"I have no reason to complain of my treatment," replied Marcy. "I had no idea that you were impressed at the time I was, until I saw you on that gunboat."
"If I'd knowed that they was going to slap the bracelets onto me, they never would have took me there alive," said Beardsley in savage tones. "I'd a fit till I dropped before I would have went a step. Who'd 'a' thought that me and you would ever seen any of them Hollins fellers on a war-ship? I'm mighty sorry now that I didn't stick Captain Benton in irons the same as I done with his men, and it's a lucky thing for him that he didn't let me have the handling of his ship. I would have run her so hard aground that she would be there now."
"Then it is a lucky thing for you that you were sent below," added Marcy. "You would have been hanging at the yard-arm in less than ten minutes after you ran the ship ashore. Those gunboat fellows don't stand any nonsense."
"Mebbe that's so," said the captain. "And sense I've got home all right, I'm kinder glad things happened as they did. The robbers who went to your house, after the money they didn't get, used me pretty rough, didn't they?" he added, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward the spot on which his home had once stood. "How do you reckon they happened to know that I wasn't here to fight 'em that night?"
"That is a question I can't answer," replied Marcy, and then he waited for Beardsley to say something about the Union men who had rescued him and his mother, but that seemed to be a matter that the captain did not care to touch upon.
"Don't it beat you what sort of stories get afloat these times?" continued the latter. "There's plenty of people about here who believe you uns have got money in your house."
"I know it. I told the robbers there wasn't a cent outside of the little there was in mother's purse and mine, and asked them to look around and see if they could find any more. They preferred to choke a different story out of me, but they wouldn't have got it if they had choked me to death. If there is a dollar in the house besides what I offered them, I don't know it."
"Where's the prize-money I paid you?' asked Beardsley.
"That was safely concealed; but it wasn't what they wanted, and so I said nothing about it. They were after money which they and some other lunatics think my mother brought from Wilmington, when she went there to buy goods."
"Have you any idea who they were?"