ng thirst the world has ever known.
You're the boy, too, who told about it."

The youth moved forward, gazed at him and said:

"Now I remember you, too. You're Dick Mason of the Winchester regiment.
I heard the Winchesters were on board, but I haven't had time to look
around. It was hot when we drank up the river, but it was hotter that
afternoon at Perryville. God! what a battle! And again at Stone
River, when the Johnnies surprised us and took us in flank. It was you
Kentuckians then who saved us."

"Just as you would have saved us, if it had been the other way."

"I hope so. But, Mason, we left a lot of the boys behind. A big crowd
stopped forever at Perryville, and a bigger at Stone River."

"And we left many of ours, too. I suppose we'll land soon, won't we, and
then take these Grand Gulf forts with troops."

"Yes, that's the ticket, but I hear, Mason, it's hard to find a landing
on the east side. The banks are low there and the river spreads out to
a vast distance. After the boats go as far as they can we'll have to get
off in water up to our waists and wade through treacherous floods."

The question of landing was worrying Grant at that time and worrying him
terribly. The water spread far out over the sunken lands and he might
have to drop down the river many miles before he could find a landing on
solid ground, a fact which would scatter his army along a long line, and
expose it to defeat by the Southern land forces. But his anxieties were
relieved early in the morning when a colored man taken aboard from a
canoe told him of a bayou not five miles below Grand Gulf up which his
gunboats and transports could go and find a landing for the troops on
solid ground.

Dick was asleep when the boats entered the bayou, but he was soon
awakened by the noise of landing. It was then that most of the
Winchester and of the Ohio regiment discovered that they were comrades,
thrown together again by the chances of war, and there was a mighty
welcome and shaking of hands. But it did not interfere with the rapidity
of the landing. The Winchester regiment was promptly ordered forward
and, advancing on solid ground, took a little village without firing a
shot.

All that day troops came up and Grant's army, after having gone away
from Grand Gulf in darkness, was coming back to it in daylight.

"They say that Pemberton at Vicksburg could gather together fifty
thousand men and strike us, while we've only twenty thousand here,