"If you are bound to take Tom with you I can't go, and you'll have to do the best you can for yourselves. He'd find means to let my rebel neighbors hear of it, and then I'd have to go among the Yanks or back to the army; for I couldn't live here. What do you say?"
"What do you say, boys?" inquired the corporal, turning to his companions. "He's a Home Guard, and a mighty mean one, too, judging by——"
"None of that, please," Rodney interposed. "Having submitted the case, you have no business to keep on arguing it. Yes or no, Yanks?"
"I wish we had knocked him on the head before we took him prisoner," said Ben, who could not forget his lost comrade.
"But you didn't, and you can't very well do it now," replied Rodney. "Are you going to let him go or not?"
Ben did not answer; but his three companions gave a favorable, though very reluctant response to Rodney's question, and the latter drew a long breath of relief. Ben looked and acted ugly, and if he had been a little better talker Tom Randolph's chances for liberty and life would have been slim indeed. As Dick Graham afterward explained it, Tom was saved by Ben's want of gab. Rodney's next care was to urge upon the soldiers the necessity of sending Tom about his business with the least possible delay, and of being careful to drop no word in his hearing that would give him a hint of their future movements. Tom would make all sorts of promises, but they must not put the least faith in them, for if he saw an opportunity to do it, he would put a squad on their trail in less than an hour. This done, he and Dick climbed the fence and followed the soldiers toward the camp. Ned Griffin had had time to prepare Tom for Rodney's coming, and the expression Rodney's face wore when he appeared in sight prepared him for the good news.
"You have prevailed upon them to release me and I know it," he exclaimed, seizing one of Rodney's hands in both his own and shaking it with all his might. "And I'll never forget you for it; never in this world. If you want anything, all you've got to do is to say the word, and if I've got it you shall have it. And as for you soldiers—I'll cook up some sort of a story when I reach home that will stop all pursuit till you have had time to reach the Union lines. I am very grateful to you, and will prove it by pulling off my gray suit as soon as I get home. If all Yanks are like you, I am not going to fight any more during the war."
Tom was sure he saw a faint prospect of escape before him, and his joy was so great that it choked his utterance. He continued to rattle on in this way, until the corporal interrupted him with:
"That's all right, Johnny. So long as you keep the hounds off our trail, it's all the return we ask for setting you at liberty."