"That's the way the thing stands, and if you want to stay at home you and your men had better be doing something."
These chance words, which really did not mean anything, set some of the Home Guards to thinking.
CHAPTER IV.
LIEUTENANT LAMBERT'S CAMPAIGN.
Of course the principal topic of conversation at the enrolling office during the rest of the day was Mr. Gray's unexpected interference in behalf of Ned Griffin, the conscript. It frightened Captain Roach, enraged and disgusted Tom Randolph, and put Lieutenant Lambert into a very anxious frame of mind. The latter was obliged to confess that his chances for keeping out of the army were very slim indeed.
"That's the way the thing stands, and if you want to stay at home you and your men had better be doing something," he kept saying to himself as he galloped along the dusty road on his way home. It was easy enough for Captain Roach to talk, but what was there that the Home Guards could do to distinguish themselves, seeing that the Federal troops were so secure in their position at New Orleans that the whole Confederate Army could not drive them out, and that the gunboats in the river in front of Baton Rouge could not be whipped by men who were armed only with squirrel rifles and shot guns? Lambert had been turning the matter over in his mind ever since Mr. Gray left the enrolling office in the morning, and now he did something which he had declared he never would do as long as he lived. He went out of his way to ask the advice of a Confederate veteran who had just returned from the Army of the Centre disabled by wounds received in battle.
There were several of these crippled veterans in the neighborhood, and they had been so many thorns in Tom Randolph's side ever since they first began straggling home from the front. To begin with, they turned up their noses at the Home Guards, and made all manner of sport of their finely uniformed captain when they saw him riding along the road slyly pricking his horse with his spurs to make the animal prance and go sideways, as an officer's horse ought to do. They laughed, too, when they heard the Home Guards tell of their fight with that gunboat, and some of them went so far as to declare that, disabled as they were and half dead with camp fever besides, they could arm themselves with corn-stalks and drive Tom Randolph and his warriors into the Mississippi River.
In the next place, almost all these veterans had brought home with them a goodly supply of Yankee relics and trophies in the shape of uniform coats, pants, caps, and overcoats that had been picked up on the field, and which, for some reason or other, they seemed anxious to get off their hands. So they offered them to the Home Guards in exchange for citizens' clothing of equal or less value, and the latter were always found willing to trade. Captain Tom was disgusted and angry when first one man and then another appeared at the enrolling office clad in some portion of a shabby uniform that had once belonged to a Federal trooper or infantry-man, and ordered the wearers to clear out and never come there again unless they could come properly dressed; but the Home Guards paid no sort of attention to him. They were soldiers, they said, and since their own government did not think enough of them to provide them with uniforms they felt at liberty to obtain them where they could. Besides, their new clothes, even though they were well worn and had once belonged to Lincoln's hirelings, were warm and comfortable, and the blue overcoats would keep out next winter's cold as effectually as gray ones. Much against his will Tom finally appealed to the enrolling officer; but the latter could not help him, for he had no authority over the Home Guards.