r longer than it will take us to
reach the ground and drive them off.'
"Can we at the front be whipped while our friends at home keep up such
heart as that?" cried the excited captain, pulling off his cap and
flourishing it over his head with one hand, while he shook the paper at
his men with the other. "Three cheers for brave old Missouri, and
confusion to everybody who wants to keep her down."
"Everybody except Tom Percival," thought Rodney, as he threw up his cap
and joined in to help increase the almost deafening noise that arose
when the officer ceased speaking. "Whatever happens to anybody else I
want Tom to come out all right."
After this short delay the squad rode on again, and along every mile of
the road they traversed they found people to cheer them and hurrah for
the great victory at Bull Run. There were no signs of Union men anywhere
along the route, but the blackened ruins they passed now and then
pointed out the sites of the dwellings in which some of them had
formerly lived. Those ruins had been left there by some of Price's men
scouting parties like the one with which he was now riding. Rodney had
always thought he should like to be a scout, but if that was the sort of
work scouts were expected to do, he decided that he would rather be a
regular soldier. He wouldn't mind facing men who had weapons in their
hands, because that was what soldiers enlisted for; but the idea of
turning women and children out into the weather, by burning their houses
over their heads, was repugnant to him. There was one piece of news he
and the captain did not get, although they asked everybody for it. No
one could tell them for certain that the victorious Confederates had
gone into Washington and dictated terms of peace to the Lincoln
government. There were plenty who were sure it had been done, but they
had received no positive information of it. The only news they heard on
which they could place reliance was that Price had withdrawn from
Neosho, and effected a junction with Jackson and Rains at Carthage. That
was a point in the captain's favor, for instead of being obliged to make
a wide detour to the east and south of Springfield, he turned squarely
to the west toward Carthage, and saved more than a hundred miles of
travel, as well as the risk of being captured by a scouting party of
Yankee cavalry.
The squad reached Carthage without seeing any signs of Siegel's
troopers, who were supposed to be raiding through th
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