Ned laughed until he was red in the face, and then went on to give the "straight" of one "fight" as he had heard it from indignant citizens of Baton Rouge, who had petitioned General Williams, the Union commander, to send a company of cavalry to Mooreville with orders to exterminate the Home Guards or drive them from the country. The boys heard much the same story from several disabled veterans of Bragg's army, upon whom they called on their way home, and that was the way Rodney came to know so much about what had been transpiring along the river during his absence. He and Dick also learned from various sources that the enrolling officer would prove to be a jolly and entertaining companion when once they became acquainted with him, but as he was Tom Randolph's friend, they had better not trust him too far at first.
"Perhaps we'll not trust him at all," said Rodney. "We can tell better after we have had a look at him. As we are not in the Confederate service we are under no obligations to go near him; still he might look upon it as a courteous and friendly act if we were to drop into his office to-morrow and tell him 'hallo!'"
With this object in view they rode to Mooreville on the afternoon of the next day, and that was the time they saw Tom Randolph and frightened him nearly out of his wits, as we have recorded, by assuring him that he need not expect to take a squad of conscripts to Camp Pinckney without having a brush with the Union cavalry. It was after they left him that they heard the hounds giving tongue in the woods; but such sounds were common enough in that country, and so they paid no attention to it, although they might have done so had they been able to look far enough into the future to see what was going to happen afterward.
When they reached the enrolling office Rodney found that he knew everyone there except the officer in charge; and as he shook hands with some and barely nodded to others, he told himself that they were just the sort of men he expected to find in Tom Randolph's company of Home Guards. There were a few industrious, hard-working ones among them, but the majority were long-haired, lazy vagabonds, who had never been known to earn an honest living.
"They're a pretty set to fight a gunboat," he whispered to Dick while the two were hitching their horses at the rack. "And I'll bet my roll of Confederate scrip against yours that they never take any conscripts to the camp of instruction. I'll go farther, and say that they will never start with any, for when they are wanted they'll not be found. Now let's go in and see what sort of a chap we have to deal with."
Dick Graham put him down at once as a conceited prig, who did not know a thing outside of office routine, and was so disgusted with the airs he tried to throw on that he did not salute when he handed out his discharge; but Rodney, who did not care any more for the enrolling officer than he did for a crooked stick in the road, pursued a different course, and very soon succeeded in making Captain Roach ashamed of himself. He made him see that there was a big difference between a veteran soldier and a Home Guard, and ended by asking him to dinner.
"Now you've done it," said Dick, as the two mounted their horses and rode homeward. "If your mother had wanted that officer at her table, don't you think she would have asked him long ago?"
"Oh, that's all right," said Rodney. "We're privileged characters, and my folks will back up anything we do or say. Besides, during the last three days I've got to be a policy man."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Just this: so long as Captain Roach collogues with Tom Randolph and his mother—she's the one I am afraid of, for she is a schemer from the word go, I tell you—so long will he be more or less under their influence; and I am well enough acquainted with them to know that they would not hesitate to say or do anything that came into their heads if they thought they could set him against me. So I wanted the first chance at the captain. There's no telling at what moment he may be able to do us a good turn."