CAPT. THOMAS M. FEE.
The chief now made one or two more unsuccessful attempts to catch a spark in the cotton, and each effort produced a laugh from us and an inelegant remark from the captain. The expression upon his face and the glare in his eye caused us to move farther away before offering any further advice, when I suggested that he should stop this fooling and strike a light. His reception of my remark was decidedly ungracious, and I retired behind a log, while he made another attempt. This time he caused a spark to alight on the charred cotton, but he forgot to blow it while he looked around with a smile of triumph on his face, and when he looked back at the spark there was none there. The mutterings and suppressed laughter of the rest of us caused the chief to make some emphatic remarks of a lurid nature, and, when I remarked that we would wait while he went back to find the negro boy, he grew furious in his denunciation of such ancient methods of procuring fire. Then I suggested that the potatoes would spoil if he did not hurry up, dodging down behind my log as he looked at me with anything but a loving glance. He now made several careful attempts to locate another spark in the tinder, but history did not repeat itself, and he got up, exclaiming, hoarsely:
"I'll be everlastingly d——d if I know as much as a 10-year-old nigger."
Glaring around him, he caught sight of my head above the log, striving to suppress my laughter enough to utter some words of consolation, when he violently threw the whole fire department at my head, saying:
"Damn you, Swiggett; I suppose I'll never hear the end of this!" and he walked off by himself.
We ate our sweet potatoes raw, as no one cared to risk further failure with the fire apparatus, and after a time our crestfallen chief came back and joined us. Several remarks by the others about the delicacy of baked sweet potatoes were noted by him, and a wild glare at the speakers was the result. I remarked to Captain Gedney that the niggers were very kindly, but that their education was sadly neglected, and that a man who had not as much sense as a 10-year-old negro boy was not a remarkable man.
"You fellows want to let up, or I'll kill some of you," remarked Fee, and then, after the subject had been dropped for a time:
"Say, boys, what will you take to keep mum about this?"
After some bargaining, we finally agreed to keep his experience a secret, and peace was restored; but we had not agreed to drop the matter, and as long as we were together the captain would occasionally see one of us sit down in a confident way and go through a pantomime in which were reproduced his expressions and actions while trying to run our fire department.
The same afternoon, while we were peacefully resting, in seeming security, on the sunny side of the sloping bank of a little creek, we discovered a man on horseback. He was not far off, and carried a gun on his shoulder, being engaged in following the slow trail of a hound, and evidently on our tracks.