enerally very rigid in his temperance ideas, He strongly
disapproved of Shorty's{155} drinking, and always interposed all the
obstacles he could in the way of it. But this was an extraordinary
case--it would be "using liquor for a medicinal purpose"--and his
conscience was quieted.

Co. Q had one of those men--to be found in every company--who can get
whisky under apparently any and all circumstances. In every company
there is always one man who seemingly can find something to get drunk on
in the midst of the Desert of Sahara. To Co. Q's representative of this
class Si went, and was piloted to where, after solemn assurances against
"giving away," he procured a halfpint of fairly-good applejack, into
which he put his doses of quinine.

In the middle of the night Shorty woke up with a yell.

"Great Cesar's ghost!" he howled, "what's the matter with me? I'm
sicker'n a dog. Must've bin them dodgasted peaches. Si, don't you feel
nothin'?"

"No," said Si sheepishly; "I'm all right. Didn't you eat nothin' else
but them?"

"Naw," said Shorty disgustedly. "Nothin' but my usual load o' hardtack
and pork. Yes, I chawed a piece o' sassafras root that one of the boys
dug up."

"Must've bin the sassafras root," said Si. He hated to lie, and made
a resolution that he would make a clean breast to Shorty--at some
more convenient time. It was not opportune now. "That must've bin a
sockdologer of a dose the Surgeon gave me," he muttered to himself.

Shorty continued to writhe and howl, and Si made{156} a hypocritical
offer of going for the Surgeon, but Shorty vetoed that emphatically.

"No; blast old Sawbones," he said. "He won't do nothin' but give me
bluemass, and quinine, and I never could nor would take bluemass. It's
only fit for horses and hogs."

Toward morning Shorty grew quite weak, and correspondingly depressed.

"Si," said he, "I may not git over this. This may be the breakin' out o'
the cholera that the folks around here say comes every seven years and
kills off the strangers. Si, I'll tell you a secret. A letter may come
for me. If I don't git over this, and the letter comes, I want you to
burn it up without reading it, and write a letter to Miss Jerusha Ellen
Briggs, Bad Ax, Wis., tellin' her that I died like a man and soldier,
and with her socks on, defendin' his country."

Si whistled softly to himself. "I'll do it. Shorty," he said, and
repeated the address to make sure.

The crisis soon passed, however, an