Marcy found it hard to keep from laughing outright when Tom said this. The latter had never done a day's work at overseeing or anything else, and it is doubtful if he could have told whether or not a corn furrow was laid off straight. He was too indolent to do anything but eat, sleep, and ride about the country.
"There are plenty around here who could go as well as not," continued Tom, "and I might go myself if I could only get a commission. But I won't go as a private soldier."
"Have you tried to get a commission?" asked Marcy.
Tom replied that he had not. He did not know how to go about it, and was not acquainted with any one who could tell him.
"Then hunt up General Wise, and ask his advice," suggested Marcy. "He can, and no doubt will put you on the right track at once."
But Tom Allison was much too sharp to do a thing like that. He was well aware that enlisted men had no love for "cits" who could go into the army and wouldn't, and the promise of a colonel's commission would not have induced him to go among them. He meant to remain at home and let other and poorer men's sons do the fighting, and Marcy knew it all the while.
The latter did not put much faith in the stories that Captain Beardsley and Colonel Shelby had spread through the country, and when his mother's negroes began coming home in companies of twos and threes, he put still less faith in them. They were a sorry-looking lot, ragged and dirty; and the first thing they asked for as they crowded about the kitchen door was something to eat.
"Oh, missus, don't eber luf dem rebels take we uns away agin," was their constant plea. "Dey 'buse us de wust you eber see. Dey whop us, an' dey kick us, an' dey don't gib us half 'nough to eat. We all starve to def. We been prayin' night an' day dat de Yankees may come an' shoot dat place plum to pieces."
"But the trouble is that the Yankees can't do it," said Marcy, as he bustled about in search of bread and meat to satisfy the demands of the hungry blacks. "Captain Beardsley says the Island is too strong to be captured."
The negroes confessed that they did not know much about military matters, but they did know that there was much dissatisfaction among the soldiers composing the garrison, many of whom declared that they would make tracks for home as soon as their year was out, leaving the Confederacy to gain its independence in any way it pleased. The Richmond authorities would not help them, the people along the coast were too cowardly or too lazy to shoulder a musket, and they were not going to stay in the army and eat hard-tack while other able-bodied men stayed at home and lived on the fat of the land. They would do their duty until their term of enlistment expired, and then they would stand aside and give somebody else a chance to fight the Yankees. That was what a good many deluded and disappointed rebels thought and said about this time; but those who have read "Rodney, the Partisan," know how very easy it was for the Confederate authorities to bring such malcontents to their senses.