“All right.  Let’s see:  where was I?  O, yes, talking about our brigade.  It is the Third Brigade, of the Third Division, of the Fourteenth Corps, and is made up of the Fourteenth Ohio, Thirty-eighth Ohio, Tenth Kentucky, and Seventy-fourth Indiana.  Our old Colonel—­George P. Este —­commands it.  We never liked him very well in camp, but I tell you he’s a whole team in a fight, and he’d do so well there that all would take to him again, and he’d be real popular for a while.”

“Now, isn’t that strange,” broke in Andrews, who was given to fits of speculation of psychological phenomena:  “None of us yearn to die, but the surest way to gain the affection of the boys is to show zeal in leading them into scrapes where the chances of getting shot are the best.  Courage in action, like charity, covers a multitude of sins.  I have known it to make the most unpopular man in the battalion, the most popular inside of half an hour.  Now, M.(addressing himself to me,) you remember Lieutenant H., of our battalion.  You know he was a very fancy young fellow; wore as snipish’ clothes as the tailor could make, had gold lace on his jacket wherever the regulations would allow it, decorated his shoulders with the stunningest pair of shoulder knots I ever saw, and so on.  Well, he did not stay with us long after we went to the front.  He went back on a detail for a court martial, and staid a good while.  When he rejoined us, he was not in good odor, at all, and the boys weren’t at all careful in saying unpleasant things when he could hear them, A little while after he came back we made that reconnaissance up on the Virginia Road.  We stirred up the Johnnies with our skirmish line, and while the firing was going on in front we sat on our horses in line, waiting for the order to move forward and engage.  You know how solemn such moments are.  I looked down the line and saw Lieutenant H. at the right of Company —­, in command of it.  I had not seen him since he came back, and I sung out: 

“‘Hello, Lieutenant, how do you feel?’

“The reply came back, promptly, and with boyish cheerfulness: 

“’Bully, by ——­; I’m going to lead seventy men of Company into action today!’

“How his boys did cheer him.  When the bugle sounded—­’forward, trot,’ his company sailed in as if they meant it, and swept the Johnnies off in short meter.  You never heard anybody say anything against Lieutenant after that.”

“You know how it was with Captain G., of our regiment,” said one of the Fourteenth to another.  “He was promoted from Orderly Sergeant to a Second Lieutenant, and assigned to Company D. All the members of Company D went to headquarters in a body, and protested against his being put in their company, and he was not.  Well, he behaved so well at Chickamauga that the boys saw that they had done him a great injustice, and all those that still lived went again to headquarters, and asked to take all back that they had said, and to have him put into the company.”