"You go with the lieutenant after the horses, and I will stay with the captain to say a word in your defense in case any of these Union people happen to speak your name, or let out anything else you would rather keep hidden." Tom thought this a good suggestion. It would certainly be disagreeable, and perhaps dangerous, to have the captain tell him when he returned with the horses that he wasn't Tom Barton at all--that his real name was Percival, that he was the commander of a company of Union men who had offered to help Lyon at St. Louis, and all that. While Tom did not think the captain would believe such a story if it were told him, it might suggest to him some leading questions that the boys would find it hard to answer. So he left Rodney to act as a sort of rear guard, and went off to the stable with the lieutenant. "Did you really know that we were in the house?" Tom asked, when he was alone with the officer. "If you did, it can't be that Merrick's boy told you." "Of course he didn't. He would have kept it from us if he could, but all the same the information came from him in the first place. The blacks in these parts are all Union--no one need waste his breath telling me different--and that scamp of a boy lost no time in spreading it among the Union men in the neighborhood that there were a couple of 'disguised rebels,' as he called you and Gray, putting up at Truman's house. That was the way those five fellows came to get on your trail; but, as good luck would have it, the darkey told the story to too many. Not being as well acquainted in this settlement as he probably is in his own, he told it to a Jackson man, who rode to our camp and told us of it. If it hadn't been for that we should be miles away now; but of course we couldn't think of going off and leaving some of our own people in the hands of the enemy." "You rendered us a most important service," replied Tom; and he told nothing but the truth when he said it. "It is necessary that I should go home on business, but Rodney Gray wants to enlist in an independent command as soon as he can get the chance. Didn't you speak of Dick Graham as a sergeant?" "May be so. That's what he is." "Does he belong to your company?" "No; but he belongs to our regiment, and that's how I came to get acquainted with him. He's got more friends than any other fellow I know of, and he will be glad to see an old schoolmate once more. I have heard him tell of Rodney Gray and the scrapes he got into by speaking his mind so freely, and I am not the only one in the regiment who thinks that the Barrington Military Academy is a disgrace to the town and State in which it is located. The citizens ought to have turned out some night and torn it up root and branch." "They would have had a good time trying it," said Tom. "The boys punched one another's head on the parade ground now and then, but it wasn't safe for an outsider to interfere with our private affairs."