"Ime doin' my best to be a second father to little Pete.
Heze as good a little soul as ever lived, but when I talk
another boy to raise it'll be sumwhair else than in the
army.
"Yores, till deth."
Just then the silver-voiced bugles in hundreds of camps on mountain-sides, in glens, in the valleys, and on the plains began ringing out sweetly mournful "Taps," and the echoes reverberated from the towering palisades of Lookout to the rocky cliffs of the Pigeon Mountains.
It was the last general "Taps" that mighty army would hear for 100 days of stormy battling.
The cheering ceased, the bonfires burned out. Shorty put his letter in an envelope, directed it, and added it to the heap at the Chaplain's tent.
Then he went back and arranged his things so that he could lay his hands unfailingly on them in the darkness of the morning, straightened little Pete out so that he would lie easier, and crawled in beside him.
CHAPTER XIII. THE FIRST DAY OF THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN.
AS usual, it seemed to the boys of the 200th Ind. that they had only lain down when the bugle blew the reveille on the morning of May 3, 1864.
The vigilant Orderly-Sergeant was at once on his feet, rousing the other "non-coms" to get the men up.
Si and Shorty rose promptly, and, experienced campaigners as they were, were in a moment ready to march anywhere or do anything as long as their rations and their cartridges held out.