The baker had suddenly dodged to the other side of the road when the hilarious Lanyard readied his ponderous claws toward him, and only grinned back, in broad Dutch, his reply to the suggestion. After a little more of this sort of sky-larking, as he called it, he cooled down sufficiently to talk in a more rational way, but kept on using, by way of emphasis, as Parson Brownlow would say, "Good mouth-filling oaths, that would blister a sailor's lips."
"Why, blank it—I only shipped with this gang of pirates until we could reach some civilized port where I could get ashore amongst white people."
Lanyard was opposed to "d——d niggers," and had somehow become full of the contrary notion, that the South was fighting to retain the colored population, and the North wished to free them, merely that they could be sent, as he said, "back to Africa, where they belong."
"You were not missed from camp last night until it was time to turn in; the duffer that was on watch up on the volcano back there reported to his partner, who took his place, that you had said you were sick, and had gone down to the house below to get a hot supper, so he told him not to shoot at you when you came in to roost.
"Our old chum, the Colonel, you know, he got excited because you didn't show up, so he had to turn us out to go down to the old house to fetch you in. I told him it was no use; that you would be too drunk to walk up the hill; but he made me take a mate out of our mess, and started us out after you. We couldn't get by the watchman. We told the blasted fool that we had to go down the hill to find you, but he kept fooling with his gun, and swore he'd sink us if we tried to run out of port.
"Pretty soon the racket and loud talk brought an officer and a whole gang of fellows on to us, and we were taken into the guard-house. We had to stay there half the night before any of our fellows came to help us out; then the Colonel and Elkton figured around and, by a lot of talking, they were allowed to take us back to our shanty to finish the rest of the night.
"Now I wanted to get out of that country and go to New York, terrible bad, but, by G—, I never would have thought of going down into that wood to find a path to New York. I was just going to wait until the Yankees came up to fight us, and then I was going right out to join them in spite of h—; but I wanted to see them first. Well, while we were in the guard-house that night, and our Lieutenant was talking with the other officer about getting us out, I heard them say something about your 'being in the Yankee camp before we started after you.' This set me thinking about your being there and me left in the Rebel guard-house.
"On the way back to our shanty, I asked the Lieutenant if he thought you were captured by the Yanks, and he said:
"Oh, no! he's got lost, and will turn up all right when it gets daylight."
"But the Lieutenant was in a damn bad humor about your going off, and kept talking to the Sergeant about it being "queer" that you should come up from Knoxville and go straight out into that country alone. The Colonel was satisfied that you were lost, but the Lieutenant said the officers up at the guard-house were sure you had gone straight to the Yankee Camp, as they were out on the road only a mile and you must have been among them before night.