“I will write you fuller particulars after a while, but just now I am rather ‘shuck up.’ Of course this upsets all my plans; my place is at home with mother. I inclose Captain Frazier’s card, to which I have appended his New Orleans address. I told him all about your cotton, and he and the agent will be only too glad to help you get it to market as soon as they think it safe to make the attempt. You can trust them, but be sure and hold out for twenty-five cents, greenback money. Captain Frazier promised me he would give it.”
The rest of the page was filled with loving messages from Marcy’s sorrowing mother, and at the bottom was a hasty scrawl that stood for Sailor Jack’s name.
Mr. Gray brought this letter from Baton Rouge, and finding Rodney at home with his mother, gave it to him to read aloud. The boy’s voice became husky before he read half a dozen lines, and Mrs. Gray’s eyes were filled with tears. When it was finished Rodney handed it back to his father with the remark:
“I am a good deal of Jack’s opinion that we shall never see or hear of Marcy again. I know by experience that the petty tyrants we call officers make the service so hard that a volunteer can scarcely stand it, and how much mercy do you think they will have on a conscript? They would as soon kill him as to look at him. No better fellow than Marcy ever lived, and to think that I—I deserve killing myself.”
Rodney arose hastily from his chair, staggered up to the room he still called his own, threw himself upon the bed and buried his tear-stained face in his hands. He had not forgotten, he never would forget, that episode at the Barrington Military Academy in which Bud Goble and his minute-men bore prominent parts. Marcy had freely forgiven him for what he did to bring it about, but it was always fresh in Rodney’s mind. How terribly the memory of it tortured him now!
CHAPTER IX.
RODNEY IS ASTONISHED.
Rodney Gray had promised himself no end of pleasurable excitement when his sailor cousin returned to take command of a trading boat on the river, for he had made up his mind that he would accompany Jack wherever he went. He was as well satisfied as Ned Griffin was that the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson would be the signal for instant and increased activity among the guerillas who infested the country as far up as New Madrid, and that picking up cotton along the river with an unarmed boat would be a hazardous undertaking.
The Mississippi is the most tortuous of rivers, and there is none in the world better adapted to guerilla warfare. Frequently the distance a steamer has to traverse in going around a bend is from twelve to thirty times greater than it is in a direct line across the country. The great bend at Napoleon is a notable example. A steamboat has to run fifteen miles to get around it, while the neck of land that makes the bend is but a mile wide. This was a famous guerilla station during the war until Commander Selfridge cut a ditch across the neck and turned the Mississippi into a new channel. A band of guerillas, with a howitzer or two mounted in wagons, would fire into a transport at the upper end of the bend (they seldom troubled armed steamers), and failing to sink or disable her there, would travel leisurely across the country and be ready to try it again when the steamboat arrived at the lower end. What made this sort of warfare particularly exasperating was the fact that the guerillas did not live along the river, but came from remote points, fifty or a hundred miles back in the country. If a gunboat hove in sight they would take to their heels; and if the gunboat landed a company or two of small-arm men and burned the nearest dwellings, as all gunboats were ordered to do in cases like the one we are supposing, the chances were that they punished people who were no more to blame for what the guerillas did than you or your chum.
The majority of the men who carried on this style of fighting were worthless fellows, like Lambert and Moseley, who had everything to make and nothing to lose by it; and we may anticipate events a little by saying that they came to look upon trading boats as their legitimate prey. If there was a fortune for the man who was lucky enough to get a permit to trade in cotton, there was also plenty of danger for him. Rodney would have entered upon this adventurous life with the same enthusiasm he exhibited when he set out for the North to aid in “driving the Yankees out of Missouri,” but there was little prospect that he would ever see any of it now that Jack had decided to remain at home with his mother. To do him justice he did not mourn over his disappointment, or the possible loss of his father’s cotton, as he did over the dire misfortune that had befallen his cousin Marcy.
“I wish I stood in his shoes this minute, and that he stood in mine,” Rodney said to his mother more than once. “I could stand the hard knocks he is likely to receive, but Marcy can’t.”