was included in the ten.  First, I was as good a hustler as ever “threw his feet,” and next, I was “Sailor Jack.”  I understood boats and boating.  The ten of us forgot the remaining forty men of Company L, and by the time we had missed one meal we promptly forgot the commissary.  We were independent.  We went down the river “on our own,” hustling our “chewin’s,” beating every boat in the fleet, and, alas that I must say it, sometimes taking possession of the stores the farmer-folk had collected for the Army.

For a good part of the three hundred miles we were from half a day to a day or so in advance of the Army.  We had managed to get hold of several American flags.  When we approached a small town, or when we saw a group of farmers gathered on the bank, we ran up our flags, called ourselves the “advance boat,” and demanded to know what provisions had been collected for the Army.  We represented the Army, of course, and the provisions were turned over to us.  But there wasn’t anything small about us.  We never took more than we could get away with.  But we did take the cream of everything.  For instance, if some philanthropic farmer had donated several dollars’ worth of tobacco, we took it.  So, also, we took butter and sugar, coffee and canned goods; but when the stores consisted of sacks of beans and flour, or two or three slaughtered steers, we resolutely refrained and went our way, leaving orders to turn such provisions over to the commissary boats whose business was to follow behind us.

My, but the ten of us did live on the fat of the land!  For a long time General Kelly vainly tried to head us off.  He sent two rowers, in a light, round-bottomed boat, to overtake us and put a stop to our piratical careers.  They overtook us all right, but they were two and we were ten.  They were empowered by General Kelly to make us prisoners, and they told us so.  When we expressed disinclination to become prisoners, they hurried ahead to the next town to invoke the aid of the authorities.  We went ashore immediately and cooked an early supper; and under the cloak of darkness we ran by the town and its authorities.

I kept a diary on part of the trip, and as I read it over now I note one persistently recurring phrase, namely, “Living fine.”  We did live fine.  We even disdained to use coffee boiled in water.  We made our coffee out of milk, calling the wonderful beverage, if I remember rightly, “pale Vienna.”

While we were ahead, skimming the cream, and while the commissary was lost far behind, the main Army, coming along in the middle, starved.  This was hard on the Army, I’ll allow; but then, the ten of us were individualists.  We had initiative and enterprise.  We ardently believed that the grub was to the man who got there first, the pale Vienna to the strong.  On one stretch the Army went forty-eight hours without grub; and then it arrived at a small village of some three hundred inhabitants, the name of which I do not remember, though I think it was