was thankful.

"I thought I'd get the bulge on them things some way or other," said Si,
as he drank the last of his coffee and arose from his meal, feeling like
a giant refreshed with new wine.

For the next two or three months Si largely devoted his surplus energies
to further experimenting with the hardtack. He applied every conceivable
process of cookery he could think of that was possible with the meager
outfit at his command in the way of utensils and materials. Nearly all
of his patient and persevering efforts resulted only in vexation of
spirit.

He continued to eat hardtack from day to day, in these various forms,
but it was only because he had to do it. He didn't hanker after it,
but it was a military necessity--hardtack or starvation. It was a hard
choice, but Si's love of life--and Annabel--induced him to choose the
hardtack.

[Illustration: THE BEST WAY AFTER ALL 045 ]

But for a long-time Si's stomach was in a state of chronic rebellion,
and on the whole he had a hard time of it getting used to this staple
article of army diet. He did not become reconciled to it until after his
regiment had rations of flour for a week, when the "cracker-line" had
been cut by the guerillas and the supply of that substantial edible was
exhausted. Si's experience with the flour swept away all his objections
to the hardtack. Those slapjacks, so fearfully and wonderfully made,
and those lumps of dough, mixed with cold water and dried on flat stones
before the fire, as hard as cannon balls, played sad havoc with his
internal arrangements. For the first time he was obliged to fall into
the cadaverous squad at sick-call and wabble up to the doctor's shop,
where he was dosed with castor-oil and blue-mass. Si was glad enough to
see hardtack again. Most of the grumbling he did thereafter concerning
the hardtack was because he often couldn't get enough.

About six months taught Si what all the soldiers learned by experience,
that the best way to eat the average hardtack was to take it
"straight"--just as it came out of the box, without any soaking or
frying or stewing. At meal-time he would make a quart or so of coffee,
stab the end of a ramrod through three or four slices of sowbelly, and
cook them over the coals, allowing some of the drippings to fall upon
the hardtack for lubricating purposes, and these constituted his frugal
repast.

CHAPTER V. FAT PORK--INDISPENSABLE BODY TIMBER FOR PATRIOTISM.

IT WAS told in the l