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"Didn't nobody see nothin' o' little Skidmore?" savagely repeated Shorty, walking back to the works and scanning the country round. "Was you all so blamed anxious lookin' out for yourselves that you didn't pay no attention to that little boy? Nice gang, you are." "Orderly, take the company back into the abatis, and look for the boys," ordered Capt. McGillicuddy.
But complaints are coming in to me that you can't do their work; that it often takes two white men to perform one Negro's task. Good and reliable colored help are leaving the city in alarming numbers, and we must call a halt. Mr. Skidmore tells me that he tried a few whites at his mill a few days ago and the result was most unsatisfactory.
Inspector Merrick was bound to admit this himself when he went over the spot. And the problem of the missing bullion boxes was quite as puzzling in its way as the mysterious way in which Mr. Skidmore had met his death. There was no clue to this either. Certainly there had been a struggle, or there would not have been blood marks all over the place, and the window would have remained intact.
We're awfully anxious to git to the regiment, too, but I feel like as if I'd stove two inches offen my legs already against them blamed rocks." "I can't keep up. I can't keep up at all," whimpered little Pete Skidmore. "You are just dead certain to lose me." "Pull out just a little more, boys," Si said pleasantly. "We must be almost there. It can't be but a little ways now."
Shorty occupied himself in fixing the blankets comfortably for a nest for little Pete Skidmore, while Si, brooding over the way that Shorty "had flared up about nothin' at all," and the Orderly-Sergeant's and Capt. McGillicuddy's unjust heat to him, had kept his eyes fixed on the skyline beyond, and had listened to the conversation of the rebel officers.
The more the police went into the matter, the more puzzled they were. It was not a difficult matter to establish the bona fides of the passengers who traveled in the next coach with Skidmore, and as to the rest it did not matter. Nobody could possibly have left any of the corridor coaches without attracting notice; indeed, the very suggestion was absurd. And there the matter rested for three days.
Skidmore had noticed the four of them playing bridge just before he slipped into his own carriage. Really, he had nothing to fear. He lay back comfortably wondering how Poe or Gaboriau would have handled such a situation with a successful robbery behind it. There are limits, of course, both to a novelist's imagination and a clever thief's process of invention. So, therefore....
"Let me and Sandy go," pleaded little Pete Skidmore. "The big boys went before." "All right; skip out. Break the lid o' the box off before you take it out o' the car. We haven't anything here to do it with. Leave your guns here." "No, we'll take 'em along," pleaded Pete, with a boyish love for his rifle. "We mightn't be able to find 'em agin."
The morning brought no relief. Si and Shorty talked together, standing apart from the squad, and casting anxious glances over the swirling mass of army activity, which the boys did not fail to note and read with dismal forebodings. "I do believe they're lost," whimpered little Pete Skidmore. "What in goodness will ever become of us, if we're lost in this awful wilderness?"
What in Sam Hill did the Captain take him for, I'd like to know? Co. Q aint no nursery. Well, the bugler up at Brigade Headquarters blowed some sort of a call, and Skidmore wanted to know what it meant. They told him that it was an order for the youngest man in each company to come up there and get some milk for his coffee tomorrow morning, and butter for his bread.
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