night.

This was a new suggestion by Shorty, and an amazing success.

"I declare, Shorty," said Si, as he lay down on the bed to try it, "I
often wonder where you get all your ideas. For a man who wasn't raised
on the Wabash you know an awful sight. Mebbe, if you'd actually been
born in Posey County you'd a-knowed enough to be a Jigadier-Brindle.
Then I'd a lost you for a pard. This's a great invention. Why, it's
softer and comfortabler than one of mother's feather beds. When I get
out of the army, I'm going to sleep on nothin' but cedar boughs."

"There, you're at it again the Wabash forever," returned Shorty,
good-humoredly. "They raise the finest corn and cattle in the world on
the Wabash, I'll admit, and some fairly good soldiers. But where'll
you get any cedars there to make beds with? You'll have to go back to
sleepin' on wheat straw and corn husks, with chicken-feather pillers.
But after{42} the way you stood up to that rebel Sergeant to-day I'll
never say another word about ager and milk-sick en the Wabash, and I'll
lick any other feller that does. There wasn't a speck of ager in
your gizzard when you ordered him forward, or you'd blow his Southern
Confederacy head off."

"There was more ager there than you thought, Shorty," Si admitted
softly. "I was awfully scared, for there was six to us two, and if that
feller 'd had the right kind of sand he'd a-jumped me at once, before I
could get my gun up. The moment he began to palaver I knowed I had him.
But I'd 'a' died in my tracks before I'd let him go, and I knowed you
would, too. You're the best pard a feller ever had."

And he reached over and took Shorty's rough hand and squeezed it
affectionately.

"I can bet on you every time, even when I don't think it's quite safe to
bet on myself. And, Shorty," he continued, with his eyes kindling, "it
was worth all that we've gone through since we've been in the army, even
all that time in the rain, to have the Colonel speak as he did to us
before the rest of the boys. I'd be willing to enlist three years more
if father and mother and sisters, and and Annabel could have heard him.
I tell you, war has some glorious things in it, after all."

He sat there on his bed before the fire, with his feet curled up under
him in the comfortable way that it takes months of field service
to acquire, and gazed steadily into the bank of glowing coals. They
suffused his face and body with their generous warmth, and helped lift
hi