“What regiment stayed under the bank?”

“Sixth Missouri, General,” said an aide, promptly.

The General sat late in the Admiral’s gunboat that night, but when he returned to his cabin in the Forest Queen, he called for a list of officers of the Sixth Missouri.  His finger slipping down the roll paused at a name among the new second lieutenants.

“Did the boys get back?” he asked.  “Yes, General, when it fell dark.”

“Let me see the casualties,—­quick.”

That night a fog rolled up from the swamps, and in the morning jack-staff was hid from pilot-house.  Before the attack could be renewed, a political general came down the river with a letter in his pocket from Washington, by virtue of which he took possession of the three army core, and their chief, subpoenaed the fleet and the Admiral, and went off to capture Arkansas Post.

Vicksburg had a breathing spell.

Three weeks later, when the army was resting at Napoleon, Arkansas, a self-contained man, with a brown beard arrived from Memphis, and took command.  This way General U. S. Grant.  He smoked incessantly in his cabin.  He listened.  He spoke but seldom.  He had look in his face that boded ill to any that might oppose him.  Time and labor be counted as nothing, compared with the accomplishment of an object.  Back to Vicksburg paddled the fleet and transports.  Across the river from the city, on the pasty mud behind the levee’s bank were dumped Sherman’s regiments, condemned to week of ditch-digging, that the gunboats might arrive at the bend of the Mississippi below by a canal, out of reach of the batteries.  Day in and day out they labored, officer and men.  Sawing off stumps under the water, knocking poisonous snakes by scores from the branches, while the river rose and rose and rose, and the rain crept by inches under their tent flies, and the enemy walked the parapet of Vicksburg and laughed.  Two gunboats accomplished the feat of running the batteries, that their smiles might be sobered.

To the young officers who were soiling their uniform with the grease of saws, whose only fighting was against fever and water snakes, the news of an expedition into the Vicksburg side of the river was hailed with caps in the air.  To be sure, the saw and axe, and likewise the levee and the snakes, were to be there, too.  But there was likely to be a little fighting.  The rest of the corps that was to stay watched grimly as the detachment put off in the little ‘Diligence’ and ‘Silver Wave’.

All the night the smoke-pipes were batting against the boughs of oak and cottonwood, and snapping the trailing vines.  Some other regiments went by another route.  The ironclads, followed in hot haste by General Sherman in a navy tug, had gone ahead, and were even then shoving with their noses great trunks of trees in their eagerness to get behind the Rebels.  The Missouri regiment spread out along the waters, and were soon waist deep, hewing a path