rned
and ran, sending his mounted troopers to threaten several points at
once, misleading the Federals who had hastily assembled to harass his
rear, and thus securing an almost unobstructed road for his retreat.
These advance troopers had a few engagements, and Rodney and Dick took
part in the most of them, but Price could neither be overtaken nor
stopped. The two friends were among the first to ride into Neosho, a
little town in the southwestern part of the State, toward which the
march had been directed, and the first man they met gave them some
information that struck them dumb with surprise and indignation. He was
a farmer who had just sold a load of provisions to the soldiers, and he
drove his empty wagon out of the road to let the regiment pass.

"We're into the mud now as deep as the rest of 'em," said he, as
Rodney's company rode by. "If Caroliny gets stretched up by the neck,
we-uns will have to be stretched, too."

"What do you mean by that?" inquired Captain Jones.

"The Legislator is over there in that house," replied the farmer, "and
they've just give out some kind of a paper saying that this State of
Missoury don't belong to the old Union no more, but is one of the
Confedrit States of Ameriky."

"Do you mean that the State has seceded?" cried the captain, while his
men looked at him and at one another as if they could not understand
what the farmer was trying to tell them. "There's cheek for you. Why,
the whole of the State, except this part of it right around here, is
over-run with Yankees."

"I don't know nothing about that," replied the farmer; and he was
obliged to turn around on his seat and shout the words, for Rodney's
company had been riding straight ahead all the time. "It's only what I
heard. Mebbe you'll find somebody up the street that can tell you all
about it."

The story was so improbable that the boys could not make up their minds
to believe it. The Legislature, which had run almost as far as it could
get without going over the line into Arkansas, had no authority over the
State, three-fourths of whose territory was under the control of the
Union forces, and level-headed Dick Graham did not hesitate to say, in
the presence and hearing of his captain, that if the Legislature had
passed an Act of Secession, they were idiots, the last one of them. But
the Confederate authorities Were given to doing foolish things. Read the
proclamation Jefferson Davis issued from Danville while he was r