It was almost noon when he opened his eyes again, and the first move he made was for the window that looked toward the swamp that inclosed Rodney Gray’s plantation on three sides. Of course all signs of the conflagration had long since disappeared, but it had left gloom and anxiety in the house below, as Tom found when he went down to eat the late breakfast that had been kept warm for him. His mother seemed to have grown a dozen years older since he last saw her.
“What is the matter?” he demanded. “Your face is as long as my arm.”
“O Tommy, did you see it last night?” she asked in reply.
“See what last night?” faltered Tom, who began to have a faint suspicion that it would be a wise thing for him to make his mother believe, if he could, that he had slept soundly through it all.
“Why, the fire. Someone’s cotton has been destroyed. Mr. Walker, who lives on the plantation below, saw the light and came up this morning and told your father about it, and together they have gone to the swamp to look into the matter.”
“Oh! the swamp,” repeated Tom with a chuckle. “That’s all right, and father need not have troubled himself to ride so far without his breakfast. Please tell the girl to give me a bite of something. Old man Gray has some cotton in there, I believe.”
“But, my dear, we have two hundred bales in there, too.”
The tone in which the words were uttered struck Tom dumb and motionless for a moment. Then he groped blindly for the nearest chair and dropped into it. It was true that his father had a fortune hidden not more than half a mile from the bayou in which Mr. Gray’s four hundred bales were concealed, and up to that moment he had forgotten all about it. It was also true that all the cotton that had been run into the swamp was plainly marked with the initials of the owners’ names, but Tom didn’t know whether Lambert could read or not. He had never thought to ask him, and now he blamed himself for his stupidity. If it was the Pearl River vagabonds, and not Lambert, who applied the torch, there was the same trouble to be feared. Tom took particular pains to tell the men with whom he conspired to destroy Mr. Gray’s property that every bale of it was marked R. W. G., but he now remembered, with a sinking at his heart that almost drove him crazy, that these Home Guards were as ignorant as the mules and horses they rode on their plundering expeditions, and perhaps there was not one among them who knew one letter from another. The fear that the wrong pile might have been committed to the flames threw him into a terrible state of mind.
“I don’t wonder that you are sadly troubled,” said his mother, in a sympathizing tone. “But I suppose it is about what we can look for in times like these. I never did expect to save that cotton. I was sure that if the Yankees did not steal it the rebels would destroy it.”
(Mrs. Randolph called them “rebels” now. A few months before she would have spoken of them as “Confederates” or “our own brave soldiers.”)