“But I don’t, you see. Of course he would make all sorts of promises, but he’d burn that cotton of ours as soon as he could get to it.”
When the events we have just described became known in the settlement, they created almost as much excitement as did the news of the firing upon Sumter, but of course it was a different sort of excitement. The Union men whom Lambert had robbed and abused went into the city by dozens to bear testimony against him, and then hastened home to repair their wagons and harness so that they could earn the four dollars a day, “greenback money,” that Sailor Jack offered them for hauling out his uncle’s cotton. Everyone who had cotton to sell and teams for hire, with one exception, was happy; and that exception was Mr. Randolph, who was the most miserable man in the State. He had not only lost the most of his cotton (he had about twenty bales that Jack said he would buy), but since Lambert’s arrest he had learned why he lost it. That was a matter which Tom desired above all things to keep from his father’s knowledge; but Lambert had told all he knew about him in the hope that, if he were sent to prison, his old captain would have to go with him. Tom himself had some fears on this score, but thus far no one in the settlement had thought it worth while to trouble him. Such treatment as that made Tom angry.
“Nobody pays any more attention to me than if I was a stump-tailed yellow dog,” he complained to his mother, who was the only friend he had in the world. “Father will scarcely speak when I am around, and when I go to town, the men who used to go out of their way to salute me and say ‘Good-morning, Captain Randolph,’ won’t look at me. It wasn’t so when we were rich.”
“That is true,” assented his mother. “I have always heard it said that one’s pocket-book is one’s best friend, and I believe it. Tommy, don’t you think, if you could fix up a wagon and earn a little money, it would be better than idling away your time doing nothing?”
“And drive crow-bait mules and work for Rodney Gray?” exclaimed Tom. “Mother, I am surprised at you. Think what a comedown that would be for one who has been a captain in the Confederate service!”
Mrs. Randolph did not say that it would have been a good thing for the captain if he had been content to remain a civilian, but she thought so.
There were others in the neighborhood who had never performed any manual labor, rich planters before the war, who had nothing to do but spend the money their slaves made for them, but they did not talk as Tom did. They took off their coats and went to work, and never stopped to see whether the shoulder that was under the opposite side of a cotton bale belonged to a white man or a negro. Rodney Gray, who superintended the work while Sailor Jack went to New Orleans to charter a river steamer, paid them their greenbacks every night, and the planters took them home and hid them for fear that a squad of rebel cavalry might make a night raid into the settlement and steal them. Jack did not ask for military protection, but he had it, for every day or two a company of Federal troopers galloped through the country, ready to do battle with any “Johnnies” who might try to interfere with the work. Rodney was always glad to see them. He knew that the Confederate authorities would not permit that cotton to be shipped if they could prevent it, and he never left it unguarded. Moseley and his five companions were in his pay, and earned two dollars a night by holding themselves ready at all times to drive off any marauders who might try to burn it. On one memorable night they proved their worth and earned five times that amount. Moseley, who seemed to have grown several inches taller since Rodney last saw him, proudly reported that he had had a regular pitched battle about three o’clock that morning, and that he had driven the enemy from the field in such confusion that they left their wounded behind them. And, what was more to the point, he produced three injured rebels to show that he told nothing but the truth.
By the time Sailor Jack returned with the steamer he had chartered, Mr. Gray’s cotton was all on the levee at Baton Rouge awaiting shipment to New Orleans, and Rodney’s teams were hard at work hauling in Mr. Walker’s. By this time, too, everyone in the southwestern part of the State knew what was going on at Mooreville, and Union men and rebels, living as far away as the Pearl River bottoms, came to Jack and begged, with tears in their eyes, that he would take their cotton also and save them from utter ruin. Jack assured them that he would be glad to buy every bale, provided they would put it where he could get hold of it without running the risk of being bushwhacked; but there was the trouble. The guerillas became very active all on a sudden, and almost every morning someone would report to Rodney that he “seen a light on the clouds over that-a-way, and jedged that some poor chap had been losin’ cotton the night afore.” On one or two occasions Rodney saw such lights on the sky, and if his heart was filled with sympathy for the planter who was being ruined by the wanton destruction of his property, there was still room enough in it for gratitude to his sailor cousin, through whose manœuvring his father had been saved from a similar fate.
Jack Gray was a “hustler,” and he “hustled” his men to such good purpose that in ten days more his chartered steamer was loaded to her guards, and Mr. Gray and a few of his neighbors were rich and happy, while Rodney was very miserable and unhappy, for his cousin and Charley Bowen were going away. Jack had been told to take Marcy home with him, and Jack’s rule was to obey orders if he broke owners. Anxious to remain with Marcy as long as he could, Rodney accompanied him to New Orleans and saw his father’s cotton loaded into the Hyperion’s hold. A few days afterward he waved his farewell to Marcy as the swift vessel bore him down the river, and then turned his face homeward to wait for Grant and Banks to open the Mississippi. But his patience was sadly tested, for it was not until July 4 that Grant’s army marched into Vicksburg. After an active campaign of eighty days the modest man who afterward commanded all the Union armies “gained one of the most important and stupendous victories of the war,” inflicting upon the enemy a loss of ten thousand in killed and wounded, capturing twenty-seven thousand prisoners, two hundred guns, and small arms and munitions of war sufficient for an army of sixty thousand men. General Banks took possession of Port Hudson on the 9th, and no Northern boy shouted louder than Rodney Gray did when he heard of it. The river was open at last, and Jack Gray and his trading boat could make their appearance as soon as they pleased.
But this was not all the glorious news that Rodney heard about that time. On the 3d of July, at Cemetery Ridge in far-off Pennsylvania, there had been a desperate charge of fifteen thousand men and a bloody repulse that “marked the culmination of the Confederate power.” When General Lee saw Pickett’s lines and Anderson’s fading away before the terrible fire of the Union infantry, he also saw “the fading away of all hope of recognition by the government of Great Britain. The iron-clad war vessels, constructed with Confederate money by British ship-builders and intended for the dispersion of the Union fleets blockading Wilmington and Charleston, and which were supposed to be powerful enough to send the monitors, one by one, to the bottom of the sea, were prevented from leaving English ports by order of the British government”; but if Pickett’s charge had been successful, those iron-clads would have sailed in less than a week, and France and England, who were waiting to see what would come of the invasion of Pennsylvania, would have recognized the Confederacy. It is no wonder that General Lee’s soldiers fought hard for victory when they knew there was so much depending upon it. The boys in blue who whipped them at Cemetery Ridge are deserving of all honor.