FORE:The Deacon found that a ride in a wagon was not such an unqualified favor as he might have thought. The poor, half-fed, overworked mules went so slowly that the Deacon could make better time walking, and he was too merciful to allow them to pull him up hill.
FORE:It was night, and he dozed in his seat until the train reached Bridgeport, Ala., when everybody was turned out of the train, and a general inspection of the passengers made.When Shorty returned to the squad he found them in feverish excitement about the distribution to the different companies. As he and Si had apprehended, all were exceedingly anxious to go with them into Co. Q, which Si and Shorty had unwittingly impressed upon them was the crack company of the regiment, and contained the very cream of the men. To be assigned to any other company seemed to them, if not an actual misfortune, a lack of good luck.
THREE:TO: John HarrisonAfter the members were duly seated according to rank, with Maj. Truax at the head of the table, Lieut. Bowersox read the order for holding the court, and called the names of the members. He then said:
THREE:"There's Silas Peckham," exclaimed Si, running up to him. "Badly hurt, Sile?""No, we won't," Si assured him. "You just keep with us and you'll be all right."
THREE:"That telegraph pole will be just the thing to hang him on," suggested Harry to Gid. "We could put him on a flat car and push the car out from under him. I'll look around for a rope, Gid, and you git ready to climb the pole.""Raise up!" shouted Si. "Forward! Forward! Jump 'em. Jump 'em before they kin load agin!"
He led off with the long march stride of the veteran, and began threading his way through the maze of teams, batteries, herds, and marching men and stragglers with the ease and certainty born of long acquaintance with crowded camps. He dodged around a regiment here, avoided a train there, and slipped through a marching battery at the next place with a swift, unresting progress that quickly took away the boys' wind and made them pant with the exertion of keeping up."A thief always gits fetched up with," said Shorty, in a tone of profound moralizing. "But since it had to go I'm glad one o' our own boys got it. I snatched another and a better one that night from the Ohio boys. I'm awful sorry you got hurt. Was it bad?"There was more scurrying, and when at last Si reached a clear space, he had only a portion of his squad with him, while Shorty was vowing he would not go a step farther until he had licked a railroad man. But the engines continued to whirl back and forth in apparently purposeless confusion, and the moment that he fixed upon any particular victim of his wrath, he was sure to be compelled to jump out of the way of a locomotive clanging up from an unexpected direction and interposing a train of freight cars between him and the man he was after.