“The Admiral’s in a bad way, sir,” said the Colonel who rode up to meet the General.  “He’s landlocked.  Those clumsy ironclads of his can’t move backward or forward, and the Rebs have been peppering him for two days.”

Just then a fusillade broke from the thickets, nipping the branches from the cottonwoods about them.

“Form your line,” said the General.  “Drive ’em out.”

The force swept forward, with the three picket companies in the swamp on the right.  And presently they came in sight of the shapeless ironclads with their funnels belching smoke, a most remarkable spectacle.  How Porter had pushed them there was one of the miracles of the war.

Then followed one of a thousand memorable incidents in the life of a memorable man.  General Sherman, jumping on the bare back of a scrawny horse, cantered through the fields.  And the bluejackets, at sight of that familiar figure, roared out a cheer that might have shaken the drops from the wet boughs.  The Admiral and the General stood together on the deck, their hands clasped.  And the Colonel astutely remarked, as he rode up in answer to a summons, that if Porter was the only man whose daring could have pushed a fleet to that position, Sherman was certainly the only man who could have got him out of it.

“Colonel,” said the General, “that move was well executed, sir.  Admiral, did the Rebs put a bullet through your rum casks?  We’re just a little tired.  And now,” he added, wheeling on the Colonel when each had a glass in his hand, “who was in command of that company on the right, in the swamp?  He handled them like a regular.”

“He’s a second lieutenant, General, in the Sixth Missouri.  Captain wounded at Hindman, and first lieutenant fell out down below.  His name is Brice, I believe.”

“I thought so,” said the General.

Some few days afterward, when the troops were slopping around again at Young’s Point, opposite Vicksburg, a gentleman arrived on a boat from St. Louis.  He paused on the levee to survey with concern and astonishment the flood of waters behind it, and then asked an officer the way to General Sherman’s headquarters.  The officer, who was greatly impressed by the gentleman’s looks, led him at once to a trestle bridge which spanned the distance from the levee bank over the flood to a house up to its first floor in the backwaters.  The orderly saluted.

“Who shall I say, sir?”

The officer looked inquiringly at the gentleman, who gave his name.

The officer could not repress a smile at the next thing that happened.  Out hurried the General himself, with both hands outstretched.

“Bless my soul!” he cried, “if it isn’t Brinsmade.  Come right in, come right in and take dinner.  The boys will be glad to see you.  I’ll send and tell Grant you’re here.  Brinsmade, if it wasn’t for you and your friends on the Western Sanitary Commission, we’d all have been dead of fever and bad food long ago.”  The General sobered abruptly.  “I guess a good many of the boys are laid up now,” he added.