"You'll have to take the consequences; and if you don't promise right here and now that you will be governed by me in future, I will go out of this house and never enter it again; and you know well enough what that means. I am not going to let you send me to the army in disgrace if I can help it."
"Sit down a minute," said Tom, seeing that the captain stood ready to carry out his threat to leave the house. "I don't see how the burning of a cotton-gin or two will disgrace you or anybody else."
"Yes, you do; for I have explained it to you more than a hundred times. Mr. Gray and some others are almost ready to report me now for my failure to make you and your worthless men take your chances with the other conscripts, and the minute somebody begins to lose property that minute I shall be ordered away from here and into the army; and wouldn't that put me in disgrace, I'd like to know?"
"What's the use of my being captain of the Home Guards if I can't call upon my men to protect me?" cried Tom, who would have given something to be alone for about five minutes so that he might have found relief in a flood of tears.
"There isn't a bit of use in it," replied the enrolling officer bluntly, "except that it keeps you out of the army with my help. Your commission gives you no authority to call upon the members of a State organization to avenge your supposed private wrongs."
"Well—why don't you sit down?" repeated Tom.
"I will when I have your promise, and not before. If you have laid your plans to get me into a muss with the Governor, I must head you off if I can."
"Then I will make no effort to wipe out the disgrace that has been put upon me as long as you remain in town," said Tom very reluctantly. "But after you leave I'll make some people I know of wish they had spoken of Captain Randolph with more respect. Now sit down and act like yourself."
"You ought to go straight to Mr. Gray and thank him; for if he and his friends had not stood by you last night you might have been badly treated," answered Captain Roach, placing his cap on the table again and resuming his seat by Tom's side. "You and I do not want to go into the army, and you must see that, in order to keep out of it, it will be necessary for you to follow a different course from the one you have marked out for yourself. If I am reported for neglect of duty the jig will be up with you."
"Then I must lie around and do nothing, must I?"