"Fair or fowl, we'll have a good dinner, any way."
With an appetite ever growing keener as we caught savory whiffs from the steaming mess-pan, we piled up the rails on the fire and boiled the biddy, and boiled, and boiled, and boiled her from morn till noon, and from noon to night, and couldn't eat her then, she was so tough!
"May the dogs take the old grizzle-gizzard! I'm not going to break my teeth on this old buzzard any more," shouted the corporal, as he flung the whole cartilaginous mass into a pile of brush near by. "It was a fowl trick, after all, Harry, wasn't it?"
Thus it chanced that, when we marched out of Warrenton early one sultry summer morning, we started with empty stomachs and haversacks, and marched on till noon with nothing to eat. Halting then in a wood, we threw ourselves under the trees, utterly exhausted. About three o'clock, as we lay there, a whole staff of officers came riding down the line—the quartermaster-general of the Army of the Potomac and staff, they said it was. Just the very man we wanted to see! Then broke forth such a yell from hundreds of famished men as the quartermaster-general had probably never heard before nor ever wished to hear again:
"Hard-tack!"
"Coffee!"
"Pork!"
"Beef!"
"Sugar!"
"Salt!"