They looked up with startled eyes to stare into a dozen muskets leveled straight at their heads from the willow thickets. Corn-dodgers and milk-gourds dropped into the water as they impulsively jumped to their feet.
"If yo'uns move we'uns 'll blow the lights outen yo'uns," shouted the leader of the rebels. "Hold up yer hands."
It was a moment of the most intense anguish that either of them had ever known. Their thoughts were lightning-like in rapidity. The rebel muzzles were not a rod away, their aim was true, and it would be madness to risk their fire, for it meant certain death.
The slightest move toward resistance was suicide.
Si gave a deep groan, and up went his hands at the same moment with Shorty's.
The rebels rushed out of the clump of willows behind which they had crept up on the boys, and surrounded them. Two snatched up their guns, and the others began pulling off their haversacks and other personal property as their own shares of the booty. In the midst of this, Si looked around, and saw the woman standing near calmly knitting.
"You ain't so afeared o' rheumatism all at once," he said bitterly.
"My rheumatiz has spells, young man, same ez other people's," she answered, pulling one of the needles out, and counting the stitches with it. "Sometimes it is better, and sometimes it is wuss. Jest now it is a great deal better, thankee. I only wisht I could toll the whole Yankee army to destruction ez easy ez you wuz. My, but ye walked right in, like the fly to the spider. I never had nothin' do my rheumatiz so much good."
And she cackled with delight. "When you git through," she continued, addressing the leader of the rebels, "come up to the house, and I'll have some dinner cooked for ye. I know ye're powerful tired an' hungry. I s'pose nothin' need be cooked for them," and she pointed her knitting-needle contemptuously at Si and Shorty. "Ole Satan will be purvidin' fur them. I'll take these along to cook fur ye."
She gathered up the dead chickens and stalked back to the house.