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Updated: May 23, 2025
Do you suppose he has been stealing anything? He's got a handful of gold big pieces, too." "So far so good," said Rodney, as he and his father went out upon the street. "Now let that Yankee cotton-factor watch the St. Louis wharf-boats if he wants to, and see how much he will make by it. I knew I could throw them off the scent." "You may not have done it as completely as you think," replied Mr.
"The boys wouldn't come and so I had to come alone. I hope that second dispatch did not put your father to any trouble, but I was obliged to send it to throw those telegraph operators off my track and blind them to my real intentions. I suppose that St. Louis cotton-factor was on the watch?"
The captain and his lieutenant were gone two days, and came back to report that the steamers were all so busy with government business that it would be a week or more before they could get transportation; but the captain had left instructions with his cotton-factor who would keep his eyes open, and telegraph him when to expect a boat at Baton Rouge landing.
"He'll be safe as long as he stays here, seeing that he's a friend of your'n, but when he gets back in the country I dunno; I dunno." The steamboat captain didn't know either, but he couldn't stop to talk about it. He had done the best he could to keep Rodney out of the clutches of that Yankee cotton-factor in St. Louis, and now the boy must look out for himself.
And then he went on to tell the captain how it happened that he came to Missouri alone, not forgetting to mention how he had fooled the telegraph operators at Baton Rouge and Mooreville. "Those operators told that St. Louis cotton-factor I was a Confederate bearer of dispatches," said he, in winding up his story. "But I haven't a scrap of writing about me."
"Did he tell the Governor in his second dispatch that I was getting ready to leave the State, and that he had better be on the lookout to stop me?" "Eh? No. He didn't send the second dispatch to the Governor. He sent it to his father's cotton-factor in St. Louis, who is a Yank so blue that the blue will rub off."
As war days and cotton-factor days recede into a past more and more filmed over with romance, he too grows rare among us, and I regret it, for he was in truth a picturesque figure. General Rieppe was perfect.
"He was the last person in the world I expected to see when I left the steamer at Cedar Bluff landing to get ahead of the Yankee cotton-factor in St. Louis," said Rodney. "Tom had been over Cape Girardeau way on business, and got a trifle out of his reckoning when Mr. Westall and his party of Emergency men picked him up and brought him to the wood-cutters' camp.
The old steamboat-man sympathized with the South, and Captain Howard and his friends had found it out, and induced him to do what he could to help Rodney escape the expectant Yankee cotton-factor at St. Louis. The boy laughed aloud when he thought how astonished and angry Tom Randolph would be to learn that he had wasted time and telegrams to no purpose.
That Union cotton-factor would have you arrested the minute you put your foot on the levee. I'll tell you what I'll do," said the captain, after thinking a moment. "The first clerk, with whom I have a slight acquaintance, is solid, and I'll make it my business to ask him if we are going to land anywhere on the Missouri side between Cape Girardeau and St. Louis.
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