o I strapped them on the saddle in
front and behind, and only my head stuck out over them. There was one
thing, it would be a practicable impossibility to fall off.

[Illustration: Mounting a horse from the top of a rail fence 021]

The regiment started on a raid. The colonel came along by my company
during the afternoon, and I asked him where we were going. He gave me an
evasive answer, which hurt my feelings. I asked his pardon, but told him
I would like to know where we were going, so as to have my letters
sent to me, but he went off laughing, and never told me, while the old
soldiers laughed, though I couldn't see what they were laughing at.
I did not suppose there was so much difference between officers and
privates, and wondered if it was the policy of this government to have
a cavalry regiment to start off on a long raid and not let the soldiers
know where they were going, and during the afternoon I decided to write
home to the paper I formerly edited and give my opinion of such a fool
way of running a war. Suppose anybody at home was sick, they wouldn't
know where to write for me to come back. There is nothing that will give
a man such an appetite as riding on a galloping horse, and along about
the middle of the afternoon I began to get hungry, and asked the orderly
sergeant when we were going to get any dinner. He said there was a hotel
a short distance ahead, and the colonel had gone forward to order dinner
for the regiment. I believed him, because I had known the orderly before
the war, when he drove a horse in a brickyard, grinding clay. But he
was a liar, too, as I found out afterwards. There was not a hotel within
fifty miles, and soldiers did not stop at hotels, anyway. Finally the
orderly sergeant came along and announced that dinner was ready, and I
looked for the hotel, but the only dinner I saw was some raw pork that
soldiers took out of their saddle bags, with hard tack. We stopped in
the woods, dismounted, and the boys would cut off a slice of fat pork
and spread it on the hard tack and eat it. I had never supposed the
government would subject its soldiers to such fare as that, and I
wouldn't eat. I did not dare dismount, as there was no fence near that
I could use to climb on to my horse, so I sat in the saddle and let the
horse eat some grass, while I thought of home, and pie and cake, and
what a condemned fool a man was to leave a comfortable home to go
and put down anybody's rebellion. The way I