"WHO ATE THE DOG."
This inquiry, while not invested with the same degree of mystery, nor enjoying as large a measure of notoriety as "Who struck Billy Patterson?" nevertheless echoed on many a hillside and enlivened many a camp fire on our trip to Nashville. The incident which gave rise to it occurred soon after we left the Tennessee river on this ill-fated tramp. To prevent depredations upon the property of citizens along the route of our march, a provost guard had been formed, in command of which was placed an officer now living not a thousand miles from Augusta, but who shall be nameless here, partly out of respect to his feelings and partly out of regard for my own. He has warned me that a different course would be followed by an aggravated case of assault and battery and I do not care to put the courts to unnecessary expense.
Stringent orders were issued by Gen. Smith to arrest any man found in possession of fresh meat, for which he could give no satisfactory account. Several arrests had been made and the captured meat had been confiscated and appropriated by the provost guard to their own use, benefit and behoof. To the men engaged in these depredations, justified in their eyes by the shortness of their rations, these captures became a little monotonous and they determined to find some means of retaliation. One day a soldier was seen tramping through the woods with a suspicious looking sack swinging from his shoulder and one of the guard ordered him to halt. Instead of obeying the command he gave leg bail and the guard started in pursuit.
The forager encumbered with the weight of his plunder finally dropped it and made his escape. The sack was found to contain, apparently, a leg of mutton nicely dressed, which was turned over to the officer in command.
In view of this tempting addition to the bill of fare, a brother officer, who has since turned his sword into a spatula and is as well versed now in drugs as he was then in tactics, was an invited guest at the midday meal that day. Ample justice was done to the menu by all concerned and all went merry as a marriage bell until the command had halted for the night and the men, wearied by the day's march, were resting around their camp fires. And then a change came o'er the spirit of their dream. From one end of the camp, up through the stillness of the evening air, there rose a cry, that like of noise of many waters, rang and reverberated to its farthest bounds, "Who ate the dog?" And as its echoes died away, from another camp fire in the same stentorian tones there came the answer, "Lieut ——," naming the officer of the provost guard. And on through the entire evening, at brief intervals and without the stimulus of an encore the program was repeated. And now as there flitted across the mental vision of the officer aforesaid the memory of the mutton chops that had seemed so savory and toothsome, there came to him a dim suspicion that he had been the victim of misplaced confidence. Was it mutton or was it dog? As he debated the question pro and con, he was forced to admit with Shakespeare that "all that glitters is not gold," and with Longfellow, that "things are not what they seem," and with Whittier that—
"Of all sad thoughts of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these, it might have been"—a dog.
And now if the spirit of Poe will pardon me,
All this dark and dread suspicion
Of such canine deglutition,
As it crossed his mental vision
Leading not to height elysian,
Made him sad and made him sadder,
Made him mad and made him madder,
And his soul from out its shadow
Shall be lifted, nevermore.
For weeks and months, and indeed until the war closed, this canine ghost would never down. He was not allowed to forget it. He was taunted and barked at and dogged so constantly that no Lethean waters could wash out the maddening memory. And the bitterness of it all was that the perpetrators of the joke would give no intimation as to the special breed that graced his table that winter day, whether
"Mongrel, puppy, whelp or hound
Or cur of low degree."
The size of the ham precluded the possibility of its having been a bench-legged fice, but there was the torturing reflection that it might have been what Mark Twain has termed the Ishmael of his race, the "yaller dog," who if Mark is to be credited, has been "cursed in all his generations and relations in his kindred by consanguinity and affinity and in his heirs and assigns—cursed with endless hunger with perpetual fear with perennial laziness with hopeless mange, with incessant fleas and with his tail between his legs."
These unpleasant reflections were, however, not confined to the officer in command of the provost guard. A part of the meat had been sent to brigade headquarters and it was said that an aide on the general's staff, who had eaten very freely of the dish, suffered on learning of its origin so serious a gastric disturbance that he vomited, as a colored brother once put it, from Genesis to Revelations.
"I know not how the truth may be,
I tell the tale as 'twas told to me."
Regretting my inability, for reasons already stated, to answer this inquiry more definitely, I can only say in conclusion as I heard Bob Toombs once say in another connection, "In spite of compromises, concessions and constitutions this question still marches onward for its solution," who ate the dog?