These hens were not the last things stolen from Oakland. Nearly all
the men in the country had gone with the army. Indeed, with the
exception of a few overseers who remained to work the farms, every man
in the neighborhood, between the ages of seventeen and fifty, was in
the army. The country was thus left almost wholly unprotected, and it
would have been entirely so but for the "Home Guard," as it was
called, which was a company composed of young boys and the few old men
who remained at home, and who had volunteered for service as a local
guard, or police body, for the neighborhood of their homes.
Occasionally, too, later on, a small detachment of men, under a leader
known as a "conscript-officer," would come through the country hunting
for any men who were subject to the conscript law but who had evaded
it, and for deserters who had run away from the army and refused to
return.
These two classes of troops, however, stood on a very different
footing. The Home Guard was regarded with much respect, for it was
composed of those whose extreme age or youth alone withheld them from
active service; and every youngster in its ranks looked upon it as a
training school, and was ready to die in defence of his home if need
were, and, besides, expected to obtain permission to go into the army
"next year."
The conscript-guard, on the other hand, were grown men, and were
thought to be shirking the very dangers and hardships into which they
were trying to force others.
A few miles from Oakland, on the side toward the mountain road and
beyond the big woods, lay a district of virgin forest and old-field
pines which, even before the war, had acquired a reputation of an
unsavory nature, though its inhabitants were a harmless people. No
highways ran through this region, and the only roads which entered it
were mere wood-ways, filled with bushes and carpeted with pine-tags;
and, being travelled only by the inhabitants, appeared to outsiders
"to jes' peter out," as the phrase went. This territory was known by
the unpromising name of Holetown.
Its denizens were a peculiar but kindly race known to the boys as
"poor white folks," and called by the negroes, with great contempt,
"po' white trash." Some of them owned small places in the pines; but
the majority were simply tenants. They were an inoffensive people, and
their worst vices were intemperance and evasion of the tax-laws.
They made their living--or rather, they existed--by fishing and
hunting; and, to eke it out, attempted the cultivation of little
patches of corn and tobacco near their cabins, or in the bottoms where
small branches ran into the stream already mentioned.
In appearance they were usually so thin and sallow that one had to
look at them twice to see them clearly. At best, they looked vague and
illusive.
They were brave enough. At the outbreak of the war nearly all of the
men in this community enlisted, thinking, as many others did, that war
was more like play than work, and consisted more of resting than of
laboring. Although most of them, when in battle, showed the greatest
fearlessness, yet the duties of camp soon became irksome to them, and
they grew sick of the restraint and drilling of camp-life; so some of
them, when refused a furlough, took it, and came home. Others stayed
at home after leave had ended, feeling secure in their stretches of
pine and swamp, not only from the feeble efforts of the
conscript-guard, but from any parties who might be sent in search of
them.
In this way it happened, as time went by, that Holetown became known
to harbor a number of deserters.
According to the negroes, it was full of them; and many stories were
told about glimpses of men dodging behind trees in the big woods, or
rushing away through the underbrush like wild cattle. And, though the
grown people doubted whether the negroes had not been startled by some
of the hogs, which were quite wild, feeding in the woods, the boys
were satisfied that the negroes really had seen deserters.
This became a certainty when there came report after report of these
wood-skulkers, and when the conscript-guard, with the brightest of
uniforms, rode by with as much show and noise as if on a fox-hunt.
Then it became known that deserters were, indeed, infesting the piny
district of Holetown, and in considerable numbers.
Some of them, it was said, were pursuing agriculture and all their
ordinary vocations as openly as in time of peace, and more
industriously. They had a regular code of signals, and nearly every
person in the Holetown settlement was in league with them.
When the conscript-guard came along, there would be a rush of
tow-headed children through the woods, or some of the women about the
cabins would blow a horn lustily; after which not a man could be found
in all the district. The horn told just how many men were in the
guard, and which path they were following; every member of the troop
being honored with a short, quick "toot."
"What are you blowing-that horn for?" sternly asked the guard one
morning of an old woman,--old Mrs. Hall who stood out in front of her
little house blowing like Boreas in the pictures.
"Jes' blowin' fur Millindy to come to dinner," she said, sullenly.
"Can't y' all let a po' 'ooman call her gals to git some'n' to eat?
You got all her boys in d'army, killin' 'em; whyn't yo' go and git
kilt some yo'self, 'stidder ridin' 'bout heah tromplin' all over po'
folk's chickens?"
When the troop returned in the evening, she was still blowing;
"blowin' fur Millindy to come home," she said, with more sharpness
than before. But there must have been many Millindys, for horns were
sounding all through the settlement.
The deserters, at such times, were said to take to the swamps, and
marvellous rumors were abroad of one or more caves, all fitted up,
wherein they concealed themselves, like the robbers in the stories the
boys were so fond of reading.
After a while thefts of pigs and sheep became so common that they were
charged to the deserters.
Finally it grew to be such a pest that the ladies in the neighborhood
asked the Home Guard to take action in the matter, and after some
delay it became known that this valorous body was going to invade
Holetown and capture the deserters or drive them away. Hugh was to
accompany them, of course; and he looked very handsome, as well as
very important, when he started out on horseback to join the troop.
It was his first active service; and with his trousers in his boots
and his pistol in his belt he looked as brave as Julius Cæsar, and
quite laughed at his mother's fears for him, as she kissed him
good-bye and walked out with him to his horse, which Balla held at the
gate.
The boys asked leave to go with him; but Hugh was so scornful over
their request, and looked so soldierly as he galloped away with the
other men that the boys felt as cheap as possible.