The eloquent soldier pounded the table with his fist; everyone in the room, negro servants and all, applauded; and one of the latter ventured to say, in tones that of course were not intended to reach the officer's ears: "Say, you niggahs! What'll you bet dem Yankees don't run fit to kill derselves when dey see Mass' Tom comin'?" As to Tom, he smiled complacently and said to himself: "That was a better speech than Rodney Gray delivered when those Rangers gave him that frog-sticker of his."
Knowing Rodney Gray and Dick Graham as well as you ought to know them by this time, what do you think they would have thought if they had been in that room and listened to Tom's words? Before twenty minutes had passed away he appeared upon the streets of Mooreville in the full glory of his captain's suit and with his horse duly caparisoned; but having no company to command he prudently left his sword at home.
It was Tom's wish and his father's to bring the strength of the company up to a hundred men; but Tom found it harder work to raise a small fraction of that number than it was to get his commission from the Governor. Everyone who presented himself was accepted, and that too without reference to his social standing or his ability to pass the surgeon; and when all other expedients to promote enlistments had been tried, Mr. Randolph came to the front, as he had done in the case of the Rangers, with the offer to arm and equip all recruits who could not furnish their own outfit. This helped matters along amazingly; and when fifty men had been enrolled Captain Randolph ordered them to appear in one of his father's fields on a certain afternoon, armed and equipped as the law directed, for "company inspection." No one knew just what the order meant, but the men were all in the field at the appointed time; and when Tom came to look at them as they sat in their saddles facing him, after making an awkward and ineffectual effort to fall in line, he was disgusted with them and with himself too. Until that moment he had no idea that he had been enrolling so unpromising a body of men. Men! They looked more like lazy vagabonds, as indeed the most of them were. Rodney Gray himself could not have made soldiers of them. The next half hour was an ordeal that Captain Tom never wanted to pass through again; but we will let him describe it in his own way.
"They were the worst looking fellows I think I ever saw," Tom told his father and mother when he reached home after the "inspection" was over. "I brought them together because I wanted to see how they looked, and how I would look riding at their head; and to tell the honest truth, if a stranger had come into that field when they first tried to draw themselves up in line I believe I should have put spurs to my horse and galloped away rather than be seen in their company."
"Why, what was the matter with them?" inquired his mother, who took as deep an interest in the organization as Tom himself, and was anxious that it should win a name for him after the rebuff he had received at the hands of Captain Hubbard's Rangers. "You knew they were not gentlemen when you asked them to give in their names. There are few of that sort left in the country, more's the pity."
"I know that; but I hoped they might have pride enough to make a half-way respectable appearance at inspection," answered Captain Tom. "In the first place, no two of them were mounted, armed, or dressed alike. In the next, they came just as they had been at work in the field in the forenoon, and I don't believe that half of them had taken the trouble to wash their faces or comb their hair."
"They looked just as we see them on the streets every day, I suppose," said Mr. Randolph.
"Just the same, only worse," replied Tom, who was almost mad enough to cry every time he thought of it. "Here was a man mounted on the heaviest kind of a plough horse and carrying a long squirrel rifle on his shoulder, and beside him was one on a little runt of a mule and armed with a heavy double-barrel deer-killer. Not a few of them had chicken or turkey feathers stuck in their slouch hats for plumes, and some had pipes in their mouths; and when I said that no smoking would be allowed in the ranks, they did not hesitate to tell me that I need not think I could boss them around as Rodney Gray had bossed the Rangers while he was acting as their drill-master, for that was something they would not submit to."
"Why the—the impudence!" exclaimed Mrs. Randolph; while her husband looked down at the floor and told himself that that was about what might have been expected of such men as he and Tom had been able to bring into the Home Guards.
"That's the kind of soldiers they are," continued Captain Tom. "They know I haven't the power to enforce my commands, and so they intend to do pretty near as they please. The only reason they joined was because they wanted an excuse for keeping out of the army, and get the horses and weapons that were promised them."