as I
shall not follow any man after death, where I am in doubt as to which
road he has taken, but if he is alive, and reads these lines, he can
hear of something to his advantage by communicating with me. I would
probably kill him. As far as the bounty was concerned, I got that all
right, but it was only three-hundred dollars. Within twenty-four hours
after I had been credited to the town from which I enlisted, I heard of
a town that was paying as high as twelve-hundred dollars for recruits.
I have met with many reverses of fortune in the course of a short, but
brilliant career, have loaned money and never got it back, have been
taken in by designing persons on three card monte, and have been beaten
trading horses, but I never suffered much more than I did when I found
that I had got to go to war for a beggerly three-hundred dollars bounty,
when I could have had twelve hundred dollars by being credited to
another town. I think that during two years and a half of service
nothing tended more to dampen my ardor, make me despondent, and hate
myself, than the loss of that nine-hundred dollars bounty. There was not
an hour of the day, in all of my service, that I did not think of what
might have been. It was a long time before I brought to my aid that
passage of scripture, "There is no use crying for spilled bounty," but
when I did it helped me some. I thought of the hundreds who didn't get
any bounty.

I joined my regiment, and had a cavalry horse issued to me, and was
assigned to a company. I went up to the captain of the company, whom I
had known as a farmer before the war commenced, and told him I had come
to help him put down the rebellion. I never saw a man so changed as he
was. I thought he would ask me to bring my things into his tent, and
stay with him, but he seemed to have forgotten that he had known me,
when he worked on the farm. He was dressed up nicely, and I thought he
put on style, and I could only think of him at home, with his overalls
tucked in his boots, driving a yoke of oxen to plow a field. He seemed
to feel that I had known him under unfavorable circumstances before the
war, and acted as though he wanted to shun me. I had drawn an infantry
knapsack, at Madison, before I left for the front, and had it full of
things, besides a small trunk. The captain called a soldier and told him
to find quarters for me, and I went out of his presence. At my quarters,
which consisted of what was called a pup-tent, I