ld man, walking around the
house, looking at it.

As the boys went back to wash and dress themselves, they heard Balla
explaining to Lucy Ann and some of the other servants that "the man
them chillern let git away had just come back and tooken out the one
he had locked up"; a solution of the mystery he always stoutly
insisted upon.

One thing, however, the person's escape effected--it prevented Willy's
ever hearing any more of his mistake; but that did not keep him now
and then from asking Uncle Balla "if he had fastened his horses
well."

CHAPTER VI.

These hens were not the last things stolen from Oakland. Nearly all
the men in the country had gone with the army. Indeed, with the
exception of a few overseers who remained to work the farms, every man
in the neighborhood, between the ages of seventeen and fifty, was in
the army. The country was thus left almost wholly unprotected, and it
would have been entirely so but for the "Home Guard," as it was
called, which was a company composed of young boys and the few old men
who remained at home, and who had volunteered for service as a local
guard, or police body, for the neighborhood of their homes.

Occasionally, too, later on, a small detachment of men, under a leader
known as a "conscript-officer," would come through the country hunting
for any men who were subject to the conscript law but who had evaded
it, and for deserters who had run away from the army and refused to
return.

These two classes of troops, however, stood on a very different
footing. The Home Guard was regarded with much respect, for it was
composed of those whose extreme age or youth alone withheld them from
active service; and every youngster in its ranks looked upon it as a
training school, and was ready to die in defence of his home if need
were, and, besides, expected to obtain permission to go into the army
"next year."

The conscript-guard, on the other hand, were grown men, and were
thought to be shirking the very dangers and hardships into which they
were trying to force others.

A few miles from Oakland, on the side toward the mountain road and
beyond the big woods, lay a district of virgin forest and old-field
pines which, even before the war, had acquired a reputation of an
unsavory nature, though its inhabitants were a harmless people. No
highways ran through this region, and the only roads which entered it
were mere wood-ways, filled with bushes and carpeted with pine-