"Now, my son, you must quit the Home Guards at once and stay right here on the plantation," said Mrs. Randolph, when she had asked her hero all the questions she could think of. "When you are a private citizen you will not be called upon to assist in capturing desperadoes."
"I've done the very best I could for the South ever since I joined my fortunes with hers," answered Captain Tom; "I have risked life and liberty in her defence more than once, and am ready to do it again; but I can't fight the whole Yankee nation alone and unaided."
"I was the only one of the company who had the pluck to face those desperate men in the woods," continued Tom, "and was captured for my pains. I ordered my men out to help me, but they never came. They left me to meet the danger alone; and when I dropped into the enrolling office on my way home, they were loafing as usual and bragging too. And when I told them right where they would find those Yanks, and tried to get them to go out and capture them, do you suppose they would go? They just as good as told me that they did not believe me, and Roach broke in on my story by giving orders directly to Lambert instead of passing them to him through me. I have put up with that man just as long as I am going to; and, father, if you will pay Larkin off and let him go, I'll be ready to take his place to-morrow morning. And now I'll write to the Governor the very first thing I do."
This letter to the Governor, tendering his resignation as captain of State troops, was the "bomb" with which Tom had threatened to "scatter Captain Roach's camp far and wide," but when he sat down to write it, the thought occurred to him that if he said too much the letter might operate like a boomerang, and hurt him more than he hoped to hurt Captain Roach. If he had written it as he had it framed in his mind, it would have been a complete and scathing indictment of the enrolling officer's way of doing business; but the letter he showed his mother, when she came to his room in response to his call, read something like this:
I have the honor to tender herewith my resignation as captain of the State militia which was granted me on the —th day of April last, with authority to raise and command a company of mounted men for home defence.