Barker rose up slowly. “Paddle,” he whispered; “we are drifting into the timber.”
A flash of lightning threw a gleam of light over the dark water. A dugout shot out from under the timber on the west bank.
“Who goes there? Halt!” a low deep voice called, and the four travelers heard the click of two guns.
“Pull in here!” the order came from the other craft.
Barker steered toward the shore and found himself alongside of two Confederate dugouts, with two men in each.
The leader flashed a lantern at the travelers.
“Who are you and where are you going?” he demanded. “Get out; we have to search you.”
The searchers found a piece of fresh beef and two loaves of bread and some coffee.
“That’s rich pickings,” the leader commented. “We haven’t had any beef between our teeth for two weeks.
“Come back in the woods a way and we’ll roast some of it, right away. But we can’t build a fire here. The Yanks have a lot of ammunition to waste and they might shoot some Minié balls at our camp-fire.”
Their four captors seemed hungry, for they ate all the bread and meat and drank the coffee as if they had been crossing a desert.
“That was good of you,” the leader remarked. “Wheat-bread, beef, and coffee are rather scarce in our town just now. We’ve been living on corn-meal and mule-steak.
“Now, Stenson,” he continued, “you take this bunch down to the guard-house and they can tell their story to the provost marshal in the morning. I reckon they don’t care to be shot before daylight.”
“Mr. Barker,” Tim asked, after they had been locked in a small room, “do you think they will shoot us?”
“Don’t worry, boys,” Barker said kindly. “We haven’t done anything they can shoot us for. Just lie down and go to sleep. Thank God, we’re in Vicksburg at last.”
The examination next morning was not very formidable. It was easy for Barker to prove that he and his company were not Northern spies; moreover the meeting of the boys with their parents convinced the military authorities that Barker had told them the exact truth.
“But how did you get past the Union gunboats?” one of the officers inquired. “Did you get a pass?”
“If you please, gentlemen,” the old trapper replied with a shrewd smile, “you see we got by and I reckon as long as we don’t want to pass them again, it really makes no difference how we did it.”