t
them.

"Who are you, and what are you doing there?" demanded Dick.

"Who are you, and what do you want of us?" asked one of the men in
reply. "Are you from Tennessee?"

"No; Missouri."

"By the right flank, then, and toddle right along. You want no truck
with us; but if you meet old Daddy Bragg tell him to come and see us.
We've got something for him."

"All right," answered Dick, as he and his squad faced to the right and
marched away. "Good-by, and good luck to you. I don't think old Bragg
will come out," he added, when the men had been left out of hearing.
"They'd shoot him as quick as they would any other varmint. There must
be two or three hundred in that party, and they straggled out of the
ranks last night in the dark. They'll stay there until the enemy's
advance passes, and then they'll come out and give themselves up. Slick
scheme, but I'd die before I would do it myself."

The squad halted at the "diggings" long enough to fill their haversacks,
and then kept on after the army, marching with a quick step and keeping
a good look-out for the Federal cavalry, which they knew would be sent
out to pick up stragglers as soon as Beauregard's retreat became known
to Halleck. They were in no hurry to overtake their comrades, for they
were doing very well by themselves, and neither did they want to be
picked up and treated as deserters by their own rear guard. But if there
_was_ any rear guard they never saw it, although they ran into another
body of Tennesseans, more than a thousand of them this time, who told
them that the army gone on toward Tupelo, thirty-five miles from
Corinth. No one seemed to know why Corinth had been abandoned, and it
turned out afterward that the Richmond government disapproved of it, for
the command was taken from Beauregard and given to Bragg, the man whom
all his soldiers feared and hated, and who, a few months later, said to
the people of Kentucky, "I am here with an army which numbers not less
than sixty thousand men. I bring you the olive-branch which you refuse
at your peril." But proclamations and threats did not take Kentucky out
of the Union.

It took the boys five days to cover the thirty-five miles that lay
between Corinth and Tupelo, and they were by no means the last of the
stragglers to come in. The men who had been left behind, and who had no
intention of deserting, were nevertheless bound to enjoy their liberty
while they had the chance, and some of them did not arri