"Why, what's the matter?"
"Oh, nothin'; only you jest try it," said Si.
Had it not been for the "fun" the soldiers had in the army to brighten their otherwise dark and cheerless lives, they would all have died. Si was a true type of those who had to suffer for the good of others until they learned wisdom in the school of experience.
CHAPTER XIV. SI AND THE MULES
ONE DAY'S RICH EXPERIENCE AS COMPANY TEAMSTER.
"I'VE GOT to have a man to drive team for a few days," said the Orderly of Co. Q of the 200th Ind. one morning at roll-call. "The teamster's sick and I'm goin' to send him to the hospital to-day."
The Orderly-Sergeant of Co. Q was a wily fellow. All Orderly-Sergeants have to be. If they are not naturally, they learn it very quickly, or lose the little diamond on their sleeves, if not all their stripes. The man who undertakes to manage 60 or 75 stalwart, high-spirited young Americans through all their moods and tenses, and every kind of weather, has to be as wise as a serpent, though not necessarily as harmless as a dove. Therefore, the Orderly-Sergeant didn't tell the boys what ailed the teamster. The fact was that the heels of the "off=wheeler" caught the teamster in the pit of the stomach and doubled him up so badly that he wouldn't be fit for duty for a week. It was worse than the green-corn colic.
"'Tisn't every man," continued the Orderly, "that's gifted with fust-class talent fur drivin' team. I'd like to find the best man to steer them animals, an' if there's a real sientifick mule-whacker in this comp'ny let him speak up an' I'll detail him right off. It'll be a soft thing fur somebody; them mules are daises."
Somehow they didn't all speak at once. The company had only had the team two or three weeks, but the boys were not dull of hearing, and ominous sounds had come to them from the rear of the camp at all hours of the night—the maddening "Yeehaw-w-w!" of the long-eared brutes, and the frantic ejaculations of the teamster, spiced with oaths that would have sent a shudder through "our army in Flanders."