CHAPTER XLI. THE LOST ARMY IN CAMP AT HELENA—NEGROES UTILIZED—THE END.
Our story draws to a close. We have brought Harry and Jack to the banks of the great river, and there we will leave them. The army of General Curtis had terminated a most arduous campaign. Since leaving Rolla in February, six months before, it had marched more than six hundred miles, much of the way through a thinly-settled and inhospitable region, with bad roads, unbridged streams, and all the difficulties of locomotion in a new country. It had fought several minor engagements and skirmishes, and engaged in a battle of three days' duration—that of Pea Ridge—out of which it emerged victorious after combating with a force three times as great as its own. It had performed some of the best marching on record, and its men were ready to go through another campaign of the same sort, only asking for a brief rest and for sufficient good food to restore their accustomed strength. And the reader may be sure that nothing was kept from them that was within the power of the quartermasters to give, and the camps in and around Helena were a scene of feasting and rejoicing, such as that quiet town on the Mississippi had never before known.
Harry and Jack were quite as ready as any one else for a good rest, and did not hang back when there was a prospect of something nice to eat. As they strolled through the streets and along the levee of Helena they built many castles in the air, and pondered upon what they had been through since they left their homes a twelve-month before.
“Wonder how many miles we've traveled?” said Harry. “I leave out of the calculation the railway and steamboat traveling, and only include horseback riding and on foot.”
“I don't know, I'm sure,” replied Jack. “Let's figure it up as best we can, and see how it comes out.”
They proceeded to figure it, but frankly acknowledged that the job was a difficult one, on account of their numerous scouting expeditions, many of which they could n't remember at the moment. Altogether they thought it must have been not far from a thousand miles up to the time they made their last departure from Rolla. The army, as we have seen, had marched six hundred miles from Rolla to Helena, and as the boys had made many scouting and other expeditions around Pea Ridge, Forsyth and Batesville, they thought it not unfair to add four hundred miles to the total of the army's movements, making two thousand miles altogether.
“Just think of it!” exclaimed Jack. “Two thousand miles! Why, that's two-thirds the distance, about, from New York to San Francisco. It's a big lot of traveling, especially when it's been done on the quarter-deck of a horse, and sometimes under very hard circumstances. We've been many times in peril of our lives, passed through a great many privations, been cold and wet and hungry, but for all that, here we are as healthy as a couple of young tigers, ready for the next adventure that turns up.”
“Yes, that's so,” replied Harry; “and I suppose you don't want to go home just now, do you?”
“Not I,” was the ready response; “but we 'll see what our folks say about it, and also what the general says.”
“We haven't had any letters for a long time,” said Harry, “and furthermore we have n't sent any, for the very simple reason that the mails could n't get either to or from us. We've been buried in the wilderness as much as though we had been in the middle of Africa.”