found that his ankle was hurt by the fall, I brought a
bottle of horse liniment out of my saddle-bags, and a rag, and bound
some liniment on his ankle. He said he had never seen a Yankee soldier
before, and he was glad he had met me. I told him he was the first rebel
I had ever met, and I hoped he would be the last, until the war was
over. By this time our horses had gone to nibbling grass, as though
there were no such thing as war. We could hear occasional bugle calls
off in the woods in two directions, and knew that our respective
commands had gone off and got lost again, so we concluded to camp there
till morning. After the excitement was over I began to get hungry, and I
asked him if he had anything to eat. He said he had some corn bread and
bacon, and he could get some sweet potatoes over in a field. So I built
a fire there on the track, and he hobbled off after potatoes. Just about
daylight breakfast was served, consisting of coffee, which I carried
in a sack, made in a pot he carried, bacon fried in a half of a tin
canteen, sweet potatoes roasted in the ashes, and Confederate corn
bread, warmed by holding it over the fire on a sharp stick. My friend,
the rebel, sat on my saddle, which I had removed from my horse, after he
had promised me on his honor to help me to put it on when it was time to
mount. He knew how to put on saddles, and I didn t, and as his ankle
was lame I gave him the best seat, he being my guest, that is, he was
my guest if I beat him in the coming game of seven-up, which we were to
play to see if he was my prisoner, or I was his. It being daylight, I
could see him, and study his character, and honestly he was a mighty
fine-looking fellow. As we eat our early breakfast I began to think
that the recruiting officer was more than half right about war being a
picnic. He talked about the newspaper business in the South, and before
breakfast was over we had formed a partnership to publish a paper at
Montgomery, Ala., after the war should be over. I have eaten a great
many first-class meals in my time, have feasted at Delmonico's, and
lived at the best hotels in the land, besides partaking pretty fair food
camping out, where an appetite was worked up by exercise and sporting,
but in all my life I have never had anything taste as good as that
combination Union-Confederate breakfast on the Alabama race track,
beside the judges stand. After the last potato peeling, and the last
crumb of corn bread had been