Lieutenant Clemens needed assistance to mount Paint Brush, and the little mule refused to cross the river; so Ab Grimes took the coil of rope, hitched one end of it to his own saddle and the other end to Paint Brush’s neck.  Grimes was mounted on a big horse, and when he started it was necessary for Paint Brush to follow.  Arriving at the farther bank, Grimes looked around, and was horrified to see that the end of the rope led down in the water with no horse and rider in view.  He spurred up the bank, and the hat of Lieutenant Clemens and the ears of Paint Brush appeared.

“Ah,” said Clemens, as he mopped his face, “do you know that little devil waded all the way across?”

A little beyond the river they met General Harris, who ordered them back to camp.  They admonished him to “go there himself.”  They said they had been in that camp and knew all about it.  They were going now where there was food—­real food and plenty of it.  Then he begged them, but it was no use.  By and by they stopped at a farm-house for supplies.  A tall, bony woman came to the door: 

“You’re secesh, ain’t you?”

They acknowledged that they were defenders of the cause and that they wanted to buy provisions.  The request seemed to inflame her.

“Provisions!” she screamed.  “Provisions for secesh, and my husband a colonel in the Union Army.  You get out of here!”

She reached for a hickory hoop-pole that stood by the door, and the army moved on.  When they arrived at Col.  Bill Splawn’s that night Colonel Splawn and his family had gone to bed, and it seemed unwise to disturb them.  The hungry army camped in the barnyard and crept into the hay-loft to sleep.  Presently somebody yelled “Fire!” One of the boys had been smoking and started the hay.  Lieutenant Clemens suddenly wakened, made a quick rolling movement from the blaze, and rolled out of a big hay-window into the barnyard below.  The rest of the army, startled into action, seized the burning hay and pitched it out of the same window.  The lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he struck the ground, and his boil was far from well, but when the burning hay descended he forgot his disabilities.  Literally and figuratively this was the final straw.  With a voice and vigor suited to the urgencies of the case, he made a spring from under the burning stuff, flung off the remnants, and with them his last vestige of interest in the war.  The others, now that the fire was, out, seemed to think the incident boisterously amusing.  Whereupon the lieutenant rose up and told them, collectively and individually, what he thought of them; also he spoke of the war and the Confederacy, and of the human race at large.  They helped him in, then, for his ankle was swelling badly.  Next morning, when Colonel Splawn had given them a good breakfast, the army set out for New London.