During the next few days Rodney did not do much overseer’s work on his plantation, and neither did Ned Griffin. To quote from the latter they became first-class all-around loafers; and so anxious were they to miss no item of news which might have come down from Vicksburg that they visited every man in the neighborhood who was known to have made a recent trip to Baton Rouge or have a late paper in his possession, and the information they picked up during their rides was far from encouraging. There was a heavy force of men at work upon the sunken iron-clad, as well as upon the Webb, which had been seriously injured during her fight with the Indianola, and when the latter was raised and the other fully repaired, the control of the river below Vicksburg would be fairly within the grasp of the Confederates. If Porter sent a few more boats below the batteries to be captured, the rebels would soon have a powerful and almost irresistible fleet; but in this hope they were destined to be disappointed, as they had been in many others.
It so happened that the next boat to pass under the iron hail of Vicksburg’s guns was very different from the Indianola. The papers described her as a “turreted monster—the most formidable thing in the shape of an iron-clad that had ever been seen in the Western waters.” It was just daylight when the Confederate gunners discovered her moving slowly down with the current, and the fire that was poured upon her by almost eighteen miles of batteries ought, by rights, to have sunk anything in the form of a gunboat that ever floated; but the monster, with the heavy black smoke rolling from her chimneys, passed safely on through the whole of it without firing a single gun in reply, and disappeared from view. Then there was excitement in Vicksburg and in Richmond too, for the news went to the capital as quickly as the telegraph could take it. The Queen of the West, which now floated the Confederate flag and had come up to Warrenton to see how her friends were getting on, turned and took to her heels, and orders were sent down the river to have the Indianola blown up without delay, so that she might not be recaptured by this new enemy. The order was obeyed, and the powerful iron-clad which might have given a better account of herself in rebel hands than she did while in possession of her lawful owners, was once more sent to the bottom.
Meanwhile the turreted monster held silently on her way, moving as rapidly as a five-mile current could take her, and at last grounded on a sand-bar. Not till then did the rebels awake to the fact that they had been deceived. When they found courage enough to go aboard of her they saw, to their amazement and chagrin, that she was not a gunboat at all, but a coal-barge that had been fitted up to represent one. She had been set afloat for the purpose of bringing out the whole fire of the batteries, so that Admiral Porter and General Grant, who had decided to effect a lodgement below the city, might know just how severe would be the cannonade that their vessels would be subjected to. Of course the Confederates were angry over the loss of the Indianola, but the soldiers of Grant’s army, who had thronged the bank on the Louisiana side and shouted and laughed to see the fun, looked upon the whole affair as the best kind of a joke. In speaking of it in his report Admiral Porter said: “An old coal-barge picked up in the river was the foundation we had to build on. The casemates were made of old boards in twelve hours, with empty pork-barrels on top of each other for smoke-stacks and two old canoes for quarter-boats. Her furnaces were built of mud, and were only intended to make black smoke instead of steam.” This was the contrivance which frightened the rebels into destroying the finest gunboat that ever fell into their hands, and which is known to history as “Porter’s dummy.” The enemy’s chances for getting control of the river were farther off than before, and Rodney said he would surely see the day when his cousin’s trading boat would be making regular trips up and down the Mississippi.
“But do you suppose the rebels will throw no obstacles in your way?” demanded Ned Griffin. “Do you imagine that they will let you run off cotton at your pleasure? When Vicksburg and Port Hudson fall the river will be lined with guerillas, and some day they will burn your trading boat.”
Taken in connection with what happened afterward these words of Ned’s seemed almost prophetic.
Having become satisfied that the rebels were not going to build up a navy in the river as they fondly hoped to do, Rodney began to think more about his absent cousin and the letters he had promised to write. The first one that came through the hands of the provost marshal was mailed at New Orleans and did not contain a word that was encouraging. Captain Frazier’s agent could not put a boat on the river just now for three reasons: He couldn’t get a permit, it wouldn’t be a safe venture at this stage of the game, and he had as much cotton on hand already as he could attend to.
“That hope is knocked in the head,” said Rodney.
“It is no more than I expected,” replied Mr. Gray, after he had read the letter. “Saving that cotton is going to be the hardest task you ever set for yourself. Others have been ruined by this terrible and utterly useless war, and why should we think to escape? Let us keep our many blessings constantly in mind, and spend less time in worrying over the troubles that may come upon us in the future. None of our family have been killed or sent to prison, and isn’t that something to be thankful for?”
And Mr. Gray might have added that another thing to be grateful for was the fact that the family had not become bitter enemies, as was the case with some whose members had fought under the opposing flags. Jack and Marcy were strong for the Union, and Rodney had been the hottest kind of a rebel; but that made no sort of change in the affectionate regard they had always cherished for one another. Some Union men bushwhacked their rebel neighbors, and some Confederate guerillas relentlessly persecuted their Union relatives; but there was no such feeling in the family whose boys have been the heroes of this series of books. Consequently, when the next letter came from Jack, written at his home in far-away North Carolina, and containing the startling intelligence that Marcy Gray had been forced into the rebel army in spite of all his efforts to keep out of it, Rodney was as angry a boy as you ever saw, while his father and mother could hardly have expressed more sorrow if they had heard that Marcy had been killed. The paragraph in Jack’s letter which contained the bad news read as follows:
"I almost wish I hadn’t been so anxious to see home and friends once more, for no news at all is better than the crushing words mother said to me as soon as I got into the house. I wished I had stayed in the service; and if I ever go back you may rest assured that I shall fight harder than I did before to put down this rebellion. Poor Marcy wasn’t here to welcome me. He was surprised and captured in mother’s presence, thrust into the common jail at Williamston, and finally shipped south with a lot of other conscripts, to act as guard at that horrible prison-pen at Millen, Ga. For months Marcy had been a refugee, living in the swamp with a few other Union men and boys who hid there to escape being forced into the army, and until a few weeks ago he beat Beardsley, Shelby, Dillon, and the rest at every job they tried to put up on him; but he was caught napping at last, and I never expect to see or hear of him again. Mother is almost broken-hearted, but being a woman she bears up under it better than I do. But hasn’t there been a time here since Marcy was dragged away! The work was done by strange soldiers, but Marcy’s friends knew who was to blame for it, and took vengeance immediately. The three men whose names I have mentioned were burned out so completely that they didn’t have even a nigger cabin to go into, and two pestiferous little snipes, Tom Allison and Mark Goodwin by name, whose tongues have kept the settlement in a constant turmoil, were bushwhacked.