felt then I wouldn't have
touched a rebellion if one lay right in the road. What business was it
of mine if some people in the South wanted to dissolve partnership and
go set up business for themselves? How was I going to prevent them
from having a southern confederacy, by riding an old rack of bones of a
horse, that would reach his nose around every little while and chew my
legs? If the recruiting officer who inveigled me into the army had
come along then, his widow would now be drawing a pension. While I was
thinking, dreaming of home, and the horse was eating grass, the fool
animal suddenly took it into his head to lay down and roll, and before I
could kick any of his ribs in, he was down, and I was rolling off, with
one leg under him. The soldiers quit eating and pulled the horse of
me, and hoisted me up into the space between my baggage, and then they
laughed, lit their pipes and smoked, as happy as could be. I couldn t
see how they could be happy, and wondered if they were not sick of war.
Then they mounted, and on we went. My legs and body became chafed, and
it seemed as though I couldn t ride another minute, and when the captain
came along I told him about it, and asked him if I couldn t be relieved
some way. He said the only way was for me to stand on my head and ride,
and he winked at a soldier near me, and, do you know, that soldier
actually changed ends with himself and stood on his head and hands in
the saddle and rode quite a distance, and the captain said that was the
way a cavalry soldier rested himself. Gracious, I wouldn t have tried
that for the world, and I found out afterwards that the soldier who
stood on his head formerly belonged with a circus.

I suppose it was wrong to complain, but the horse they gave me was the
meanest horse in the regiment. He would bite and kick the other horses,
and they would kick back, and about half the time I was dodging the
heels of horses, and a good deal of the time I was wondering if a man
would get any pension if he was wounded that way. It would seem pretty
tough to go home on a stretcher, as a wounded soldier, and have people
find out a horse kicked you. I never had been a man of blood, and didn't
enlist to kill anybody, as I could prove by that recruiting officer,
and I didn t want to fight, but from what I could gather from the
conversation of the soldiers, fighting and killing people was about all
they thought about. They talked about this one and that one wh