"The Northern soldiers prefer enlisting to starvation. But they are not soldiers, least of all to meet the hot-blooded, thorough-bred, impetuous men of the South. They are trencher-soldiers who enlisted to make war upon rations, not upon men. They are such as marched through Baltimore, squalid, wretched, ragged, half-naked, as the newspapers of that city report them; fellows who do not know the breech of a musket from its muzzle; white slaves, peddling watches; small-change knaves and vagrants. These are the levied forces which Lincoln arrays as candidates for the honor of being slaughtered by gentlemen such as Mobile sends to battle. Let them come South and we will put our negroes to the dirty work of killing them. But they will not come South. Not a wretch of them will live on this side of the border longer than it will take us to reach the ground and drive them off.'
"Can we at the front be whipped while our friends at home keep up such heart as that?" cried the excited captain, pulling off his cap and flourishing it over his head with one hand, while he shook the paper at his men with the other. "Three cheers for brave old Missouri, and confusion to everybody who wants to keep her down."
"Everybody except Tom Percival," thought Rodney, as he threw up his cap and joined in to help increase the almost deafening noise that arose when the officer ceased speaking. "Whatever happens to anybody else I want Tom to come out all right."
After this short delay the squad rode on again, and along every mile of the road they traversed they found people to cheer them and hurrah for the great victory at Bull Run. There were no signs of Union men anywhere along the route, but the blackened ruins they passed now and then pointed out the sites of the dwellings in which some of them had formerly lived. Those ruins had been left there by some of Price's men scouting parties like the one with which he was now riding. Rodney had always thought he should like to be a scout, but if that was the sort of work scouts were expected to do, he decided that he would rather be a regular soldier. He wouldn't mind facing men who had weapons in their hands, because that was what soldiers enlisted for; but the idea of turning women and children out into the weather, by burning their houses over their heads, was repugnant to him. There was one piece of news he and the captain did not get, although they asked everybody for it. No one could tell them for certain that the victorious Confederates had gone into Washington and dictated terms of peace to the Lincoln government. There were plenty who were sure it had been done, but they had received no positive information of it. The only news they heard on which they could place reliance was that Price had withdrawn from Neosho, and effected a junction with Jackson and Rains at Carthage. That was a point in the captain's favor, for instead of being obliged to make a wide detour to the east and south of Springfield, he turned squarely to the west toward Carthage, and saved more than a hundred miles of travel, as well as the risk of being captured by a scouting party of Yankee cavalry.
The squad reached Carthage without seeing any signs of Siegel's troopers, who were supposed to be raiding through the country in all directions, and when Rodney rode into the camp, which was pitched upon a little rise of ground a short distance from the town, he remarked that he had never seen a stranger sight. The camp itself was all right. The tents were properly pitched, the wagons and artillery parked after the most approved military rules, and all this was to be expected, since the commanding general was a veteran of the Mexican war; but the men looked more like a mob than they did like soldiers. There were eight thousand of them, and not one in ten was provided with a uniform of any sort. The guard who challenged them carried a double-barrel shotgun, and the only thing military there was about him, was a rooster's feather stuck in the band of his hat.
"They're a good deal better than they look," said the captain, when Rodney called his attention to the fact that the sentry "slouched" rather than walked over his beat, and that he didn't know how to hold his gun. "They are not very well drilled yet, but they'll fight, and that is the main thing. Think of Washington and his ragamuffins at Valley Forge the next time you feel disposed to criticise the boys."
"Where is the enemy?" inquired Rodney.
"He is supposed to be concentrating twenty thousand men at Springfield, thirty-five miles east of here." replied the captain. "When McCulloch gets up from Arkansas we'll have a little more than fifteen thousand. But that's enough. We'll be in St. Louis in less than a month. That victory at Bull Run will nerve our boys to do good work when they get at it. Now where shall I go to find my regiment? The colonel is the man I want to report to."
While the captain was looking around to find an officer of whom he could make inquiries, there was a loud clatter of hoofs behind, and a moment afterward a spruce young fellow, handsomely mounted and wearing a uniform that Rodney Gray would have recognized anywhere, dashed by and held on his way without once looking in their direction.
"There he is now," exclaimed the captain, before Rodney had time to speak. "Oh, sergeant!"