en in another, looking to the right and to the
left to see if anybody was watching him. I was the same kind of a miser
about my pancake. If I hid it in the woods I might fail to find the
place, in the morning, where I had hid it, and besides, some soldier
that was peacefully snoring near me, apparently, might have one eye on
me, and commit burglary. If I put it in my pocket, and went to sleep, I
might have my pocket picked, so I concluded to remain awake and hold
it in my hands. There appeared to be nothing between me and death by
starvation, except that cornmeal pancake, and I sat there for an hour,
beside the dying embers of the campfire, trying to make up my mind who
stole my other pancake, and what punishment should be meted out to him
if I ever found him out. I would follow him to my dying day. I suspected
the captain, the colonel, the chaplain, and six hundred soldiers, any
one of whom was none too good to steal a man's last pancake if he was
hungry. To this day I have never found out who stole my pancake, but I
have not given up the search, and if I live to be as old as Methuselah,
and I find out the fellow that put himself outside my pancake that dark
night in the pine woods, I will gallop all over that old soldier, if he
is older than I am. That is the kind of avenger that is on the track of
that pancake-eater. I sat there and nodded over my remaining pancake,
clutched in my hands, and finally started to my feet in alarm. Suppose
I should fall asleep, and be robbed? The thought was maddening. I have
read of Indians who would eat enough at one sitting to last them several
days, and the thought occurred to me that if I ate the pancake my
enemies could not get it away from me, and perhaps it would digest
gradually, a little each day, and brace me up until we got where there
were rations plenty. So I sat there and deliberately eat every mouthful
of it, and looked around at the sleeping companions with triumph, laid
down and slept as peacefully on the ground as I ever slept in bed.

There may be truth in the story about Indians eating enough to last them
a week, but it did not work in my case, for in the morning I was hungry
as a she wolf. The pancake had gone to work and digested itself right
at once, as though there was no end of food, and my stomach yearned for
something. I walked down by the quartermaster's wagons, about daylight,
and there was a four-mule team, each with a nose bag on, with corn in
it. The mules