“Jes, ’fore the war broke out,” he said, “I had enlisted in the First Ohio, I was workin’ down the Valley of Virginia wid a little wagon show doin’ the same kind of work I’se doin’ now, ’cept it was nothin’ but play to this. Funny, too, for six months afore I was down that same valley wid the cavalry cuttin’ into them rebs, an’ I don’t mind telling you they was a cuttin’ us, too, wid Mosby in the woods an’ ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, God knows where.
“Well, we had been doin’ a day an’ a night stand in one of the little towns, an’ had a fourteen mile haul down the pike for the next. We was hopin’ for a moon, not so much to strike by, but for the drive, for the people hadn’t got the roads to right, an’ they was still full of artillery ruts an’ wagon train wrecks. But we pulled off the show, an’ before the last bareback was on I has the menagerie canvas on the wagons, all stakes up and the dens down the road, with the boys leadin’ the elephants and the two camels over the hills. It had been squally like, all night, but I had the round top tightened up so hard that youse could have walked the ropes an’ there was no danger.
“But jes’ as Dutch Andy was playin’ his last piece there was a bust of wind an’ a flash of lightnin’, an’ she began to come down in solid sheets. We gets the people out and gets to work on the tent wall. This peels off in a jiffy, an’ the rain lets up. Then down wid the big top an’ on the wagon. But sumthin’ catches in the riggin’ on the main pole, an’ I sees I has to send me helper up on a climb to get her clear. Everything was gone but the pole wagon and a few side show things, an’ the ’bus we bosses rode in, with four grays pullin’ it. Afore I sends my helper, Jim, a fine boy, what had been a sailor, up the pole, I send four men out to hold her up by hangin’ on the long rope to the far stake. Jim skins up to the top an’ gits her loose, but before he kin git down the gang holdin’ the long guy loses their holt, an’ the pole falls.
“Well, we picks up Jim, an’ he is pretty bad. Ribs in, an’ a lot of cuts. We tried ev’ry house aroun’, but no doctor, though there was one good old lady who gave us some arnicy and strips of bandage she said she’d kept to use on her husband when he got shot up in the Saturday night fights ’bout the tavern. So we piles poor Jim into the ’bus, and drives off easy, while we walks along quiet like an’ sore. Poor Jim, he jes’ groans an’ talks ’bout doin’ his best, an’ I keeps givin’ him liquor to make him forget it.
“But it was all over for Jim, an’ we jes pullin’ out of a clump of woods down by a river when we sees he’s dead. There was no use carryin’ his body long, an’ he didn’t have no people to ship it to, so we decided to give him a decent burial. Two of the stakemen digs the place, an’ we lays poor Jim away under a willow tree. Jes’ then one of the boys speaks up an’ sez:
“‘Say, boys, it don’t seem right to plant Jim without sayin’ sumthin’.’
“But there wasn’t a mother’s son in the crowd knew what to say, though they is all on to what the fellow means. We waits awhile an’ I sez:
“‘Well, there might be a little singin’.’
“An’ I wishes that I had the principal clown there, for he was good on sad songs, ’specially if he’d been boozin’ a little.