names,
on a sheet of paper, and take it up to the Captain's tent.

"The Captain was having a life-and-death rassle with Cap Summerville
over their eternal chess, when he's crosser'n two sticks, and liable
to snap your head off if you interrupt him. 'Hello, what do you want?
What's this?' says he, taking the paper."

[Illustration: Them's our names and addresses 59]

"'Them's our names and addresses,' says the brats, cool as cucumbers.
Thought we ought to give 'em to you, so's you'd know where to find us,
in case you wanted us in a hurry, say, at night.'

"The blazes it is,' says Cap, and Cap Summerville roared. 'You get back
to your quarters quick as you can run. Don't worry about my not finding
you when I want you. It's my business to find you, and I've got men to
help me do it. I'll find you sometime in a way that'll make your hair
stand up. Get out, now, and never come around my tent with any such
blamed nonsense as that.'

"And Cap Somerville took advantage of the break to snap up Cap's queen,
which made him hotter'n ever.

"When the boys got back they found them smart Alecks, Bob Walsh and Andy
Sweeney, waiting for 'em, and they consoled 'em, saying, That's just the
way with that old bull-head. Never'll take no good advice from nobody
about running' the company. Thinks he knows it all. You see how he runs
the company. He haint got the addresses o' half his men this minnit, and
don't know where they are. That's the reason so many o' our letters from
home, and the good things they send us, never reach us. He ought to keep
a regler directory, same as in the other companies.'"

"Then some o' them smarties found out that Scruggs was stuck on his
spouting. Seems that he was the star declaimer in his school. They laid
it in to him that I was soft on hearing poetry spouted, especially after
night, when the moon was up, and everything quiet in camp, and that I
was particularly tender on 'Bingen on the Rhine.' You know that if there
is anything I'm dead sore on it's that sniveling rot. There used to be a
pasty-faced boy in school that'd wail that out, and set all the girls to
bawling. Then they gave us an entertainment just before we left, and all
the girls were there, and Pasty-Face he must be the star attraction.
He wailed out his condemned old There-was-a-soldier-of-the
Legion--laying-i-n-Algiers, and all the girls looked at us as if we
were already dead, and they'd better look out for new beaux. My own
particular