We both ran toward the bag as fast as we could, ready to secure our prize; but we found, alas! that squirrels sometimes have two doors to their houses, and that while we had hoped to bag our bush-tail at the front door, he had merrily skipped out the back way. For scarcely had the tree reached the ground, when we both beheld our intended pet leaping out of the branches and running up a neighboring tree as fast as his legs could carry him.
"Plague take it!" said Andy, wiping the perspiration from his face, "what shall we do now? I guess you'd better run to camp and get a little salt to throw on his tail."
"Never mind," said I, "we'11 get him yet, see if we don't. I see him up there behind that old dry limb peeping out at us—there he goes!"
Sure enough, there he did go, from tree-top to tree-top, "lickerty-skoot," as Andy afterward expressed it, and we after him, quite losing our heads, and shouting like Indians.
As ill luck would have it, our shade-tail was making straight for the camp, on the outskirts of which he was discovered by one of the men, who instantly gave the alarm—"A squirrel! a squirrel!" In a moment all the boys in camp not on duty came running pell-mell, Sergeant Kensill's black-and-tan terrier, Little Jim (of whom more anon), leading the way. I suppose there must have been about a hundred men together, and all yelling and shouting too, so that the poor squirrel checked his headlong course high up on the dead limb of a great old oak-tree. Then, forming a circle around the tree, with "Little Jim" in the midst, the boys began to shout and yell as when on the charge,—
"Yi-yi-yi! Yi-yi-yi!"
Whereat the poor squirrel was so terrified, that, leaping straight up and out from his perch into open space, in sheer affright and despair, down he came tumbling tail over head into the midst of the circle, which rapidly closed about him as he neared the ground. With yells and cheers that made the wood ring, a hundred hands were stretched out as if to catch him as he came down. But Little Jim beat them all. True to his terrier blood and training, he suddenly leaped up like a shot, seized the squirrel by the nape of the neck, gave him a few angry shakes, which ended his agony, and carried him off triumphantly in his mouth to the tent of his owner, Sergeant Kensill, of Company F.
That evening, as we sat in our tent eating our fried hard-tack, Andy remarked, while sipping his coffee from his black tin cup, that if buck-tails were as hard to catch as shade-tails, they were well worth a dollar apiece any day; and that he believed a crow, or one of those young pigs we found running wild in the woods when we came to that camp, or something of that sort, would make a better pet than a squirrel.
"Well," said I, "we caught those pigs, anyhow, didn't we? But didn't they squeal! Fortunately they were so much like oysters that they couldn't get away from us, and all found their way into our frying-pans at last."
"I fail to apprehend your meaning," said Andy, with mock gravity, setting down his black tin cup on the gum-blanket. "By what right or authority, sir, do you presume to tell me that a pig is like an oyster?"