[LAWSON'S INVESTMENT]
BY MAJOR G. B. DAVIS, U.S.A.
LAWSON ON THE WATCH.
To begin with, it was not an investment of gold or silver, in land or bonds, or any of those things for which men vainly toil and strive, in constant peril of their souls. Of all that, I know nothing. I am simply to tell how Lawson, a volunteer soldier, defended the Cienega Ranch during the long hours of a summer day against a band of Mescalero Apaches, red-handed, thirsting for plunder, and bent upon his destruction.
I have said that Lawson was a volunteer soldier. If I rightly understood him, he was born in Ohio. At any rate, he served in the Ohio infantry, and enlisted for the war, with a thousand others, in the early fall of 1861. By rights he ought to have been drilled and properly set up and disciplined in some sort of camp of instruction in Kentucky or southern Ohio, but there was not thought to be time for that, so great was the need for men, and so he had to acquire his manual of arms and other military fundamentals in the field from day to day as he went along. Now this is not the best way nor the way laid down in the books, but it was the only way for Lawson, and whatever may be said against it, it is thorough and to the last degree effective.
In the raw early spring of 1862, Lawson's regiment, still rusty in its ployments and facings, and having as yet no abiding knowledge of the goose step, began its campaigning in West Tennessee. He was at Donelson and Shiloh, and later got his first lessons in digging and the use of the head-log at the siege of Corinth. After that was over, he marched about, hither and yon, as his Generals wished—but somewhat aimlessly as he thought—in northern Mississippi. This sort of thing was kept up all through the fall and winter until the spring came, and the Army of the Tennessee set out to do something at Vicksburg. He did his share of digging and fighting in the hot trenches there, and then, just as the cool fall breezes were beginning to blow, he betook himself with Sherman to the relief of his beleaguered comrades at Chattanooga, arriving just in time to share in Corse's gallant but unfruitful assault upon the north end of Missionary Ridge. Always a private, he missed none of the marching or fighting or digging of the Atlanta campaign, and closed the year '64 with the long sweet-potato walk to Savannah and the sea. Then he waded and toiled up through the miry Carolinas, adding not a little to his military stature and to his stock of technical war knowledge in the way of corduroying and trestle bridges, and at Bentonville finished, as he had begun, a private, full of dearly bought experience, fuller still of malaria, an expert in all the arts of defence, a resolute and resourceful soldier, who had been tried on many an emergent occasion, and who had stood shoulder to shoulder with the boys whenever they lined up at the sound of the long-roll or rushed to the parapet to repel the assaults of the enemy.
At last, when the whole thing was over, and he had been paid off and discharged, and had spent the greater part of the little that was coming to him in seeing the great world that lay between Pittsburg and Columbus, Lawson fared back to the peaceful Maumee Valley, with his chills and fever and his slender resources, only to find himself a sort of living vacancy in the body-politic. Look where he would, there seemed to be no place open for an old soldier like him in the changed order of things that somehow seemed to prevail in the little community which he called his home. He was in no sense a "hustler," he had no trade but war, no capital save his strong arms and an honest heart, and no powerful friends to push him in any direction, and so, after many disappointments, it came about that he drifted down to Cincinnati, and there enlisted in the regular army. He had served side by side with the regulars for four long years, and they were now the only folk with whose goings and comings he was familiar; and for the first time since his discharge he felt at home among the lean infantrymen as he ate his bacon and beans in the company kitchen, and took his turn at guard, as he had been used to do, or discussed the characters of his Generals with the old men who had served under them when they were Lieutenants in Mexico, in the hazy days before the war, when men's minds were at peace and soldiering a trade worth thinking of.
The days rolled into weeks and months. There was little to do, there were many to do it, and he was content, ay, happy—happier than he had been at any time, that he could remember, since the winter quarters at Chattanooga, after the blockade was broken and fresh beef and soft bread were issued every day. But this was altogether too good a thing to last, and the end came one day when a big detachment of ex-deserters and bounty-jumpers were assigned to the Fourteenth, and the good times were gone forever. To Lawson it was an enigma, and he gave it up, but it came about in this way: When the great volunteer armies were disbanded and sent to their homes, there remained on hand a residuum of deserters and men without souls, who had been bought with a price, but who belonged to no regiment, and so were kept in pay when the rest were mustered out and discharged. Of a sudden it occurred to the powers that this unpromising material might be put to some use in filling the depleted ranks of the regular army.