for it to move on to the front without further delay.  Samuel Clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose tail had been trimmed down to a tassel at the end in a style that suggested his name, Paint Brush, upholstered and supplemented with an extra pair of cowskin boots, a pair of gray blankets, a home-made quilt, frying-pan, a carpet sack, a small valise, an overcoat, an old-fashioned Kentucky rifle, twenty yards of rope, and an umbrella, was a representative unit of the brigade.  The proper thing for an army loaded like that was to go into camp, and they did it.  They went over on Salt River, near Florida, and camped not far from a farm-house with a big log stable; the latter they used as headquarters.  Somebody suggested that when they went into battle they ought to have short hair, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy could not get hold of it.  Tom Lyon found a pair of sheep-shears in the stable and acted as barber.  They were not very sharp shears, but the army stood the torture for glory in the field, and a group of little darkies collected from the farm-house to enjoy the performance.  The army then elected its officers.  William Ely was chosen captain, with Asa Glasscock as first lieutenant.  Samuel Clemens was then voted second lieutenant, and there were sergeants and orderlies.  There were only three privates when the election was over, and these could not be distinguished by their deportment.  There was scarcely any discipline in this army.

Then it set in to rain.  It rained by day and it rained by night.  Salt River rose until it was bank full and overflowed the bottoms.  Twice there was a false night alarm of the enemy approaching, and the battalion went slopping through the mud and brush into the dark, picking out the best way to retreat, plodding miserably back to camp when the alarm was over.  Once they fired a volley at a row of mullen stalks, waving on the brow of a hill, and once a picket shot at his own horse that had got loose and had wandered toward him in the dusk.

The rank and file did not care for picket duty.  Sam Bowen—­ordered by Lieutenant Clemens to go on guard one afternoon—­denounced his superior and had to be threatened with court-martial and death.  Sam went finally, but he sat in a hot open place and swore at the battalion and the war in general, and finally went to sleep in the broiling sun.  These things began to tell on patriotism.  Presently Lieutenant Clemens developed a boil, and was obliged to make himself comfortable with some hay in a horse-trough, where he lay most of the day, violently denouncing the war and the fools that invented it.  Then word came that “General” Tom Harris, who was in command of the district, was stopping at a farmhouse two miles away, living on the fat of the land.

That settled it.  Most of them knew Tom Harris, and they regarded his neglect of them as perfidy.  They broke camp without further ceremony.