From E. S. P.
Nov. 26. We got to R.’s house, where he told us he had been helping Mr. Wells all day before in boating his cotton from Morgan Island to his home place.149 There was about $3000 worth on the island, and he did not choose to expose the rebels to any further temptation in regard to it. It seems that Tuesday morning the cow-minder had gone out to the pen with his milk-pail and never returned. Search being made, the milk-pail and his jacket were found, and some new tracks of shoes on the beach, also traces of a bivouac breakfast and marks of a boat’s keel on the Coosaw River beach. Nothing more is known than this. The presumption is that a scouting party had come over Coosaw River and bivouacked on the beach, hauling up their boat, and that, seeing this poor man in the morning, they gobbled him up and cleared out as they came. He was an Edisto man, of considerable intelligence, and it is hoped his information will not be so reliable as the rebels might wish. Mr. Wells immediately informed Captain Dutch and got Mr. R. to help him boat over his cotton. Captain Dutch sent a guard to patrol the island and sent his little schooner up opposite Morgan Island in Coosaw River as an outpost.
We had an immense rush at the store yesterday, four hundred and sixty odd dollars during the day here. R. and Wells have taken over fifteen hundred dollars in the three days after opening their goods. Amaritta bought over forty dollars’ worth at once, and poor Juliana staggered off with a load on her head that she could hardly carry. The trunks go like smoke, so do the firkins and other domestic wares.