HOW exuberantly bright, restful, and happy were those long July days
on the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains, after the fatigues and
hardships, the endless rains, the fathom less mud, the angry, swollen
streams, the exhaust ing marches, and the feverish anxieties of the
Tullahoma campaign.
The insolent, threatening enemy had retreated far across the mountain
barrier. For the while he was out of reach of striking or being struck.
The long-delayed commissary-wagons had come up, and there was an
abundance to eat. The weather was delightful, the forests green, shady
and inviting, the scenery picturesque and inspiring, and every day
brought news of glorious Union victories, over which the cannon boomed
in joyful salutes and the men cheered themselves hoarse. Grant had taken
Vicksburg, with 25,000 prisoners, and chased Joe Johnston out of sight
and knowledge. Prentiss had bloodily repulsed Sterling Price at Helena.
Banks had captured Port Hudson, with 6,000 prisoners. The Mississippi
River at last "flowed unvexed to the sea." Meade had won a great victory
at Gettysburg, and Lee's beaten army was in rapid retreat to Virginia.
"The blasted old Southern Confederacy is certainly havin' its
underpinnin' knocked out, its j'ints cracked, and its roof caved in,"
remarked Si, as the two boys lay under the kindly shade of a low-growing
jackoak, lazily smoked their pipes, and gazed contentedly out over the
far-spreading camps, in which no man was doing anything more laborious
than gathering a little wood to boil his evening coffee with. "'Tain't
fit to store brick-bats in now. By-and-by we'll go out and hunt up old
Bragg and give him a good punch, and the whole crazy shebang 'll come
down with a crash."
"I only wish old Bragg wasn't of sich a retirin' nature," lazily
commented Shorty. "The shade o' this tree is good enough for me. I don't
want to ever leave it. Why couldn't he've waited for me, and we could've
had it out here, coolly and pleasantly, and settled which was the best
man! The thing' d bin over, and each feller could've gone about his
business."
Both relapsed into silence as each fell into day dreams the one about a
buxom, rosy-cheeked little maiden in the Valley of the Wabash; the
other of one in far-off Wisconsin, whom he had never seen, but whom
he mentally endowed with all the virtues and charms that his warmest
imagination could invest a woman. Neither could see a woman without
thinking how inferior she was in looks, words or acts to those whose
images they carried in their hearts, and she was sure to suffer greatly
by the comparison.
Such is the divinely transforming quality of love.
Each of the boys had taken the first opportunity, after getting enough
to eat, a shelter prepared, and his clothes in shape and a tolerable
rest, to write a long letter to the object of his affections. Shorty's
letter was not long on paper, but in the time it took him to write it.
He felt that he was making some progress with the fair maid of Bad Ax,
and this made him the more deeply anxious that no misstep should thwart
the progress of love's young dream.
Letter-writing presented unusual difficulties to Shorty. His training
in the noble art of penmanship had stopped short long before his sinewy
fingers had acquired much knack at forming the letters. Spelling and
he had a permanent disagreement early in life, and he was scarcely on
speaking terms with grammar. He had never any trouble conveying his
thoughts by means of speech. People had very little difficulty in
understanding what he meant when he talked, but this was quite different
from getting his thoughts down in plain black and white for the reading
of a strange young woman whom he was desperately anxious to please, and
desperately afraid of offending. He labored over many sheets of paper
before he got a letter that seemed only fairly satisfactory. One he had
rejected because of a big blot on it; second, because he thought he
had expressed himself too strongly; a third, because of an erasure and
unseemly correction; a fourth, because of some newborn suspicions about
the grammar and spelling, and so on. He thought, after he had carefully
gathered up all his failures and burned them, together with a number
of envelopes he had wrecked in his labor to direct one to Miss Lucinda
Briggs, Bad Ax, Wis., sufficiently neatly to satisfy his fastidious
taste.
He carefully folded his letter, creasing it with a very stalwart
thumb-nail, sealed it, gave it a long inspection, as he thought how much
it was carrying, and how far, and took it up to the Chaplain's tent to
be mailed.
Later in the afternoon a hilarious group was gathered under a large
cottonwood. It was made up of teamsters, Quartermaster's men, and other
bobtail of the camp, with the officers' servants forming the dark fringe
of an outer circle. Groundhog was the presiding spirit. By means best
known to himself he had become possessed of a jug of Commissary whisky,
and was dispensing it to his auditors in guarded drams to highten
their appreciation of his wit and humor. He had come across one of the
nearly-completed letters which Shorty had thrown aside and failed to
find when he burned the rest. Groundhog was now reading this aloud,
accompanied by running comments, to the great amusement of his auditors,
who felt that, drinking his whisky, and expecting more, they were bound
to laugh uproariously at anything he said was funny.
"Shorty, that lanky, two-fisted chump of Co. Q, who thinks hisself a
bigger man than Gineral Rosecrans," Groundhog explained, "has writ a
letter to a gal away off somewhere up North. How in the kingdom he ever
come to git acquainted with her or any respectable woman 's more'n I kin
tell. But he's got cheek enough for anything. It's sartin, though, that
she's never saw him, and don't know nothin' about him, or she'd
never let him write to her. Of course, he's as ignorant as a mule. He
skeercely got beyant pot-hooks when he wuz tryin' to larn writin', an'
he spells like a man with a wooden leg. Look here:
"'Mi Dere Frend.' Now, everybody knows that the way to spell dear is
d-e-e-r. Then he goes on:
"'I taik mi pen in hand to inform u that Ime well, tho I've lost about
15 pounds, and hoap that u air injoyin' the same blessin."
"Think o' the vulgarity o' a man writin' to a young lady 'bout his
losin' flesh. If a man should write sich a thing to my sister I'd hunt
him up and wollop the life outen him. Then he goes on:
"'I aint built to spare much meat, and the loss of 15 pounds leaves
fallow lots in mi cloze. But it will grow it all back on me agin
mitey quick, as soon as we kin hav another protracted meetin' with the
Commissary Department.'
"Did you ever hear sich vulgarity?" Groundhog groaned. "Now hear him
brag and use langwidge unfit for any lady to see:
"'We've jest went throo the gosh-almightiest campane that enny army
ever done. It wuz rane and mud 48 ours outen the 24, with thunder and
litenin' on the side. We got wettern Faro's hosts done chasin' the Jews
throo 50 foot of Red See. But we diddent stop for that till we'd
hussled old Bragg outen his works, and started him on the keen jump for
Chattynoogy, to put the Cumberland Mountings betwixt us and him.'
"Think o' the conceit o' the feller. Wants to make that gal believe that
he druv off Bragg a'most single-handed, and intends to foller him up and
kick him some more. Sich gall. Sich fellers hurts us in the opinion o'
the people at home. They make 'em think we're all a set o' blowhards.
But this aint nothin' to what comes next. He tries to honeyfugle the
gal, and he's as clumsy 'bout it as a brown b'ar robbin' a bee-hive.
Listen:
"'mi dere frend, I can't tell you how happy yore letters maik me. I've
got so I look for the male a good dele more angshioussly than for the
grub wagon.'
"Think o' a man sayin' grub to a lady," said Groundhog, in a tone of
deep disgust. "Awful coarse. A gentleman allers says 'peck,' or 'hash,'
or Vittels,' when he's speakin' to a lady, or before ladies. I licked a
man onct for sayin' 'gizzard-linen' before my mother, and gizzard-linin'
aint half as coarse as grub. But he gits softer'n mush as he goes on.
Listen:
"'I rede every wun of 'em over till they're cleane wore out, and then I
save the pieces, bekaze they cum from u. I rede them whenever Ime alone,
and it seems to me that its yeres before another one comes. If I cood
make anybody feel as good by ritin' to 'em as u kin me Ide rite 'em
every day.'
"Thar's some more of his ignorant spellin'," said Groundhog. "Everybody
but a blamed fool knows the way to spell write is w-r-i-g-h-t. I learnt
that much before I wuz knee-high to a grasshopper. But let me continner:
"'I think Bad Ax, Wisconsin, must be the nicest plais in the world,
bekaze u live there. I woodent want to live anywhair else, and Ime
cummin up thar just as soon as the war is over to settle. I think of u
every our in the day, and--'
"He thinks of her every hour. The idee," said Groundhog, with deep
scorn, "that sich a galoot as Shorty thinks of anything more'n a minute,
except triple-X, all-wool, indigo-dyed cussedness that he kin work off
on some other feller and hurt him, that he don't think's as smart as
he is. Think o' him gushin' out all this soft-solder to fool some poor
girl."
"You infernal liar, you, give me that letter," shouted Si, bolting into
the circle and making a clutch at the sheet. "I'll pound your onery head
off en you."
Si had come up unnoticed, and listened for a few minutes to Groundhog's
tirade before he discovered that his partner was its object. Then he
sprang at the teamster, struck him with one hand, and snatched at the
letter with the other. The bystanders instinctively sided with the
teamster, and Si became the center of a maelstrom of kicks and blows,
when Shorty, seeing his partner's predicament, bolted down the hill and
began knocking down every body in reach until he cleared a way to
Si's side. By this time the attention of the Sergeant of the Guard
was attracted, and he brought an energetic gun-barrel to the task of
restoring the reign of law and order.
"How in thunder'd you come to git into a fracas with that herd o'
mavericks, Si?" asked Shorty, in a tone of rebuke, as the Sergeant was
rounding up the crowd and trying to get at who was to blame. "Couldn't
you find somebody on your own level to fight, without startin' a fuss
with a passel o' low-down, rust-eaten roustabouts? What's got into you?
Bin livin' so high lately that you had to have a fight to work off your
fractiousness? I'm surprised at you."
"Groundhog' d got hold of a letter o' your'n to your girl up in
Wisconsin," gasped Si, "and was readin' it to the crowd. Here's a piece
of it."
Shorty glanced at the fragment of torn paper in Si's hand, and a deep
blush suffused his sun-browned cheek. Then he gave a howl and made a
rush for Groundhog.
"Here, let that man alone, or I'll make you," shouted the Sergeant of
the Guard.
"Sergeant," said Si, "that rat-faced teamster had got hold of a letter
to his girl, and was reading it to this gang o' camp offal."
"O," said the Sergeant, in a changed tone; "hope he'll baste the life
out of him." And he jumped in before a crowd that was showing some
disposition to go to Groundhog's assistance, sharply ordered them to
about-face, and drove them off before him.
"Here, Sergeant," shouted the Officer of the Guard, who came running up;
"what are you fooling around with these fellows for? They're not doing
any thing. Don't you see that man's killing that team ster?"
"Teamster had got hold of a letter to his girl," explained the Sergeant,
"and was reading it to these whelps."
"O," said the Officer of the Guard in a different tone. "Run these
rascals down there in front of the Quartermaster's and set them to
work digging those stumps out. Keep them at it till midnight, without
anything to eat. I'll teach them to raise disturbances in camp."