“Oh, no. I was struck on the shoulder by something, don’t know what, when the gunboat Westfield was blown up by her crew to keep her from falling into the hands of the rebels. If I hadn’t been a good swimmer I should now be rusticating at Tyler, Texas, or some other Southern watering-place.”
“Well, now, take this big chair—you have grown to be a pretty good-sized fellow since I last saw you—and settle back at your ease and tell us all about it,” said Rodney. “What do you mean when you say you are figuring on making some money this trip? And if you are dead broke, where did you get that blue suit? They don’t issue that style of clothes to the foremast hands in the navy, do they? Or are you an officer?”
“One at a time,” replied Jack. “One at a time, and your questions will last a heap longer. I am a trader.”
“O Jack,” exclaimed Rodney, who was all excitement in a moment. “Then you are just the man we are looking for. Have you a permit?”
“Well, I—you see—that is to say, no; I haven’t.”
“Then you are not the man we want to see at all,” said Rodney in a disappointed tone. “You can’t trade without it.”
“I am painfully aware of the fact. And perhaps you wonder how I am going to buy cotton when I am dead broke, don’t you? I have influential friends; and thereby hangs a tale as long as a yardarm.”
“Suppose you leave off bothering your cousin now and go home with us,” suggested Mr. Gray, when he saw that Rodney was settling himself to listen to a lengthy story. “We haven’t seen you at the house very often of late, and you are almost as much of a stranger to your mother as you would be if you lived in Vicksburg. We haven’t heard all Jack’s war history yet, and perhaps he will give it to us to-night after supper.”
Rodney was glad to agree to the proposition, and at his request Ned Griffin was invited to make one of the party, for he was sure to be one of the most interested listeners. In fact the Grays had come to look upon Ned as one of the family. Jack’s story was not a long one, and you ought to hear it, in order to know how he happened to “turn up” there in Mooreville when, as Rodney said, no one dreamed of seeing him, and we will tell it in our own way, leaving out a good deal of what Jack called “sailor lingo.”
The last time we saw Jack Gray was so long ago that you have perhaps forgotten that we ever mentioned his name. Instead of following in the footsteps of his father and becoming a planter, Jack had sailed the blue water from his earliest boyhood, and was the elder brother of our Union hero, Marcy Gray, who was taken from his home at dead of night by a party of blue-jackets to serve as pilot on Captain Benton’s gunboat during the fight at Roanoke Island. Jack was Union all over, and, even when it was dangerous for him to do so, could hardly refrain from expressing his contempt for those who were trying to break up the government. When we first brought him to your notice he had already had some thrilling experience with the enemies of the flag under which he had sailed all over the world, his vessel, the brig Sabine, having been one of the first to fall into the power of the Confederate cruiser Sumter.