“It’s always stillest jest before a storm,” Ben Hawkins had been heard to say, “and this here quiet is goin’ to make all we uns so careless that the first thing we know some of us will turn up missin’.”
And on the night following the day during which Tom Allison and Mark Goodwin paid their visit to Buffum’s cabin, Ben came very near making his words true by turning up missing himself. The camp regulations required that every member should report at sunset, unless he had received permission to remain away longer, and especially were the foragers expected to be on hand to make preparations to go out again as soon as night fell. Ben Hawkins was one of three who went out on the night of which we write, and he came back shortly before daylight to report that he had barely escaped surprise and capture in his father’s house.
“But I’ve got the grub all the same,” said he, placing a couple of well-filled bags upon the ground near the tree under which he slept in good weather. “I was bound I wouldn’t come without it, and that’s what made me so late.”
“Did you see them?” asked the refugees in concert. “Were they soldiers from Williamston?”
“Naw!” replied Hawkins in a tone of disgust. “They were some of Shelby’s pesky Home Guards. Leastwise the two I saw were Home Guards, but I wasn’t clost enough to recognize their faces. Now I want you all to listen and ask questions next time you go out, and find, if you can, who all is missin’ in the settlement. I had a tol’able fair crack at them two, and I don’t reckon they’ll never pester any more of we uns.”
The man Buffum was there and listening to every word, and he had so little self-control that it was a wonder he did not betray himself. Probably he would if it had not been that all the refugees showed more or less agitation.
“Didn’t I say that we uns would get too careless for our own good?” continued Hawkins. “I’ve got so used to goin’ and comin’ without bein’ pestered that I didn’t pay no attention to what I was doin’, and ’lowed myself to be fairly ketched in the house. I’d ’a’ been took, easy as you please, if I’d ’a’ had soldiers to deal with.”
“Where are the two foragers who went out with you?” inquired Marcy.
“Aint they got back yet?” exclaimed Hawkins, a shade of anxiety settling on his bronzed features. “I aint seed ’em sence I left ’em up there at the turn of the road, like I always do when we go after grub. They went their ways and I went mine, and I aint seed ’em sence. What will you bet that they aint tooken?”
The refugees talked the matter over while they were eating breakfast and anxiously awaiting the appearance of the missing foragers, and asked one another if Mr. Hawkins would be likely to lose any buildings because Ben had been detected in the act of carrying two bags of provisions from his house. Ben said cheerfully that he did not look for anything else, and that he expected to spend a good many nights in setting bonfires in different parts of the settlement. No one hinted that this sudden activity on the part of the Home Guards might be the result of a conspiracy, and, so far as he knew, Marcy Gray was the only one who suspected it. The houses toward which the foragers bent their steps, when they separated at the turn, stood at least three miles apart and in different directions, and it seemed strange to Marcy that those particular houses should have been watched on that particular night. He thought the matter would bear investigation, and with this thought in his mind he set out immediately after breakfast, with the black boy Julius for company, to see if any of the Home Guards had paid an unwelcome visit to his mother since he took leave of her the day before. On his way he passed through the field in which the overseer Hanson had been taken into custody and marched off to Plymouth, and the negroes who were at work there at once gathered around to tell him the news. Early as it was, they had had ample time to learn all about it.