“Excuse me, sir,” answered the sergeant, respectfully. “I know all about you, sir; and I know that you are hard to catch, and harder to keep.”
“You flatter me,” said the Colonel, smiling; “you forget that I am sixty years old.”
“No, I don’t, sir,” remarked the sergeant, with a grin, “but I don’t let you go until I hand you over to the lieutenant. Here he is now, sir, coming round the corner of the house. We thought you’d jumped out of the window on the stable side.”
A young lieutenant came running around the corner of the house, and, springing up the steps of the portico two at a time, saluted and said:
“Colonel Gratiot, I believe. You are my prisoner.”
“I certainly am,” replied the Colonel, grimly, as the sergeant released him and saluted; then, looking round in the half-darkness over the numbers of dark soldiers in blue uniforms surrounding the house, and the gunboat puffing and grinding away in the river, he continued:
“You took an immense deal of trouble to catch an old fellow like me.”
“You are worth it, sir,” replied the lieutenant, smiling delightedly. “And we were out for big game this time.”
By now the whole house was roused. Lights were moving about in the upper part, and the negroes, excited and with a strange mixture of triumph and timidity, had begun to collect in and about the house. In five minutes every one of the Harrowby house except Angela was down in the great hall, which was full of soldiers, with a few officers among them.
The commanding officer made an apology to Mrs. Tremaine and the ladies for disturbing them, but pleaded the exigencies of war. He permitted Mrs. Tremaine to make up, out of Colonel Tremaine’s scanty wardrobe, a parcel of clothing for Colonel Gratiot, who was a head shorter and even narrower than Colonel Tremaine. Colonel Gratiot’s horse, saddled and bridled, was found and carried on board the gunboat, as the sergeant facetiously remarked, for the Colonel to ride. The game being bagged, Colonel Gratiot was marched on board, and in a few minutes not a Federal soldier remained at Harrowby as the gunboat churned its way down the river in the darkness.