You will remember, too, that when Rodney reached home he led his friend into the parlor and pushed him into an easy-chair with the words: "Stay here till I find somebody," and that his mother came in a moment later. The way in which the two greeted each other after their long separation was something of which Dick Graham could not remain an unmoved spectator, for it made him think of his own mother away off across the river, whom he might never see again. He staggered rather than walked to the window, and looked out at the oleanders in the yard.
"O Rodney, is it possible that you have come back to me at last!" exclaimed Mrs. Gray tearfully; and Dick knew, without turning his head, that she was holding her stalwart son off at arms' length and giving him a good looking over.
"Yes, sir," replied the returned soldier, placing his arm about his mother's waist and leading her toward a sofa, "I have come back, and I have come to stay. The last words you said to me right out there on the gallery were that you never wanted to hear that I had failed to do my duty. You haven't heard any such report as that, have you? I have done the best I could, but I have come back whipped; and I wish every other man who wears a gray jacket were honest enough to say the same thing."
The listening Dick expected to hear his chum soundly rebuked for giving utterance to such sentiments, because he knew that the women were much more zealous for the cause of Southern independence than their male relatives, that they were exerting themselves to the utmost to keep the war spirit at fever heat, and that, if it hadn't been for them, the army from which he had just been discharged would have dwindled to a corporal's guard long ago. By an accidental glance into a mirror that hung on a side wall Dick saw that Mrs. Gray was holding her soldier boy tightly clasped in her arms; but he did not hear her utter one word of reproach. Like many another mother's, her patriotism had been sorely tried, and now that Rodney had returned safe and sound she considered that she had done all for the cause that could be expected of her, and hoped that he would never leave her side again. Let some other mother's son—Mrs. Randolph's, for instance—take Rodney's place at the front.
"Say!" exclaimed Rodney, starting up all of a sudden. "What's the matter here? This room doesn't look just as it did the last time I saw it. Where's the carpet?"
"It was cut into blankets and sent to Corinth, along with a lot of other things that I thought might be of use to you ragged, shivering soldiers," replied his mother.
"I hoped you would never be called upon to make the smallest sacrifice," said Rodney in a tone of disgust.
"Do you think I made no sacrifice when I sent you to the field?" said Mrs. Gray reproachfully. "O Rodney."
"I didn't mean that," said the boy quickly. "But you don't want to rob yourself for the sake of those fellows up there," bobbing his head in the direction in which he supposed Bragg's army to be. "Like as not the poor, foolish woman who cut her shawl up to make these trousers of mine will suffer with cold for the want of it. But I am forgetting something. Come here, old fellow. Mother, you have often heard me speak of Dick Graham, the only brother I've got. Well, here he is. Rags and dust and all, that's Dick. Kiss him for his mother, and tell me where I will find father."