Unable to make an honest living so long as General Kelly kept his two horsemen ahead of us, we returned to the Army and raised a revolution.  It was a small affair, but it devastated Company L of the Second Division.  The captain of Company L refused to recognize us; said we were deserters, and traitors, and scalawags; and when he drew rations for Company L from the commissary, he wouldn’t give us any.  That captain didn’t appreciate us, or he wouldn’t have refused us grub.  Promptly we intrigued with the first lieutenant.  He joined us with the ten men in his boat, and in return we elected him captain of Company M. The captain of Company L raised a roar.  Down upon us came General Kelly, Colonel Speed, and Colonel Baker.  The twenty of us stood firm, and our revolution was ratified.

But we never bothered with the commissary.  Our hustlers drew better rations from the farmers.  Our new captain, however, doubted us.  He never knew when he’d see the ten of us again, once we got under way in the morning, so he called in a blacksmith to clinch his captaincy.  In the stern of our boat, one on each side, were driven two heavy eye-bolts of iron.  Correspondingly, on the bow of his boat, were fastened two huge iron hooks.  The boats were brought together, end on, the hooks dropped into the eye-bolts, and there we were, hard and fast.  We couldn’t lose that captain.  But we were irrepressible.  Out of our very manacles we wrought an invincible device that enabled us to put it all over every other boat in the fleet.

Like all great inventions, this one of ours was accidental.  We discovered it the first time we ran on a snag in a bit of a rapid.  The head-boat hung up and anchored, and the tail-boat swung around in the current, pivoting the head-boat on the snag.  I was at the stern of the tail-boat, steering.  In vain we tried to shove off.  Then I ordered the men from the head-boat into the tail-boat.  Immediately the head-boat floated clear, and its men returned into it.  After that, snags, reefs, shoals, and bars had no terrors for us.  The instant the head-boat struck, the men in it leaped into the tail-boat.  Of course, the head-boat floated over the obstruction and the tail-boat then struck.  Like automatons, the twenty men now in the tail-boat leaped into the head-boat, and the tail-boat floated past.

The boats used by the Army were all alike, made by the mile and sawed off.  They were flat-boats, and their lines were rectangles.  Each boat was six feet wide, ten feet long, and a foot and a half deep.  Thus, when our two boats were hooked together, I sat at the stern steering a craft twenty feet long, containing twenty husky hoboes who “spelled” each other at the oars and paddles, and loaded with blankets, cooking outfit, and our own private commissary.