While Bill was eating, Colonel Lantry came around.
“Where did you learn it, boy?” he asked. “It was a neat piece of work.”
“Oh, I learned it at Vicksburg,” Bill replied. “We boys used to swim across the river, but there the water is warm.”
“At Vicksburg,” the officer repeated. “You are not going to Vicksburg! You are too young to enlist. You had better stay in Minnesota. There’s likely to be hell at Vicksburg before this war is over.”
The words of the Colonel had aroused a train of thoughts in the boy.
Was there really going to be war at Vicksburg? The boys had heard talk of war, but not until they had watched the loading of the guns and the embarking of the soldiers and had heard the pressing orders of the keen, straight army officer to “keep her going,” to “push her through,” had this war talk meant anything to them.
Tim was almost too young to understand such things, but to Bill the war had suddenly become a fearful reality. Fortunately, these big guns were not going to Vicksburg; they were going to Washington, which was a long, long way from Vicksburg.
From the talk of the men and from newspapers which had occasionally fallen into Bill’s hands, the boys had learned that during the previous winter their own State, Mississippi, had left the Union, and that Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana, had likewise followed the lead of South Carolina, which had seceded a few days before Christmas.
By this time almost everybody on the boat was asleep, except the carpenters and engineers, who were still working to put the steamer into first-class running shape.
But Bill’s mind turned from the great problem and puzzle of national events to more personal problems, which in a vague manner he had often tried to solve.
Why had his mother never told him anything about his grandfather in Tennessee, except that he was a very good man, who lived on a large plantation, and had many slaves? Why had he and Tim never visited their grandfather? Many boys of Vicksburg spent months at a time on the plantations of their grandfathers.
What kind of a man was their cousin, Hicks, really?
Both Bill and Tim liked Trapper Barker very much and even Black Buffalo, although he was an Indian, and spoke only a broken English, they liked, but they had begun to feel that there was something mysterious about Cousin Hicks. He didn’t try to make a farm. He had bought no farm horses nor oxen like the other settlers. He had only planted a little corn and a few potatoes and beans and he let the boys do the work in the small field, while with a light team and wagon he visited around amongst the Indians and Whites. Why didn’t he stay at home and work like the German and Irish and Yankee settlers?