That was the beginning of Sam's career as a soldier. It ended at Savannah. After the capture of the city, and as General Sherman's army was setting out on the march to Richmond, Sam found himself one of a squad ordered to remain behind, for the purpose of assisting the United States Excise Officers.
The men had quarters in a large stone building, which was given over entirely to their use. The work was much to their taste. Every day they shrewdly searched the city for contraband liquor, and not infrequently they unearthed a den where kegs of whiskey were concealed. Some of these they always smuggled to their own quarters, and the rest they handed over to the excise officers. Orgies that were fired with unfailing rum consumed the greater part of every night, and formed an epoch in Sam's history upon which he reflects with lasting satisfaction.
Most of the men in camp are younger than Old Man Toler and Sam the Book-keeper, and of the younger set I have made the acquaintance of "Long-nosed Harry." Harry is barely thirty and already a man of considerable experience. When fairly started, he can tell capital tales of how he has "beat his way" on long journeys through the country, and of narrow escapes from the "cops," and of other occasions when he has not escaped. Wherever in this country the railways have penetrated, Harry seems to have gone, and he has gathered on his wanderings a fund of curious information, as though there were a nether side of things, and he had grown familiar with that in contrast with the surface that is exposed to the eye of the ordinary traveller.
Harry's face confirms his account of a career not unfamiliar with the police. A long thin face it is, with small dark eyes set close together, a narrow, thin-lipped mouth, a receding chin, and an abnormally long nose, which has gained nothing in point of beauty by having been broken in a fight with a negro at Atlantic City.
He is of glib speech, and he has at command a long repertory of songs of the vaudeville variety, and this enhances his standing among the men. Besides, Harry can read aloud, as I learned one day when a stray newspaper found its way into the camp. He read with a certain swift readiness that held your interest, and you soon grew excited in an effort to recognize old acquaintances in the strangely accented longer words, which were plainly unintelligible to Harry and his hearers, while yet the general sense of what was read was obviously clear.
Harry and I sat talking together one Sunday evening. We had a corner of the lobby to ourselves. Suddenly, without apparent connection with what we had been saying, he gave me one of those rare confidences which reveal, as by a flash of supernatural light, the very heart of a man's life, and then leave you awed and speechless, in the presence of eternal verities.
It was a fragment of personal history, very short, and it was told with the directness and simplicity of truth itself. He had been married six years before. His wife was a delicate girl who lived for only two years after Harry married her. He was a brakeman on a freight-train then. He used to look forward to his "off-day" with a feeling, he said, that "made life worth living." And they were convenient, too, those "off-days"; for in them he did the washing, and the scrubbing, and whatever else of accumulated housework he could spare his wife. But she died. And there was nothing more in life for Harry; so he drifted back into the old way, the way of all the men, a life of alternate work and debauch.
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