“No; and I was foolish to ask for it,” said his father in disgust. “The general laughed in my face and said you hadn’t done anything worthy of it. Don’t say a word about it, but thank your lucky stars that you have escaped being ordered to the front.”
When the man Larkin and a few other conscripts were brought in under guard, Tom Randolph was standing as near the big gate as the camp regulations would allow him to get, waiting impatiently for somebody to come out of the commandant’s office and tell him he could go home. He was mean enough to try to attract Larkin’s attention when the latter tramped wearily into the stockade, but the man was so wrapped up in his troubles that he could hardly have recognized his best friend, if he had had one among the curious crowd that was gathered about the gate. Tom was a little disappointed, but quickly dismissed Larkin from his mind when he saw his father approaching with an expression on his face that was full of good news.
“Come right along,” said he. “It’s all settled now. There stands the officer who has orders to pass us out.”
“So the general has consented to do me justice at last, has he?” exclaimed Tom, who was not half as grateful as he ought to have been. “And he kept me here all these weary days and allowed me to be insulted and abused on account of that man Larkin, did he? Thank him for nothing. But I’ll fix some others who are as much to blame for my being here as General Ruggles is. I haven’t wasted all my time since I have been in jail, I tell you.”
“I brought a mule for you to ride,” continued his father. “But don’t you think we had better bunk with the guard to-night? It will be as dark as a pocket in an hour, and besides it is going to rain.”
“I don’t care if it rains pitchforks. I’ll face them rather than remain in this dreary hole a moment longer,” declared the liberated conscript. “And I am not going to the barracks after my clothes or blankets. I will them to the first man who can put his hands on them.”
Tom reached home in due time in spite of the rain and other discomforts that attended him on his journey, and it is scarcely necessary to say that his mother welcomed him as one risen from the dead. Her husband had told her doleful stories of Tom’s life in camp, and she was afraid that he would sink under his many hardships before his release could be effected. But Tom was not as badly off as he pretended to be. A few days’ rest made him as uneasy and full of meanness as he had ever been in his life; but it is fair to say that his uneasiness was due to an unaccountable delay in the carrying out of a certain little programme which he had arranged while living in the stockade. This was what he meant when he told his father that he had not wasted his time since he had been in jail.
During the month of September it became known to the guards and conscripts at Camp Pinckney that a meeting of cotton and tobacco planters had been held in Richmond “to consider the expediency of the purchase by the Confederacy, or of a voluntary destruction of the entire cotton and tobacco crop,” to keep it from falling into the hands of the Union forces. It is hard to tell why the news was so long in coming down to Louisiana, for the meeting, which was described as “one of the largest, wealthiest, and most intelligent that had ever assembled in the city,” was held as early as February. Among the other resolutions acted upon by this patriotic assemblage was one calling upon the Southern people to destroy all their property in advance of the invading armies, even to their homes, so that the conquest of the United States should be a barren one. Of course this resolution met the hearty approval of those of the Camp Pinckney guards and conscripts who had no property worth speaking of, and some of them declared that if General Ruggles would let them have their own way for twenty-four hours they would destroy thousands of bales of cotton which the owners would never burn themselves so long as they saw a prospect of selling them to the Yankees. This set Tom Randolph to thinking, and with the aid of some of the Pearl River Home Guards who were still on duty at the camp, he made up a nice little plan to revenge himself on several of the Mooreville people who had incurred his enmity. It might have been successful, too, if Tom had not allowed his unruly tongue to upset it. As soon as he reached home he began waiting and watching for some signs of activity on the part of the Pearl River vagabonds, but up to this time the clouds that hung over the swamp, and which he watched every night with anxious eyes, had not been lighted by any signal-fires.
The life that Tom Randolph now led was dreary and monotonous in the extreme; no healthy boy could have endured it for a week. Did he take Larkin’s place as overseer and do his work? Well, hardly; and he never had any intention of doing it. The field-hands did the work as well as the overseeing, and Tom spent his time in loafing or in riding about the country on a bare-back mule. It is true that Major Morgan’s “drag-net” had not cleared the neighborhood of everyone who was subject to military duty, for a few of the desperate ones, like Lambert and Moseley, had taken to the woods, and a few others had joined the Yankees in Baton Rouge, where they were safe from pursuit; but it had caught the most of the able-bodied men and boys of Tom’s acquaintance, and now he found himself almost alone. He saw Rodney and Ned now and then, but never spoke to them if he could help it, or visited them on their plantations; for since they, with Mrs. Griffin’s aid, kept him from being sent to a Northern prison, he disliked them more than he did before. He had never got over being surprised at Mr. Gray’s action in standing between Ned and the conscript officer, while he permitted the other telegraph operator, Drummond, to take his chances. Mr. Gray must be Union at heart or else he would not have done that; and if he was Union he ought to be driven out of the country. Tom found a world of consolation in the reflection that he would soon be even with him.
It was while the returned conscript was taking his usual morning ride on his mule, with a gunny-sack for a saddle, that he met his old first lieutenant, as described at the beginning of the last chapter. He knew that the man was living in the woods, otherwise he would have had him for company at Camp Pinckney, and he was surprised to find him riding along a public road in broad daylight. Lambert was also mounted on a mule, the property of his late employer, which he had appropriated to his own use without troubling himself to ask permission. He remembered that Tom had once drawn a sword upon him, and flattered himself that in Camp Pinckney his tyrannical captain was being well paid for that and other indignities he had put upon his Home Guards; consequently he was not a little astonished and vexed to find him breathing the air of freedom on this particular morning.