"Look here," exclaimed Dick, who had heard a good deal about Tom Randolph and learned to dislike him before he ever met him; "have you much of an acquaintance with live Yanks—I mean with those who wear uniforms?"
Tom was obliged to confess that he had not.
"Well, we've seen and talked with a few and may be supposed to know something about them; and when we say that the squad who captured us, and might have made us trouble but didn't, were gentlemen, we mean it. If we ever find one of them in a box and see a chance to help him out, we intend to improve it."
"But as you have no discharge to show, you had better not permit yourself to fall into their hands while you have that uniform on," said Rodney. "By gracious! It makes my old hat rise to think how I should feel if I knew I was going to be ordered off to that camp with a lot of conscripts. You will lose your prisoners sure, and your Home Guards will be brushed aside like so many cobwebs. If you get through with a whole skin we shall call you a good one. We'd better be riding along, Dick."
"Now you've done it," said the latter, as he and Rodney moved on and left Tom out of hearing. "You have frightened him out of his wits."
"With your help I think I have given him a good scare," was Rodney's answer. "I'll bet you a month's wages in good and lawful money of the Confederacy that Tom Randolph never takes a squad of conscripts to Camp Pinckney. I know I shouldn't hanker after the job if I were in his place."
As to Tom himself, he was about as badly frightened as he could be without becoming frantic, and much against his will he was obliged to tell himself that there was but one course of action open to him. If it was true that Federal scouting parties had thrown themselves between Mooreville and Camp Pinckney, he must run the fearful risk of being killed or captured by them, or else he must resign his commission, exchange his fine uniform for a citizen's suit and take the position of overseer on his father's plantation. Tom wanted to yell when this alternative presented itself to him. An overseer was on a par with a blacksmith or a carpenter or a clerk in a store. He had to work for his living and was in consequence a nobody. And Tom remembered how he had railed at Ned Griffin when he accepted Mr. Gray's offer, declaring, in the hearing of everyone who would listen to him, that nobody but a poltroon would take that way of keeping out of the service.
"And now I've got to come to it myself or get shot," whined Tom. "It will be an awful come down for a man who has held a commission in the service of the State, but unless mother can see some other way out I shall have to do it."
Captain Tom wound up by wishing that every man who was in any way responsible for the war might always feel as miserable as he felt at that moment.