"It is getting better every day, thank you," was his reply. "Will you not come and speak to my mother? Julius will put your horses under shelter."
"We are 'most too muddy to go into the presence of a lady," said the captain, looking down at his boots, "but as I don't want to blot my notebook by taking it out in the rain, I think we'll have to go in. We had a short but interesting chat with your captain a while ago."
"Beardsley?" Marcy almost gasped. "Has he got home?"
"Of course he has. You didn't think the Yankees had captured him, I hope. He gave us a good account of you, and since you can't run the blockade any more, I wish you would hurry up and get well so that you can join——"
Right here the captain stopped long enough to permit Marcy to introduce him and his lieutenant to Mrs. Gray. They sat down in the easy-chairs that were brought for them, made a few remarks about the weather, and then the captain resumed.
"Yes; we saw Beardsley this morning, and would have been glad to spend a longer time with him, but business prevented. He says you are a brave and skilful pilot, and I happen to know that they are the sort of men who are needed on our gunboats; but, of course, you can't go just now. Hallo!" exclaimed the captain, whose gaze had wandered to the rebel flag that hung upon the wall. "Where did you get that, if it is a fair question?"
"It is one my brother brought home with him," answered Marcy, speaking with a calmness that surprised himself. "He was second mate and pilot of the blockade runner West Wind that was fitted out and loaded in the port of Boston."
"Oh, yes; we heard all about him too," said the captain, and Marcy afterward confessed that the words frightened him out of a year's growth. "He went down to Newbern to ship on an ironclad he didn't find; so I suppose he went into the army, did he not?"
"Not that I know of," answered Marcy, looking first one officer and then the other squarely in the eye. "Almost the last thing I heard him say was, that he was going to ship on a war vessel."
"Then he will have to come back here to do it, for there is no ironclad building at Newbern, and I don't see why he did not ship with Commodore Lynch in the first place," said Captain Porter. "But doubtless he wanted to serve on deep water. Now to business. We want negroes to work on the fortifications on and about the Island, and Captain Beardsley sent us here to get some. He said he thought you might spare, say fifty or more."