It was a long time before Marcy Gray could bring himself to believe that he was not dreaming, and that he would awake to find himself a conscript guard at the Millen prison pen, but this uncertainty did not prevent him from making long strides toward recovery. His faithful friend Bowen declared that he could see him getting well. In less than a week he was strong enough to ride to Baton Rouge with Rodney. He reported to the provost marshal, who listened in amazement to his story, and gave him and Bowen a standing pass in and out of the Union lines. At the end of two weeks he began to wonder why he did not hear from Jack, and at the end of three that wished-for individual presented himself in person, much to the delight of all his relatives. He rode into Rodney’s yard in company with Mr. Gray, as he had done on a former occasion, and no sooner did his eyes rest upon Marcy, who sprang down the steps to meet him, than he began quoting something.

exclaimed Jack, as he swung himself from his mule and clasped his strong arms about the brother he had never thought to see again. “How are you, conscript?”

“O Jack!” was all Marcy could say in reply.

“She’s pretty well,” said the sailor, who knew that Marcy would have asked about his mother if his heart hadn’t been so full, “and has grown ten years younger since she heard you were safe among friends.”

He shook hands with Rodney, whom he addressed as “Johnny,” and then walked up to Bowen and fairly doubled him up with one of his sailor grips.

“You are the man I have to thank for saving my brother’s life, are you?” said he in a trembling voice. “I don’t know that I shall ever have a chance to show how grateful I am to you, but if you ever need a friend you will always find him in Jack Gray.”

It was a happy meeting altogether, and if one might judge by the way he acted, Sailor Jack himself didn’t know whether he was awake or dreaming. Marcy’s hands still showed the effect of his unmerited punishment, and when his big brother looked at them, an expression came upon his face that might have made Captain Denning a trifle uneasy if he had been there to see it.

“My orders are to bring you home with me, young man,” said he. “And, Bowen, you must go, too.”

“Don’t you think it would be dangerous?” inquired Rodney, who had somehow got it into his head that Marcy would have to live with him as long as the war continued.

“Union people are safer in our country now than they ever were before,” answered Jack. “There’s been some shooting done up there since I wrote to you.”

“O Jack!” exclaimed Marcy. “Were Tom and Mark very badly hurt?”

“Hurt!” repeated the sailor. “Well, I reckon so. They were killed deader’n herrings, and so were Beardsley, Shelby, and Dillon. Buffum, the spy who was the means of getting you captured, was hanged, and so was mother’s old overseer, Hanson. I tell you, Rodney, the country is full of Union men, and they have been carrying things with a high hand since Marcy went away.”

“I should think they had,” said the latter, who had never been more astounded. “I am sorry to hear about Tom and Mark.”

“Well, then, why didn’t they mind their own business? If they’d had a grain of common sense they would have known that they were bound to get paid off sooner or later. They brought it on themselves, and it is a wonder to me that they were not dealt with long before.”

“Jack,” said Marcy suddenly. “You had no hand in it?”

“Not a hand. Not a finger, though there’s no telling what I might have done if Captain Denning had been there, and I had known that he triced you up for nothing. Your friends, the refugees, didn’t need any help from me. There are eighty or a hundred of them now, and they have become regular guerillas. They are well armed, and when I came away were talking of raiding Williamston and burning the jail. I think you will be safe at home, for rebel cavalry don’t scout through our section any more.”

“How soon do you expect to go?” inquired Rodney.

“Just as soon as I can fill up the Hyperion’s hold,” replied Jack. “She is due in New Orleans week after next, and I want a boatload of cotton ready for her when she pulls in to the wharf. So you can trot out your four hundred bales as soon as you get ready, and I will give you twenty-five cents greenback money for it. I was dead broke when I was here before, but I’m wealthy now,” added Jack, pulling from his pocket a roll of bills that was almost as big as his wrist. “Marcy, that’s mother’s money.”

“I am overjoyed to hear it,” said the boy.

“And she was overjoyed to get rid of it, for it has been nothing but a botheration to her ever since she drew it from the bank. Old Morris showed me where you and he buried it on the night you dug it out of the cellar wall, and I brought it to New Orleans and exchanged it for greenbacks at a premium that made me open my eyes. I am first officer of the Hyperion, and in partnership with her owners. I do not expect to have time to make more than two or three trips on her before the Mississippi is opened, and then I hope to come back here and run a trading boat on the river.”

“Where will I be while you are doing that?” inquired Marcy.

“At home with your mother, where all good boys ought to be. You will get not less than a dollar for your cotton,” said Jack, turning to Rodney, “perhaps a dollar ten, minus the freight——”

“You don’t mean it!” Rodney almost gasped; for Jack’s matter-of-fact way of speaking of the fortune that seemed about to drop into his father’s hands took his breath away.

“What’s the reason I don’t mean it? I hope you don’t imagine that I am going to let anyone speculate with your property!” exclaimed the sailor. “Whatever the market price is when your cotton is landed in New York, that you will get, less the freight the Hyperion will charge you for taking it there. The twenty-five cents I am authorized to offer you is business; what you will receive over and above that will be owing to kinship. Your father and mine were brothers. Now what shall we do with that man Lambert; send him North for a guerilla or what?”

“I am perfectly willing to buy him off,” said Mr. Gray. “I can afford to be liberal, for I really believe we would have lost our cotton if it hadn’t been for him and his ’phantom bushwhackers.’”

“I am afraid he’ll not let you buy him off for any reasonable sum,” said Rodney.

“You might try him the first chance you get and find out what he is willing to do,” suggested Jack. “Any way to get rid of him, so that he will not bushwhack the teamsters we shall send into the woods after the cotton.”

“I suppose you have a permit this time,” observed Rodney.

“Right from headquarters. We didn’t ask for military protection, and it isn’t likely that we would have got it if we had; but we are at liberty to take as many bales of cotton through the lines as we can buy. General Banks’ signature is on our permit, and he is supreme in this Department.”

Before Mr. Gray and Jack went home that night a plan of operations had been decided upon. The former were to engage all the wagons and mules that could be found in the neighborhood to haul Mr. Gray’s four hundred bales to Baton Rouge, while Rodney was to seek an interview with Lambert and “buy him off” if he could. Rodney declared that he had the hardest part of the work to do, and he set about it, not by going into the woods to hunt up the ex-Home Guard, but by riding to the city to ask the advice and assistance of the provost marshal. As he was about to mount his horse he said to Marcy:

“If that man Lambert comes here while I am gone, please tell him to come again to-morrow morning, for I want to see him on important business. If you question him a little, no doubt you will be surprised at the extent of his information. There’s little goes on in the settlement that he doesn’t know all about.”

Rodney’s interview with the marshal must have been in the highest degree satisfactory, for when he came back at night he was laughing all over; but his cousin Marcy looked troubled.

“He’s been here,” said the latter, without waiting to be questioned, “and he was as impudent as you please.”

“It’s no more than I expected,” replied Rodney. “What did he say?”

“That them fellers might jest as well give up hirin’ teams to haul out that cotton till after you had made some sort of a bargain with him,” answered Marcy.

“That’s all right. Did he say he’d come to-morrow?”

“Yes, he said he would be here to listen to what you have to say, and if you don’t talk to suit him he’ll start another bonfire.”

“That’s all right,” said Rodney again. “I was afraid he might take it into his head to start it to-night, in which case I should be under the disagreeable necessity of bushwhacking him before I slept. But if he puts it off till to-morrow, he’ll never set any more bonfires. Did you ever hear of such impudence before?”

For some reason or other Rodney Gray was in excellent spirits that evening. He did not go to bed until long after midnight, and when he did, he could not sleep for more than ten minutes at a time. But when morning came he sobered down, and his face took on the determined expression that Marcy had so often seen there during those exciting days at the Barrington Academy, when Dick Graham stole the flag and the Minute-men burned Unionists out of house and home. Just as they arose from the breakfast table Ned Griffin threw down the bars and rode into the yard, and that made four resolute fellows, counting in Charley Bowen, who were ready to see Lambert and talk to him about Mr. Gray’s cotton. They all wore sack coats, and in each of the outside pockets was a loaded revolver.

“I am afraid Lambert will weaken when he sees this crowd,” said Ned. “Perhaps he’ll not come into the yard at all. Wouldn’t it be a good scheme for a couple of us to go into the house out of sight?”

“I don’t think it would,” answered Rodney. “Lambert knows how many there are of us, and if he doesn’t find us all on the porch when he comes his suspicions will be aroused. He’ll not come alone, you may be certain of that.”

And sure enough he didn’t. When he rode up to the bars half an hour later he had two companions with him, and they all carried guns on their shoulders. There was something aggressive in the way they jerked out the bars and dropped them on the ground, and Rodney noticed that Lambert did not take the trouble to put them up behind him as he usually did. This was the way he took of showing Rodney that he held some power in his hands, and that he intended to use it for his own personal ends.

“What did I tell you?” said the young master of the plantation, who was angry in an instant. “He’s brought Moseley and another long-haired chap, whose name I do not now recall, and thinks he’s going to ride over me rough-shod. Of course he will demand a private interview, and I will grant it. All you’ve got to do is to come when you hear me shoot. I’ll show him that I am in no humor to put up with any more of his nonsense.”

“Don’t run any risks,” cautioned Marcy. “Your mother says that Lambert is a dangerous man.”

“I’ll prove to you, before this thing is over, that he is the biggest coward in the Confederacy,” replied Rodney.

The near approach of Lambert and his friends cut short the conversation. They did not get off their mules, but rode straight up to the porch; and then Rodney knew why they left the bars down behind them. Their bearing was insolent, and the first words Lambert uttered were still more so.

“Look a-here, Rodney Gray,” said he, “I’d like to know what them fellers mean by goin’ round the settlement hirin’ teams to haul that cotton outen the swamp without sayin’ a word to me about it.”

“I don’t know why you should be consulted,” was the quiet reply. “Since when has that cotton belonged to you?”

“I’ve had an intrust in it ever sence I began watchin’ it for you an’ your paw,” said Lambert.

“You never had an interest in it, but my father is willing to pay you for keeping an eye on it, if we can agree upon terms.”

“That’s what I call business,” said Lambert, his face brightening. “How much you willin’ to give?”

“What are you willing to take?”

“I can’t set no figures till I know how much the cotton is wuth to you,” said Lambert. “How much you goin’ to get for it?”

“I can’t tell until it is sold in New York,” answered Rodney, controlling his rising anger with an effort.

“Are you tryin’ to make me b’lieve that you are goin’ to let some abolitionist run that cotton outen the country without payin’ you a cent down for it!” shouted Lambert. “I don’t b’lieve a word of it.”

“You needn’t yell so. I am not deaf.”

“Then if you aint you can hear what I’ve got to tell you,” said the man, raising his voice a full octave higher. “I won’t have no more foolin’. How much you goin’ to get for that cotton?”

“It’s none of your business. You understand that, I suppose?”

By this time Lambert had succeeded in working himself into a furious passion, but if he had possessed ordinary common sense he never would have done it. He thought he could frighten Rodney, but should have known better. The boy sat tilted back in his chair, with his feet on the gallery railing and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his vest, and his very attitude ought to have warned the ex-Home Guard that he was treading on dangerous ground, and that there was a point beyond which Rodney would not be driven. The latter’s reply to his insolent question capped the climax.

“Whoop!” yelled Lambert, flourishing his rifle above his head. “It aint none of my business, aint it? I’ll make it my business to make a beggar of you this very night. I’ll send that cotton of yourn where I sent Randolph’s to pay that no-account boy of his’n for shakin’ his sword at me.”

“You have fully made up your mind to burn my father’s cotton, have you?” said Rodney.

“Yes, I have. It shan’t never be hauled outen them woods less’n I get fifty cents a pound, cash in hand, for it. That Yankee cousin of yourn is goin’ to run it up North an’ get a dollar for it. I heered all about it an’ you needn’t think to fool me. Will you give it or not?”

“I certainly will not.”

“You hearn what he says, boys,” said Lambert to his companions. “I always said that this was a rich man’s war an’ a poor man’s fight, didn’t I; an’ now you see it for yourselves, don’t you? Let’s go right back to the woods an’ set her a-goin’.”

“Bang!” said one of Rodney’s revolvers, and to Marcy’s inexpressible horror Lambert dropped his rifle and fell headlong from his mule, which set up a sonorous bray and started for the bars at top speed. “Bang!” said the other revolver an instant later, and Moseley let go his hold upon his gun and clung to his mule with both hands. The result of the next shot was still more terrifying. The third man made a frantic effort to turn his beast toward the bars; but before he could put him in motion a bullet passed through the mule’s head, and he and his rider came to the ground together. It was done in much less time than it takes to tell it. Rodney’s companions jumped to their feet, but before they could draw their weapons it was all over.

“Rodney, Rodney, what have you done?” cried Marcy in great alarm.

“I have simply proved my words,” replied his cousin, walking leisurely down the steps, pushing his revolver into his pocket as he went. “Did I not say,” he added, picking up the three guns, one after the other, and firing their contents into the air, “that I would show Lambert to be the biggest coward in the Confederacy? Get up, here. It’s my turn to be sassy now. Moseley, dismount.”

Moseley obeyed with alacrity, and at the same time Lambert raised himself on his elbow and gazed about him with a bewildered air. Then he felt of his head, and examined his hand to see if there was blood upon it. The third man could not move without assistance, for the mule had fallen upon his leg and pinned him to the ground.

“Get up,” repeated Rodney, taking Lambert by the arm and helping him rather roughly to his feet. “Now you and Moseley sit down on the steps till I am ready to talk to you. Lend a hand here, a couple of you.”

Hardly able to realize what had taken place before their eyes, Rodney’s companions hastened down the steps to roll the dead mule off his rider, so that the man could get up. When he was placed upon his feet he was found to be so weak from fright that he could scarcely stand; so Marcy and Ned helped him to a seat on the steps. Then they stood back and looked closely at Lambert and Moseley. Their faces were very white, and Lambert was covered with dust from head to foot, but there wasn’t the sign of a wound on either of them. It was bewildering.

“Mister Rodney,” ventured Lambert, when he had made sure that he was still alive and had the use of his tongue, “I hope you don’t bear me no grudge for them words I spoke to you a while ago.”

“Oh, no,” replied Rodney cheerfully. “But you have had your say, and I can’t waste any more time with you now. Moseley, I believe you would be a harmless sort of rebel if you were out of Lambert’s company.”

“Yes, I would, sah,” whimpered the hog thief. “Every bit of meanness I have done was all owin’ to him, sah.”

“Jest listen at the fule!” exclaimed Lambert.

“Consequently I think I will let you and your friend here—what’s his name?”

“Longworth, sah; Joe Longworth,” replied the owner of the name.

“Ah, yes! I know you now. I believe I will let you two off on one condition. Wait until I get through!” cried Rodney, turning fiercely upon Lambert, who had made several attempts to interrupt him. “You did lots of talking a little while back, and now it’s my turn. That condition is, Moseley, that you take your gang out of the woods and keep it out from this time on, unless I tell you to take it back.”

“I’ll do it, sah,” said Moseley earnestly. “Sure’s you live——”

“He can’t, Mister Rodney,” exclaimed Lambert. “There aint nobody but me can do that, kase I’m the captain of ’em.”

“You’re not the captain of them any longer. They will have to elect someone to take your place, for you are going to start for Baton Rouge in less than fifteen minutes.”

When Lambert heard this he almost fell off the step on which he was sitting. Without giving him time to recover himself sufficiently to utter a protest, Rodney again addressed ex-Lieutenant Moseley.

“If you will do that, you can go to my father after our cotton has been shipped, and he will give each of you some money,” said Rodney. “I don’t know how much, but it will be a larger sum than you ever owned before at one time. It will be good money, too.”

“Say, Mister Rodney,” faltered Lambert, “what’s the reason I can’t have a share?”

“But if you don’t do it,” continued Rodney, “if you interfere in any way with the teamsters who will go into the swamp to-morrow to haul that cotton out, the last one of you will be hunted down and shot, or sent to a Northern prison to keep company with Lambert. How many did you leave behind when you came here?”

“Four, sah,” replied Moseley.

“Only seven of you altogether!” exclaimed Rodney. “Well, I think I can promise you a hundred dollars apiece in greenbacks, and that will be equal to six or eight hundred dollars in Confederate scrip.”

Moseley’s eyes glistened and so did Longworth’s; but Lambert’s grew dim with tears, and his face was a sight to behold. The man had less courage than Rodney gave him credit for, and the boy wondered what his mother would think of this “dangerous” person if she could see him now. He couldn’t even talk, and Rodney was glad of it, for he wanted to finish his instructions to Moseley and take down the names of his companions without being interrupted.

“Longworth, is that your beast?” said Rodney, with a nod toward the dead mule. “I am sorry I had to shoot him, and I shouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t tried to run off. When you are ready to come out of the woods and put in a crop, I will give you another and better one to take his place; but I’ll not furnish you anything to ride as long as you are playing bushwhacker.”

After a little more conversation, and before Lambert had recovered from the stupor into which he had been thrown by Rodney’s ominous words, Moseley and Longworth started for the swamp to spread consternation among their companions by telling what a desperate fighter the young overseer was when aroused, and what terrible things he had threatened to do if his demands were not complied with, while Rodney and his cousin went into the house, leaving Ned and Bowen to watch the prisoner.

“I don’t see how you could bring yourself to do it,” said Marcy.

“Do it! Do what?” replied Rodney innocently.

“I thought sure you had killed Lambert and wounded Moseley, and when I saw Longworth come to the ground as if he had been struck by lightning——”

“That’s nothing,” laughed Rodney. “If you could see a platoon of cavalry floored as quickly as he was, perhaps you would open your eyes. As to Lambert, I didn’t shoot within a foot of his head, although I shoved my revolver so close to his face that the smoke went into his eyes and blinded him for a minute or two. I shot even wider of the mark when I pulled on Moseley, and no doubt he dropped his gun because Lambert did. It was not my intention to touch either one of them. I thought it would be a good plan to let them understand who they were fooling with and what I could do if I set about it. But I meant to hit that mule. Now, will you ride to Baton Rouge with me?”

“Of course I will; but you are not going to send Lambert up North?”

“That is a matter with which I have nothing to do, but beyond a doubt it’s where Lambert will bring up before he is many weeks older. As soon as it becomes known that he is in the hands of the Yanks, the Union people he persecuted so outrageously, while Tom Randolph was captain of the Home Guards, will prefer charges against him, and that will be bad for Lambert.”

“I wish you thought it safe to let him go,” said Marcy, who could not bear to see anyone in trouble.

“But I don’t, you see. Of course he would make all sorts of promises, but he’d burn that cotton of ours as soon as he could get to it.”

When the events we have just described became known in the settlement, they created almost as much excitement as did the news of the firing upon Sumter, but of course it was a different sort of excitement. The Union men whom Lambert had robbed and abused went into the city by dozens to bear testimony against him, and then hastened home to repair their wagons and harness so that they could earn the four dollars a day, “greenback money,” that Sailor Jack offered them for hauling out his uncle’s cotton. Everyone who had cotton to sell and teams for hire, with one exception, was happy; and that exception was Mr. Randolph, who was the most miserable man in the State. He had not only lost the most of his cotton (he had about twenty bales that Jack said he would buy), but since Lambert’s arrest he had learned why he lost it. That was a matter which Tom desired above all things to keep from his father’s knowledge; but Lambert had told all he knew about him in the hope that, if he were sent to prison, his old captain would have to go with him. Tom himself had some fears on this score, but thus far no one in the settlement had thought it worth while to trouble him. Such treatment as that made Tom angry.

“Nobody pays any more attention to me than if I was a stump-tailed yellow dog,” he complained to his mother, who was the only friend he had in the world. “Father will scarcely speak when I am around, and when I go to town, the men who used to go out of their way to salute me and say ‘Good-morning, Captain Randolph,’ won’t look at me. It wasn’t so when we were rich.”

“That is true,” assented his mother. “I have always heard it said that one’s pocket-book is one’s best friend, and I believe it. Tommy, don’t you think, if you could fix up a wagon and earn a little money, it would be better than idling away your time doing nothing?”

“And drive crow-bait mules and work for Rodney Gray?” exclaimed Tom. “Mother, I am surprised at you. Think what a comedown that would be for one who has been a captain in the Confederate service!”

Mrs. Randolph did not say that it would have been a good thing for the captain if he had been content to remain a civilian, but she thought so.

There were others in the neighborhood who had never performed any manual labor, rich planters before the war, who had nothing to do but spend the money their slaves made for them, but they did not talk as Tom did. They took off their coats and went to work, and never stopped to see whether the shoulder that was under the opposite side of a cotton bale belonged to a white man or a negro. Rodney Gray, who superintended the work while Sailor Jack went to New Orleans to charter a river steamer, paid them their greenbacks every night, and the planters took them home and hid them for fear that a squad of rebel cavalry might make a night raid into the settlement and steal them. Jack did not ask for military protection, but he had it, for every day or two a company of Federal troopers galloped through the country, ready to do battle with any “Johnnies” who might try to interfere with the work. Rodney was always glad to see them. He knew that the Confederate authorities would not permit that cotton to be shipped if they could prevent it, and he never left it unguarded. Moseley and his five companions were in his pay, and earned two dollars a night by holding themselves ready at all times to drive off any marauders who might try to burn it. On one memorable night they proved their worth and earned five times that amount. Moseley, who seemed to have grown several inches taller since Rodney last saw him, proudly reported that he had had a regular pitched battle about three o’clock that morning, and that he had driven the enemy from the field in such confusion that they left their wounded behind them. And, what was more to the point, he produced three injured rebels to show that he told nothing but the truth.

By the time Sailor Jack returned with the steamer he had chartered, Mr. Gray’s cotton was all on the levee at Baton Rouge awaiting shipment to New Orleans, and Rodney’s teams were hard at work hauling in Mr. Walker’s. By this time, too, everyone in the southwestern part of the State knew what was going on at Mooreville, and Union men and rebels, living as far away as the Pearl River bottoms, came to Jack and begged, with tears in their eyes, that he would take their cotton also and save them from utter ruin. Jack assured them that he would be glad to buy every bale, provided they would put it where he could get hold of it without running the risk of being bushwhacked; but there was the trouble. The guerillas became very active all on a sudden, and almost every morning someone would report to Rodney that he “seen a light on the clouds over that-a-way, and jedged that some poor chap had been losin’ cotton the night afore.” On one or two occasions Rodney saw such lights on the sky, and if his heart was filled with sympathy for the planter who was being ruined by the wanton destruction of his property, there was still room enough in it for gratitude to his sailor cousin, through whose manoeuvring his father had been saved from a similar fate.

Jack Gray was a “hustler,” and he “hustled” his men to such good purpose that in ten days more his chartered steamer was loaded to her guards, and Mr. Gray and a few of his neighbors were rich and happy, while Rodney was very miserable and unhappy, for his cousin and Charley Bowen were going away. Jack had been told to take Marcy home with him, and Jack’s rule was to obey orders if he broke owners. Anxious to remain with Marcy as long as he could, Rodney accompanied him to New Orleans and saw his father’s cotton loaded into the Hyperion’s hold. A few days afterward he waved his farewell to Marcy as the swift vessel bore him down the river, and then turned his face homeward to wait for Grant and Banks to open the Mississippi. But his patience was sadly tested, for it was not until July 4 that Grant’s army marched into Vicksburg. After an active campaign of eighty days the modest man who afterward commanded all the Union armies “gained one of the most important and stupendous victories of the war,” inflicting upon the enemy a loss of ten thousand in killed and wounded, capturing twenty-seven thousand prisoners, two hundred guns, and small arms and munitions of war sufficient for an army of sixty thousand men. General Banks took possession of Port Hudson on the 9th, and no Northern boy shouted louder than Rodney Gray did when he heard of it. The river was open at last, and Jack Gray and his trading boat could make their appearance as soon as they pleased.

But this was not all the glorious news that Rodney heard about that time. On the 3d of July, at Cemetery Ridge in far-off Pennsylvania, there had been a desperate charge of fifteen thousand men and a bloody repulse that “marked the culmination of the Confederate power.” When General Lee saw Pickett’s lines and Anderson’s fading away before the terrible fire of the Union infantry, he also saw “the fading away of all hope of recognition by the government of Great Britain. The iron-clad war vessels, constructed with Confederate money by British ship-builders and intended for the dispersion of the Union fleets blockading Wilmington and Charleston, and which were supposed to be powerful enough to send the monitors, one by one, to the bottom of the sea, were prevented from leaving English ports by order of the British government”; but if Pickett’s charge had been successful, those iron-clads would have sailed in less than a week, and France and England, who were waiting to see what would come of the invasion of Pennsylvania, would have recognized the Confederacy. It is no wonder that General Lee’s soldiers fought hard for victory when they knew there was so much depending upon it. The boys in blue who whipped them at Cemetery Ridge are deserving of all honor.

We must not forget to say that before these things happened Sailor Jack ran up from New Orleans to tell what he had done with Marcy, and to make a settlement with his uncle.

“I’ve made a successful trip,” said he gleefully, “and, Uncle Rodney, you have that much to your credit in the Chemical Bank of New York.”

As he said this he handed Mr. Gray a certificate of deposit calling for a sum of money so large that Rodney opened his eyes in amazement.

“Of course I had to take Marcy to New York with me,” continued Jack, “but two days after we got there Captain Frazier found a Union storeship that was about to sail with provisions for the blockading fleet; and as she had a lot of mail and stuff aboard for Captain Flusser, whom I knew to be serving on the Miami in Albemarle Sound, I managed to obtain permission for Marcy to take passage on her, believing that if he could reach the Miami he could also reach Plymouth, and from there it would be easy for him to get home. I expect to find a letter from him when I return to New York, and he also promised to write you in care of the provost marshal at Baton Rouge.”

There was one thing Jack did before he went back to New Orleans that at first disgusted Rodney Gray, though he was afterward very glad of it. He paid over to Mr. Randolph every dollar his twenty bales sold for in New York, not even deducting the Hyperion’s freight bill, so that unfortunate gentleman was not quite as badly off as he thought. He had a little money with which to make a new start when the war ended.