CHAPTER XVI.
AROUND THE CAMP-FIRE.
What glorious camp-fires we used to have in the fall of the year 1863! It makes one rub his hands together yet, just to think of them. The nights were getting cold and frosty, so that it was impossible to sleep under our little shelters with comfort; and so half the night was spent around the blazing fires at the ends of the company streets.
I always took care that there should be a blazing good fire for our little company, anyhow. My duties were light, and left me time, which I found I could spend with pleasure in swinging an axe. Hickory and white-oak saplings were my favorites; and with these cut into lengths of ten feet, and piled up as high as my head on wooden fire-dogs, what a glorious crackle we would have by midnight! Go out there what time of night you might please,—and you were pretty sure to go out to the fire three or four times a night, for it was too bitterly cold to sleep in the tent more than an hour at a stretch,—you would always find a half-dozen of the boys sitting about the fire on logs, smoking their pipes, telling yarns, or singing odd catches of song. As I recall those weird night-scenes of army life,—the blazing fire, the groups of swarthy men gathered about, the thick darkness of the forest, where the lights and shadows danced and played all night long, and the rows of little white tents covered with frost—it looks quite poetical in the retrospect; but I fear it was sometimes prosy enough in the reality.
"If you fellows would stop your everlasting arguing there, and go out and bring in some wood, it would be a good deal better; for if we don't have a big camp-fire to-night we'll freeze in this snow-storm."
So saying, Pointer threw down the butt-end of a pine-sapling he had been half-dragging, half-carrying out of the woods in the edge of which we were to camp, and, axe in hand, fell to work at it with a will.
There was, indeed, some need of following Pointer's good advice, for it was snowing fast, and was bitterly cold. It was Christmas Eve, 1863, and here we were, with no protection but our little shelters, pitched on the hard, frozen ground.