be all over this county looking for them goods, and you will have to go deeper into the swamp to be rid of them. When the rebels come they won’t leave a shingle of this house that you can use. They will burn them all.”
“Where’s the map he made out?”
“Your mother has got that, and his weapons, too. Yes, I guess the best thing I can do is to stay here. There may be some more of these Confederates where these came from.”
Leon went out, spent a few moments in exchanging compliments with Giddings’ wife, who was very comfortably settled in her new quarters, and went into the house to ask his mother for the map the rebel had made. While the dinner was being made ready the boys spent their time in looking it over. They were astonished to find all the streams, as far up as he had time to go, were correctly drawn, and still more amazed to see that the little creek which marked the boundary-line between their county and Perry, which was so deep at the place where the bridge extended across it, could be forded in five different localities.
“That man must have been a civil engineer,” said Dawson. “No one, without he had some knowledge of the business, could go over those streams in the short time he has and make such a complete map of them.”