This may seem a trifling matter, but it was far from it.  We all remember the man who was very fond of white beans, but after having fifty or sixty meals of them in succession, began to find a suspicion of monotony in the provender.  We had now six months of unvarying diet of corn meal and water, and even so slight a change as a variation in the way of combining the two was an agreeable novelty.

At the end of June there were twenty-six thousand three hundred and sixty-seven prisoners in the Stockade, and one thousand two hundred—­just forty per day—­had died during the month.

CHAPTER XXXI.

Dying by inches—­Seitz, the slow, and his death—­Stiggall and Emerson —­ravages on the scurvy.

May and June made sad havoc in the already thin ranks of our battalion.  Nearly a score died in my company—­L—­and the other companies suffered proportionately.  Among the first to die of my company comrades, was a genial little Corporal, “Billy” Phillips—­who was a favorite with us all.  Everything was done for him that kindness could suggest, but it was of little avail.  Then “Bruno” Weeks—­a young boy, the son of a preacher, who had run away from his home in Fulton County, Ohio, to join us, succumbed to hardship and privation.

The next to go was good-natured, harmless Victor Seitz, a Detroit cigar maker, a German, and one of the slowest of created mortals.  How he ever came to go into the cavalry was beyond the wildest surmises of his comrades.  Why his supernatural slowness and clumsiness did not result in his being killed at least once a day, while in the service, was even still farther beyond the power of conjecture.  No accident ever happened in the company that Seitz did not have some share in.  Did a horse fall on a slippery road, it was almost sure to be Seitz’s, and that imported son of the Fatherland was equally sure to be caught under him.  Did somebody tumble over a bank of a dark night, it was Seitz that we soon heard making his way back, swearing in deep German gutterals, with frequent allusion to ‘tausend teuflin.’  Did a shanty blow down, we ran over and pulled Seitz out of the debris, when he would exclaim: 

“Zo! dot vos pretty vunny now, ain’t it?”

And as he surveyed the scene of his trouble with true German phlegm, he would fish a brier-wood pipe from the recesses of his pockets, fill it with tobacco, and go plodding off in a cloud of smoke in search of some fresh way to narrowly escape destruction.  He did not know enough about horses to put a snaffle-bit in one’s mouth, and yet he would draw the friskiest, most mettlesome animal in the corral, upon whose back he was scarcely more at home than he would be upon a slack rope.  It was no uncommon thing to see a horse break out of ranks, and go past the battalion like the wind, with poor Seitz clinging to his mane like the traditional grim Death to a deceased African.  We then knew that Seitz had thoughtlessly sunk the keen spurs he would persist in wearing; deep into the flanks of his high-mettled animal.