After selling a string of Mules he would walk the streets for a week filled with rum and gladness, bragging in his balmy periods over the keenness of his sharpness. The remainder of the purchase price, as was currently suspected, went into the pockets of the purchasing quartermaster, clothed in white samite, mystic, plunderful—popular only within restricted areas. None of it went to the Mule. A woman never looks well in a fault-finding habit; a man never looks well when detected in prevarication; therefore let us tell the truth: None of it went to the Mule!
Parenthetically we may remark that this type of financial injustice has been perpetuated, until the hind quarters of the speechless, unspeakable survivors would be excusable for rising in their might to protest emphatically. If the shoe fits spike it, says the farrier; if the conscience twinges one or more of us here present, it is perhaps not yet too late to reform. Nearly a thousand men, mostly teamsters, buglers and hospital stewarts, toothless but terrible, have been pensioned since the war for lameness caused by the kick of a Mule's hoof iron, while no Mule has been pensioned for lameness, spavin, ring-bone, wind-gall or glanders—no, not one. The speechless, rheumatic Mule, in all his army moods and tenses, acquired no stiffness of the joints materially differing from the old civil-service, barnyard variety.
Why then differentiate? Punched by the wagon-tongue or tripped by the trace chains, when the breeching was fractured on a down grade, the exposures to rupture or fracture were incessant, with no experts in attendance to splice the splints. These are facts which no profuseness of classic allusion to pearly brooks and flowery meads can obscure, when the sour cream of his experience curdles in his soul. In gushing eras of reconciliation large populations seemed extremely bent on pushing things to the whimpering point; the people who were wrong were with surprising unanimity almost ready to forgive the people who were right and kiss again with cheers.
In those days the widow of Stonewall Jackson was gallantly escorted through Boston Common by General Benjamin F. Butler, Governor of Massachusetts. And she proclaimed with tears in her voice and patriotism in her heart, that she found in this star-eyed hero an elegant gentleman as well as an orthodox believer—then immediately applied for a patent on her discovery. (Some men, like happy dreams, are too good to be true). Surely the day of jubilee had come. But even at that time undying animosities and misconceptions prevented an award of due credit to the crippled, superannuated Army Mules. Little wonder that so ungrateful an epoch was mostly given over to hybridizing chrysanthemums and breeding chappies.
And the end is not yet. "Loyal" owners, seedy and snuffy, are still collecting exaggerated pay from a long enduring government for unnumbered myriads of mythical Mules alleged to have been confiscated. The bronzed Kickapoo matron with soiled fingers, straining maple syrup through the family heirloom blanket for the St. Louis market in the forests of southern Iowa, has almost ceased to be a picturesque, typical feature of our civilization. But the war claimant still lingers, multiplying his lost Mules periodically, as the years glide by,—while the just claims of the unquestionably loyal Mule himself are neglected with studious shamelessness. Many persons are said to think that this is not just, but we may perhaps be pardoned for the remark that it is a long time between thinks.
Take notice, however, that not all Mules can establish unquestioned loyalty. Some of them yielded to the strain on their principles and went over to the enemy, like a rural dupe who is so charmed with the accomplishments of the shell-game adept that he resolves to embark in that line of business himself. Loyalty and treason were largely matters of education and environment. Even the rival little liver pills are quite the same in their essential, fundamental ingredients; one is aloes, rhubarb and antimony, while the other is antimony, aloes and rhubarb; either is equally offensive to a refined and cultured mucous membrane, and both are warranted to go through by moonlight, errors and omissions excepted.
A veracious war writer has recorded that in May, 1865, the Confederate army consisted of Kirby Smith, four Mules and a base drum, moving rapidly toward Texas. The general's proudest hope then was that he might be allowed to eke out his future anonymous existence in the solitudes of Mexico; the chattels were joint and several assets, like a plug of tobacco in the hands of a threshing crew. In war the defeated faction must accept the quartermaster's brand, "Inspected and Condemned," without a murmur, even as in politics he is four times disarmed who lets his barrel burst. These bonnie blue Mules could be readily classed as disfranchised and denationalized. They would clearly come within the fourteenth amendment unless they have been amnestied by the statute of limitations.
At any rate, the vivid historic pageant ranks next in interest to Saul of Tarsus riding the Mule's father into Damascus, where he proceeded to mulch the nursery stock of a new faith and dig a few grubs out of the roots. The boy with a big apple in his mouth, that he can neither spit out nor chew nor swallow, is a distressing spectacle; the twentieth century southerner apologizing for his deluded secessionist ancestor will command a broad clientage of respectful sympathy.
The Army Mule's strategic value was recognized throughout the whole corrugated surface of the Kenesaw region, and everywhere else within the lines of active operation. It was tersely expressed by General George H. Thomas when he said: "The fate of an army sometimes depends on a linch-pin." Poetry without a motif is held by experts to be deficient in verve; an army without a train long as the exordium of a professional spell-binder was supposed to be impossible. The science of electrocution is in its infancy, but the death-dealing corset has been industriously slaughterous for three or four generations.
Erroneous solutions of the transportation problem are responsible for much needless sacrifice of life and treasure. The army train was a baffling understudy. Six patient, faithful Mules were attached to each creaking big blue wagon, with a high, white canvas cover. Thirteen wagons were, during the first two years of the war, allotted to a regiment of infantry; six to a battery of artillery. Such campaigning emulated the luxuriousness of a hundred-acre corn-field where every ear-muff is made of silk. (P. S. It was subsequently abandoned.) One hundred teams occupy a mile of road. Thus an army of seventy-five thousand men are followed when marching by a wagon-train eighteen miles long, hauled by Mules.