rown husky all on a
sudden. "We are not a bad lot, but we are going to govern this State as
we please, and you will save yourselves trouble if you will stop
fighting against us. You'll have to do it sooner or later. Of course I
shall be obliged to deprive you of your guns, for you might be tempted
to shoot them at some loyal Jackson man when we are not here to protect
him. I have saved these young gentlemen from your clutches, and as that
was what I came for, I will bid you good-evening."

Rodney Gray did not hear much of this polite address for a new fear had
taken possession of him, and he took the opportunity to say to his
friend Tom:

"You go with the lieutenant after the horses, and I will stay with the
captain to say a word in your defense in case any of these Union people
happen to speak your name, or let out anything else you would rather
keep hidden."

Tom thought this a good suggestion. It would certainly be disagreeable,
and perhaps dangerous, to have the captain tell him when he returned
with the horses that he wasn't Tom Barton at all--that his real name was
Percival, that he was the commander of a company of Union men who had
offered to help Lyon at St. Louis, and all that. While Tom did not think
the captain would believe such a story if it were told him, it might
suggest to him some leading questions that the boys would find it hard
to answer. So he left Rodney to act as a sort of rear guard, and went
off to the stable with the lieutenant.

"Did you really know that we were in the house?" Tom asked, when he was
alone with the officer. "If you did, it can't be that Merrick's boy told
you."

"Of course he didn't. He would have kept it from us if he could, but all
the same the information came from him in the first place. The blacks in
these parts are all Union--no one need waste his breath telling me
different--and that scamp of a boy lost no time in spreading it among
the Union men in the neighborhood that there were a couple of 'disguised
rebels,' as he called you and Gray, putting up at Truman's house. That
was the way those five fellows came to get on your trail; but, as good
luck would have it, the darkey told the story to too many. Not being as
well acquainted in this settlement as he probably is in his own, he told
it to a Jackson man, who rode to our camp and told us of it. If it
hadn't been for that we should be miles away now; but of course we
couldn't think of going off and leaving some of