ENOUGH TO BAG SIX REBS.
SI CALLED out to the other boys by name to come up and join him.
The rebel Sergeant mentally tallied off each name as it was called. A
flush of shame and anger mounted to his face as Si concluded.
"Gol darn hit," he said, "you'uns hain't got ez many ez we'uns; they
hain't nigh ez good men ez we'uns, an' they'uns ain't heah. We'uns air
Tennesseans, an' you'uns hain't."
"We've got enough, an' they're good enough," said Si sententiously.
"Injianny turns out better men than Tennessee ever dreamed o' doing."
"I don't believe hit a mite," said the Sergeant, stooping down and
picking up a piece of cedar, which made a formidable club. "We'uns is
not a-gwine back with yo'uns nary a step. By rights, we'uns orter take
yo'uns back with we'uns. But I'm willin' to call hit off, and let yo'uns
go ef yo'uns 'll let we'uns go. Is hit a bargain?"
"Not by 40 rows o' apple trees it ain't," said Si, stepping back a
little to get a better range, and fixing his bayonet. "I've set my heart
on takin' you back to Co. Q, an' back to Co. Q you'll go, if Si Klegg
knows himself."38
"And you'll go in a hurry, too," said Shorty. "It's gettin' late, and
I'm always afraid to be out after dark. Mosey, now!"
The other rebels were picking up clubs similar to the Sergeant's and
casting their eyes on him for the signal to attack.
"See here," said Si desperately, cocking his gun. "Don't waste no more
time in words. This hain't a debatin' society. You're goin' back to Co.
Q or going somewhere else thunderin' quick. Sergeant, if you make a move
agin me I'll surely blow your head off en you, an' jab my bayonet
through the next man. My partner, Shorty, is a worse man than I am, an'
I can't tell how many of you he'll kill. He's awful quick-tempered, too,
towards evening, an' liable to begin shooting any minute without
warnin'. It'll save several lives if you start right off on the jump,
straight toward the rear, an' keep it up, with out looking to the right
or left, until you reach Co. Q. You'll find the trail we made comin' in.
Take it this minute."
The rebel Sergeant's eyes looked directly into the dark muzzle of Si's
gun. They glanced along the barrel, and met one eye looking directly
through the sights, while the other was closed, in the act of taking
deliberate aim. He decided with great promptness that there were many
reasons why he should prefer to be a live rebel in a Yankee prison,
rather than a badly-disfigured dead one in a lonely cedar thicket. He
dropped his club, turned around, and made his way along the path over
which Si had come. The rest followed, with Si and Shorty a few paces in
the rear.
Palpitating with pride, Si marched his prisoners up to the company, who
gave him three cheers. The Captain ordered him to report with his
prisoners to the Colonel.
Si Reports to the Colonel 38
The Colonel praised him with words that made his blood tingle.40
The skirmishing off to the right had now ceased. The rebels had fallen
back to the next hilltop, and the 200th Ind. was ordered to go into camp
where it stood.
Preparing Supper 40
It was a fine place for a camp. The mud of the day before was frozen
into stony hardness. The wagons had no difficulty in coming up. There
was wood and water in abundance, and it seemed that the command "Break
ranks March!" had hardly been uttered when great, bright, comfort-giving
fires of fragrant cedar rails flashed up all along the line.
Si and Shorty found several cedar stumps and logs, which they rolled
together, and made a splendid fire. They cooked themselves an ample
supper of fried pork, toasted hardtack, and strong, fragrant coffee,
which they devoured with an appetite and a keen enjoyment only possible
to healthy young men who have had a day of active manuvering and
marching in the crisp, chill air of December.
Then they gathered a lot of cedar branches, and made a thick mattress of
them near the fire, upon which to spread their blankets for the night.
This was a new suggestion by Shorty, and an amazing success.
"I declare, Shorty," said Si, as he lay down on the bed to try it, "I
often wonder where you get all your ideas. For a man who wasn't raised
on the Wabash you know an awful sight. Mebbe, if you'd actually been
born in Posey County you'd a-knowed enough to be a Jigadier-Brindle.
Then I'd a lost you for a pard. This's a great invention. Why, it's
softer and comfortabler than one of mother's feather beds. When I get
out of the army, I'm going to sleep on nothin' but cedar boughs."
"There, you're at it again the Wabash forever," returned Shorty, good-
humoredly. "They raise the finest corn and cattle in the world on the
Wabash, I'll admit, and some fairly good soldiers. But where'll you get
any cedars there to make beds with? You'll have to go back to sleepin'
on wheat straw and corn husks, with chicken-feather pillers. But after42
the way you stood up to that rebel Sergeant to-day I'll never say
another word about ager and milk-sick en the Wabash, and I'll lick any
other feller that does. There wasn't a speck of ager in your gizzard
when you ordered him forward, or you'd blow his Southern Confederacy
head off."
"There was more ager there than you thought, Shorty," Si admitted
softly. "I was awfully scared, for there was six to us two, and if that
feller 'd had the right kind of sand he'd a-jumped me at once, before I
could get my gun up. The moment he began to palaver I knowed I had him.
But I'd 'a' died in my tracks before I'd let him go, and I knowed you
would, too. You're the best pard a feller ever had."
And he reached over and took Shorty's rough hand and squeezed it
affectionately.
"I can bet on you every time, even when I don't think it's quite safe to
bet on myself. And, Shorty," he continued, with his eyes kindling, "it
was worth all that we've gone through since we've been in the army, even
all that time in the rain, to have the Colonel speak as he did to us
before the rest of the boys. I'd be willing to enlist three years more
if father and mother and sisters, and and Annabel could have heard him.
I tell you, war has some glorious things in it, after all."
He sat there on his bed before the fire, with his feet curled up under
him in the comfortable way that it takes months of field service to
acquire, and gazed steadily into the bank of glowing coals. They
suffused his face and body with their generous warmth, and helped lift
his soul toward the skies.43
He was much happier than he had ever been before in his life. The trials
of the day before were hardly more than a far-away dream. The fears and
anxieties of the coming battle were forgotten. The ruddy embers became a
radiant vista, which Pride and Hope and Joy filled with all that he
wanted to see. He saw there the dear old home on the Wabash, his father
seated by the evening lamp reading the paper, while his mother knit on
the other side of the table. His sisters were busy with some feminine
trifles, and Annabel had come in to learn the news. They would hear what
he had done, and of the Colonel's words of praise before the regiment,
and his father's heart would glow with pride and his mother's eyes
suffuse with tears. And Annabel but it passed words, passed thought,
almost, what she would say and think.
Just then tattoo rang out clear and musical on the chill night air. The
rattling military "good night" had never before had any special charms
for Si. But now he thought it an unusually sweet composition.
"I declare," he said to Shorty, "that sheepskin band of our'n is
improving. They're getting to play real well. But I ought to write a few
lines home before taps. Got any paper. Shorty?"
"Much paper you'll find in this regiment after that rain," said Shorty
contemptuously, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and started to
fall in for roll-call. "Every mite of paper anybody has was soaked to
spitwads. But mebbe the Orderly might have a sheet."
After roll-call Si went to the Orderly-Sergeant.44
Nothing in reason could then be refused Si, and the Orderly tore a
couple of leaves out of the back of his treasured diary, which had
escaped the rain, and handed them to him. Si fished his stub of a pencil
out of his blouse-pocket, laid the paper on the back of a tin plate, and
began:
"Somewhere in Tennessee, December the 27th, 1862.
"Dere Annabel: We're movin' on Murphysboro, where we expect a big fite.
There's bin fitin' goin' on ever since we left Nashville, but the 200th
Ind. hain't had no hand in it so far, except this after noon me and
Shorty"
He stopped, stuck his pencil in his mouth, and began to study just what
words he should use to describe the occurrence. He wanted to tell her
all that was bubbling in his heart, and yet he was afraid she would
think him an intolerable boaster, if he told it in just the words that
came to him. He was more afraid of that little country girl's
disapproval than of all the rebels in Murfreesboro.
There were yells, the rattling of chains, and the sound of galloping
hoofs coming toward him.
"Hi, there; stop them condemned mules!" shouted the voice of a teamster.
Si jumped to his feet, for the mules were charging directly for his
fire, and were almost upon him. He dropped paper, pan and pencil, and
jumped to one side, just in time to avoid a rush which scattered his
fire, his carefully-prepared bed, and all his be longings under 24
flying, hard-pounding hoofs.
After the Mules Stampeded 44
"Blast mules, anyhow," said the driver, coming up with his whip in his
hand. "I didn't hev nothin' for them to eat but a cottonwood pole that I
cut down in the bottom. But they must have smelt fodder over there
somewhere, and they broke for it like the devil beatin' tanbark. Hope
you weren't hurt, pard."
Si and Shorty fixed up their fire again, rearranged46 their scattered
cedar boughs, and did the best they could with their torn blankets.
Si found that a mule's hoof had landed squarely on his tin plate, mashed
all future usefulness out of it, and stamped his letter to Annabel into
unrecognizability.
He threw the rent fragments into the fire, sighed deeply, and crawled
under the blankets with Shorty, just as three sounding taps on the bass-
drum commanded silence and lights out in the camp.
48