"Because I left them there not more than—I mean when I escaped from them last night," answered Tom, who, now that the danger was past, would not have sold his experience for any reasonable sum of money. "You don't believe it, do you? Well, it is a fact that I have been a prisoner in the hands of those very men, and narrowly escaped being shot."
"But how did you get away from them?" continued the enrolling officer.
"I knocked one of them down with the butt of his own musket and took to my heels; that's the way I did it."
This was going too far, and Captain Tom was quick to perceive it. Some of his men exchanged sly winks with each other, and turned toward the door as if they had heard quite enough of such stories as that, while Captain Roach, who had put a little faith in Tom's tale at first, sat down in his chair and pulled some papers toward him.
"Continue to report regularly every day," said he, addressing himself to Lambert; "I have received no official notice that Camp Pinckney is ready to take conscripts, but all the same I know it is ready, and an order to send out a squad may come any hour."
"That's a polite way of calling me a liar," said Tom to himself. "I know where I can find those who will take some interest in what I have to say; and if I don't go there and drop a bomb into this camp that will scatter it far and wide, I'm a Dutchman."
He was too angry to say anything aloud. He looked hard at Captain Roach for a moment, and then went out to the hitching rack where he had left his mule, the Home Guards dividing right and left, and making no remark as he passed through their ranks. He went home with all the speed he could induce his long-eared beast to put forth, and the reception he met when he got there almost made amends for the deliberate slight that had been put upon him in the enrolling office; but the best part of the story he intended to tell was knocked in the head by the first words his mother said to him. He was going to describe a terrific battle he had had with the escaped prisoners somewhere in the woods; but his mother cried, as she ran down the steps and clasped him in her arms:
"O Tom! Where have you been? And how came your horse hitched out there in the grove?"
Captain Randolph had forgotten all about his horse, and just then he wished that one of the Yankees had put a bullet through the animal's head instead of tying him among the evergreens. Then he could have said that he did not surrender without a fight, and the dead horse would have proved it.
"Some of the neighbors heard him calling as they were riding along the road, and went in and brought him home; but they saw no signs of you," continued Mrs. Randolph, looking hard at Tom as if to assure herself that he was all there. "You don't know how frightened we all were. The first thing I thought of was those dreadful Yankees, and I was afraid you might have fallen into their hands."