Then old Jones replied with a relish: “I am the colonel of this regiment. And I have ordered these food supplies distributed to the men in the messes. The regimental commissary will obey my orders. And as soon as your wagon is emptied, you will get out of this camp in a considerable of a hurry,”—perhaps he used a shorter word than “considerable,”—“or I’ll hang you in front of headquarters. There’s no court of appeals in this camp. Now git!” as the last of the supplies were taken out of the wagon by the regimental commissary.
We were all a little bit sorry that the poor farmer should lose his entire load. And yet we sympathized with old Jones’s remark as he walked away.
“I’ll teach these thieves that they can’t loot a camp that I’m a runnin’.”
A DEAD MAN’S MESSAGE
DICK FULCHER was the best natured man in the battery, and he was nothing else.
He was entirely ignorant and entirely content to be so. He could neither read nor write, and we could never persuade him to try to learn. He had nothing resembling pride in his composition apparently, nothing that it would do to call a character.
One morning the alarm came that the enemy had landed below, and we were ordered hurriedly forward. Fulcher had just taken post as stable-guard, and was, therefore, under no obligation of duty to go. He quietly threw down the musket he was carrying, and, going up to the sergeant-major, said: “Major, can’t I be taken off guard? I want to go with the battery into the fight.”
His request was granted, of course. He was number four at Joe’s gun; number four is the man who pulls the lanyard, or string, that fires the gun. When we unlimbered to the front on Yemassee Creek, within pistol-shot range of the advancing enemy, Fulcher was laughing as usual, and apparently as indifferent to the work he was doing as he had been to everything else, since we had first known him.
I remember wondering, as I watched him, why a man who felt so little interest in the dangerous business had gone out of his way as he had done to engage in it.
The fire of the enemy was terrific in its destructiveness from the first. Within the first three minutes we had lost ten men and a score of horses. Among the men was Fulcher. He had fallen, shot through the body, just as the command was given to him to “fire.”