Tom Randolph captured by the escaped prisoners.
"Well, Johnny, we're so ragged and dirty just now that we don't rightly know who we are, except that we are some of Uncle Sam's lost boys," replied the one who had captured the sword and revolver. "I expect he's down to Baton Rouge now waiting for us, and so we'd best be toddling along. Take that horse into the grove out of sight, Ben. Come on, Johnny."
"Have you heard hounds giving tongue in the woods anywhere about here?" inquired the one who had first spoken.
Tom was so nearly overcome with fear that he could not answer. He hardly knew when two of Uncle Sam's lost boys took him by the arms and raised him to his feet. All he realized was that he had run squarely into the hands of those he had tried so hard to avoid.
CHAPTER X.
NED GRIFFIN BRINGS NEWS.
After accompanying our Confederate hero, Rodney Gray, through fifteen months of army life, during which he saw more adventures, endured more hardships and learned more wisdom than he had ever dreamed of, we left him, at the close of the second volume of this series, safe in the home of his boyhood, which he had left for the avowed purpose of "driving the Yankees out of Missouri." He confidently assured his mother and the servants who assembled to see him off that it would not take more than three or four months to do that, and then he would return, like Lentulus of old, "with victorious eagles." Instead of that, he came back as ragged and disgusted a specimen of a Confederate volunteer as could be found anywhere in the South at the time of which we write, and that is saying a good deal. The summer clothing given him and his comrades at Tupelo after the retreat from Corinth, and which had been furnished by one of the numerous "ladies' associations" of the South, was not calculated to stand soldier treatment. The trousers Rodney wore were made of a rich shawl, and his blouse had once been part of a costly silk dress. His nights at the camp-fire, and the days he had passed trudging along dusty roads, had played sad havoc with his "pictured uniform." That was what Dick Graham called it, and his regiment, which had been pretty well supplied with clothing of the same description, presented a very fantastic appearance the first time they went on dress parade.
You will remember that Rodney brought Dick home with him. Dick wanted to get into Missouri where his parents were, and in order to do that it was necessary that he should find some point on the Mississippi that was not guarded by Federal gunboats. They came from Camp Pinckney on foot, and had been doing duty as infantrymen for months, although their regiment was always spoken of as the —th Missouri cavalry. Their horses had been "confiscated" by the commissary department during that dreary "mud march" from the disastrous battlefield of Pea Ridge to Van Buren and Pocahontas. The commanding general, Van Dorn, did not need cavalry during that march, but it was necessary that his wagon train should go through; so as fast as his jaded teams gave out and dropped in the road, he took cavalry horses to replace them, and in process of time the two Barrington boys found themselves on foot like hundreds of others.