Every story to which Mr. Gray and Ned Griffin listened was more thrilling than the one that came before it. Among others they found a man who lived in the outskirts of the city, and who, standing in his back door, had seen a bench which supported twenty-five stands of bees demolished by a shell from the gunboats. Still another had fled from his house just in time to escape capture by Butler's advance infantry, which was moving up the road in platoon front; and more than that, the highway was blue with Federals as far as his eye could reach. Of course such tales as these frightened some of the Mooreville people, but Mr. Gray assured his young companion that he put very little reliance upon them.
"These folks are not responsible for what they tell us, because they are scared out of their wits," was what he said to Ned Griffin more than once. "What would the Federals gain by capturing or destroying two little towns like Baton Rouge and Mooreville? If there was a fort or a body of Confederate troops here I might put some faith in these rumors; but now I don't. When our couriers return we shall have the straight of the story, and not before. Have you seen anything of our Home Guards, who ought to be mustering for our defence?"
No, Ned hadn't seen them; and when he came to ride about the town and make inquiries he could not find anybody else who had seen them. The truth was they were too badly frightened to show themselves, for they were afraid that they might be called upon to do something. Captain Tom's uniform was in its old hiding place in the garret, and Tom himself was stretched out on the lounge in his mother's room, eager for news and dreading to hear it, but too ill to mount his horse and muster his men for the defence of the town.
At length two of the Mooreville messengers returned, and then the citizens got "the straight of the story." When they learned that General Butler's army had not moved out of New Orleans at all, that not a Federal soldier had stepped upon the sacred soil of Louisiana in the neighborhood of Baton Rouge during the whole of that day, and that the city had been shelled and partially burned because Lieutenant Lambert of Tom Randolph's Home Guards had tried to gain a little cheap notoriety for himself by firing upon an unarmed boat—when the citizens heard this their fear give way to the wildest rage; and if they could have got their hands upon Lambert at that moment it is more than probable that they would have handled him roughly. With one accord the crowd surged up the steps that led to the hotel porch and through the wide hall into the dining room, which was quickly filled with men who had about made up their minds that the Home Guards had made them trouble enough, and that it would be a good plan to get rid of them without loss of time.
"Of all the senseless acts I ever heard of this last one of Lambert's is the beat," shouted an excited individual who had perched himself upon one of the tables. "Those Baton Rouge people knew what they wanted, and if it suited them to make friends with the Yankees and trade with them we planters have no business to find any fault with them for it. I would have done the same thing myself."
"Oh, you traitor!" shouted a voice from the farther end of the dining room. "Would you hold communication with the enemies of your flag?"
"Yon shut up, Bill Cummings," retorted the speaker. "If I am a traitor you're another. You've got a sack of Federal salt and some Federal tea and coffee hidden in one of your corn cribs at this moment, and I can prove it. You got them by trading a beef to one of the gunboats down there at Baton Rouge, and you brought them home in your wagon at dead of night, when you thought all your neighbors were fast asleep."
This raised a shout of laughter at the expense of Bill Cummings, but no one said a harsh word to him, for probably there were not a dozen men in the room who would not have been glad to get some of that salt and tea and coffee. Mr. Gray himself was standing in a pair of Federal brogans, and the man next him wore a straw hat that looked exactly like those that Uncle Sam issued to his sailors every month.
"Now, then," continued the man who had taken possession of the table, "I am in favor of taking that ruffian Lambert out of his bed, if he has had time to get there, and giving him such a whipping that he won't get over it as long as the war lasts."
"Let's hang him and be done with him," cried another.