"If you'll explain I'm ready to listen," I said, resuming my seat on the big stone, "and when you're through explaining I'll thank you to give me back my pencil and sketch."
He seemed to feel the necessity of self-control, though I could see his anger was not diminishing.
"You claimed to be a hunter lost in the mountains," he repeated, "when, in fact, you are a Yankee spy sent here upon your miserable business into the last stronghold of the Confederacy."
I laughed loud and long. I know I ought not to have done so, but I could not help it. The blood rose higher in his cheeks, and his lips trembled, but he had himself under firm control at last.
"I'm a spy upon you, am I?" I asked, "Where's the proof?"
"Here it is," he said, holding up my pencil and sketch of the fort,—a poor enough sketch, too. "At the intercession of my daughter, I have been treating you this morning as a prisoner of war, ready for exchange or parole, and your first use of this hospitality is to draw for the Yankee government sketches and maps of my fortifications."
"I did not intend to take that sketch to Washington," I protested, mildly.
"It is quite certain that you will never do so," he said, putting sketch and pencil in his pocket. "I have other uses for these. Come with me."
"Suppose I decline," I said. I was growing a little obstinate. Moreover, I was tired of being hacked about.
He blew a little thing like a policeman's whistle: three or four men in Confederate uniform came out of the fort or the little outhouses.