“Well, I don’t know about that,” chimed in Mr. Newman. “If he could get a mule or one of the horses he could fly around easy, carrying dispatches and the like. He could be here to-day and see what was going on, and to-night he could get on his mule and take the news down to the Confederates. Wouldn’t he give you a mule?”
“No, he wouldn’t, I tried Sprague and the quartermaster, too, and they both threatened to arrest me if I talked so any more.”
“Well, I do think in my soul that they are getting on a high horse,” said Mr. Newman, taking the pipe from his mouth. “I’d like to see them arrest you or anybody connected with this family. Their old jail would stay up about as long as I could get to it with an axe.”
“That’s what I told ’em; and he said that I mustn’t talk that way any more.”
“Say,” said Dan, who had mustered up energy enough to straighten up during this talk and was now engaged in filling a cob pipe with some nigger-twist, “you don’t suppose that the men who were captured with that wagon-train have gone on to Mobile, do you? It seems to me that they ought to be back here to-night or to-morrow. Them fellows ain’t[ain’t] a-going to stand still and let themselves be robbed of half a million dollars’ worth.”
“Don’t I wish I had the stuff that’s in one of them wagons!” exclaimed Cale. “There’s grub enough to keep our jaws wagging for one good solid year; and clothes! You just ought to see the uniforms there is in there.”
“I came away before they got to inspecting the wagons,” said Mr. Newman. “Somehow I couldn’t manage to stay around and see the clothes and things our fellows were going to wear go to those lazy vagabonds.”
That was one reason why Mr. Newman came away before the wagons were overhauled, but the principal motive that governed him was because he did not want to see others saluted. His attention was first called to it by the actions of Bud McCoy. Bud didn’t care for anything, but he seemed to be carried away by his Union sentiment, and once, when he spoke to Mr. Sprague, he did it without saluting; but he thought of it at once, and came back and touched his hat to him.
“I declare, Mr. Secretary of War, I almost forgot my manners to you. I forgot that you ain’t a plain raftsman any more.”
Mr. Newman would have given a good deal if he could have been saluted that way, and because he was not, he didn’t care to stay around where the crowd was.