Leon did not care to spend all night with such people as these, and so he kept on until he found a family whose sentiments agreed with his own, and there he laid by until morning. The head of this household had but recently come into the county, and Leon did not know him. When the latter rode up to the bars the man was chopping wood in front of a dilapidated shanty, but when he saw Leon approaching he dropped his axe, took long strides toward his door and turned around and faced him. The boy certainly thought he was acting in a very strange way, and for a moment didn’t know whether he was a Union man or a rebel.
“Good evening, sir,” said Leon, who thought he might as well settle the matter once for all. “Can I stay all night with you?”
“Who are you and where did you come from?” asked the man in reply.
“My name is Leon Sprague and I live in the other part of the county,” replied Leon. “I am a Union boy all over, and I came out to tell everybody – ”
“Course we can keep you all night if that is the kind of a boy you are,” replied the man coming up to the bars. “Get off and turn your horse loose. I haven’t seen a Union boy before in a long while. I came from Tennessee.”
“What are you doing down here?” asked Leon, as he led his horse over the bars.
“I came down here to get out of reach of the rebels, dog-gone ’em,” said the man in a passionate tone of voice. “You had just ought to see them up there. They have got their jails full, they are hanging men for burning bridges, and when I left home there was two or three thousand men going over the mountains into Kentucky. But I couldn’t go with them. The rebels cut me off, and as I was bound to go somewhere, I came on down here.”
Leon had by this time taken the saddle and bridle from his horse and turned him loose to get his own supper. Then he backed up against the fence and watched the man chopping his wood.
CHAPTER II
THE CONVENTION
“What made you start for the house when you saw me coming up?” said Leon, as the man sank his axe deep into the log on which he was chopping and paused to moisten his hands.
“Because I thought you was a rebel. I reckoned there was more coming behind you, and I wanted to be pretty close to my rifle. I didn’t know that I had got into a community of Union folks down here.”
Leon was astonished to hear the man converse. He talked like an intelligent person, and the boy was glad to have him express an opinion, for it was so much better than his own that he resolved to profit by it.
“I don’t know that you got in among Union people,” said Leon, “for I have seen more rebels to-day than I thought there was in the county; but all the same there are some Union folks here. You might have gone further and fared worse.”
“So I believe. When you came up you said you were out to tell everybody something. What were you going to say?”
It didn’t take Leon more than two minutes to explain himself. The man listened with genuine amazement, and when the boy got through he seated himself on the log and rested his elbows on his knees.
“How are you going to take this county out?” said he. “You haven’t got men enough to do any fighting.”
“No, sir; but we are going to do the best we can with what we have got.”
“That’s plucky at any rate. I suppose that if the rebels come in here to capture you, you will take to the swamp.”
“Yes, sir. That’s just what we intend to do.”
“Well, sir, you can put my name down for that convention,” said the man, getting upon his feet and going to work upon his wood-pile. “I’ve got so down on the rebels that I am willing to do anything I can to bother them. I’ve got two brothers in jail up there now.”
“You said something about bridge burning,” said Leon, and he didn’t know whether he made a mistake or not. “Perhaps you had a hand in it.”
“Perhaps I did,” answered the man with a laugh. “And I tell you I had to dig out as soon as I got home. So you see I dare not go back there.”
“What’s the punishment?”
“Death,” answered the man. “And they don’t give you any time to say good-bye to your friends. They don’t even court-martial you, but string you up at once.”
The man said this in much the same tone that he would have asked for a drink of water. Leon was surprised that one who had passed through so many dangers as that man had could speak of it so indifferently. But then he looked like a man who would have been picked out of a crowd to engage in business of that kind. He was large and bony, the ease with which he handled his axe was surprising, but his face was one to attract anybody’s attention. It was a determined face – a face that wouldn’t back down for any obstacles. If the Union men in Tennessee were all like him, it was a wonder how the rebels got the start of them.
“I can’t give you as good a place here as I could at home,” said the man, as his wife came to the door and told him that supper was ready. “At home I have a commodious house, and you could have a room in it all to yourself. Here I have nothing but this little tumble-down shanty to go into. It leaks, but I will soon get the better of that. Molly, this young man is Union all over, and he has come down here to tell of a convention that is to be held at Ellisville to take this county out of the State. Whoever heard of such a thing? I am going to that meeting, sure pop.”
His wife was greatly surprised to listen to this, but she accepted the introduction to Leon, and forthwith proceeded to make him feel at home. There were two children, but they had been taught to behave, and did not try to shove themselves forward at all. Taken altogether, it was a comfortable meal, and before it was over Leon learned some things regarding this man that he wouldn’t have believed possible. He had come all the way through the rebel State of Mississippi by telling the people he met on the way that he was going to see some friends, and had, by chance, struck Jones county, the very place of all others he wanted to be.
“I must confess it was pretty pokerish, sometimes,” said the man. “The rebels had sent on a description of me as the man who helped burn their bridges, and now and then I had to get under the bundles of clothing and cover myself up there, leaving my wife to guide the horses. But I had my rifle all right, and it would have gone hard with the men who discovered me.”
The evening was passed in this way listening to the man’s stories, and when Leon went to bed in a dark corner of the room he told himself that he had got into a desperate scrape, and that he had got something to do in order to get out of it. He had never dreamed that men could be down on their neighbors in that way, and here this man had all he could do to keep from being shot.
“By George! I tell you we are in for it,” said Leon, pulling the blankets up over him, “and I don’t know how we are going to come out. There are rebels all around us, and if they are as bad down here as they are up in Tennessee there won’t one of us come through alive. But I am armed, and I’ll see that some of them get as good as they send.”
It was daylight when Leon awoke, and after washing his hands and face in a basin outside the door he stood in front of the fireplace, before which the woman was engaged in cooking the breakfast, and looked up at the man’s rifle, which hung on some wooden pegs over the mantel. It was an ordinary muzzle-loading thing, and didn’t look as though it had been the death of anybody.
“That rifle has been too much for half a dozen men,” said the woman.
“Why, how did that happen?” asked Leon.
“It happened when they came to burn us out,” answered the woman. “They came one night and tried to call Josiah