from the country.  Corn was abundant in the region to the south and southwest of Murfreesboro’, so to make good our deficiences in this respect, I employed a brigade about once a week in the duty of collecting and bringing in forage, sending out sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty wagons to haul the grain which my scouts had previously located.  In nearly every one of these expeditions the enemy was encountered, and the wagons were usually loaded while the skirmishers kept up a running fire, Often there would occur a respectable brush, with the loss on each side of a number of killed and wounded.  The officer in direct command always reported to me personally whatever had happened during the time he was out—­the result of his reconnoissance, so to speak, for that war the real nature of these excursions—­and on one occasion the colonel in command, Colonel Conrad, of the Fifteenth Missouri, informed me that he got through without much difficulty; in fact, that everything had gone all right and been eminently satisfactory, except that in returning he had been mortified greatly by the conduct of the two females belonging to the detachment and division train at my headquarters.  These women, he said, had given much annoyance by getting drunk, and to some extent demoralizing his men.  To say that I was astonished at his statement would be a mild way of putting it, and had I not known him to be a most upright man and of sound sense, I should have doubted not only his veracity, but his sanity.  Inquiring who they were and for further details, I was informed that there certainly were in the command two females, that in some mysterious manner had attached themselves to the service as soldiers; that one, an East Tennessee woman, was a teamster in the division wagon-train and the other a private soldier in a cavalry company temporarily attached to my headquarters for escort duty.  While out on the foraging expedition these Amazons had secured a supply of “apple-jack” by some means, got very drunk, and on the return had fallen into Stone River and been nearly drowned.  After they had been fished from, the water, in the process of resuscitation their sex was disclosed, though up to this time it appeared to be known only to each other.  The story was straight and the circumstance clear, so, convinced of Conrad’s continued sanity, I directed the provost-marshal to bring in arrest to my headquarters the two disturbers of Conrad’s peace of mind, After some little search the East Tennessee woman was found in camp, somewhat the worse for the experiences of the day before, but awaiting her fate content idly smoking a cob-pipe.  She was brought to me, and put in duress under charge of the division surgeon until her companion could be secured.  To the doctor she related that the year before she had “refugeed” from East Tennessee, and on arriving in Louisville assumed men’s apparel and sought and obtained employment as a teamster in the quartermaster’s department.  Her features were very large, and