n't tryin' to come no game.
Them men done it sure's you're born."

"Did what?"

"Sent me up here this mawnin'."

"That's one point gained, but won't mother be frightened when she hears
of it?" thought Marcy, leaning his elbows on his knees and covering his
face with his hands so that his visitor could not see it. "Some of the
best men in the country have so far forgotten their manhood, and the
friendship they once had for our family, that they can send this
sneaking fellow here to worm something out of us."

"I don't believe a word of it," he cried, jumping to his feet and
confronting his visitor.

"Ye--ye don't believe it?" faltered Kelsey, springing up in his turn.
"Well, I--I--look a-here, Mister Marcy, mebbe this is something else you
don't believe. Them men whose names I jest give you, say that you an'
your maw an' all the rest of the Gray family is Union. What do ye say to
_that?_"

"I say that they had better attend to their own business and let me
attend to mine," answered Marcy. "Are Colonel Shelby and the rest of
them for the Union?"

"Not much; an' nuther be I."

"Are you in favor of secession?"

"I reckon." replied Kelsey earnestly; and Marcy knew all the while that
he could not have told what the word secession meant.

"Then why don't you prove it--you and Colonel Shelby, and the rest of
the neighbors who are saying things behind my back that they don't care
to say to my face? Why don't you prove your loyalty to the South by
shouldering a musket and going into the army?"

"Why, we uns has got famblies to look out fur," exclaimed the visitor,
who had never had this matter brought squarely home to him before.

"That makes no difference," answered the boy, who wondered if Kelsey's
family would fare any worse while he was in the army than they did now,
while he was out of it. "Every man in this country must show his good
will in one way or another. And there's that loudmouthed fellow Allison,
who went out of his way to insult me in the post-office just before I
went to sea. Nashville is full of such braggarts as he is. When they
can't find anything else to talk about they talk about me; and I have
smelt powder while they haven't." ["No odds if it was our own powder and
the wind blew the smoke into my face," he said to himself.]

By this time Marcy had the satisfaction of seeing that he had taken the
wind completely out of Kelsey's sails, and that the man who had come
there to trouble him was tr