nd himself, as he didn't care to be bothered with
combination tactics of which he had never had previous knowledge. Being
of the same opinion, Braxton himself took hold, and the next
performance, though somewhat erroneous in many respects, was a slight
improvement on the first, though Braxton did not give time for the
battery to complete one movement before he would rush it into another.
When the officers assembled to compare notes during the rest after the
second repetition, Minor growled that this was "a little better, yet not
good," which led to some one suggesting in low tone that the major got
his positives and comparatives worse mixed than his tactics, and
inquiring further "whether it might not be well to dub him Minor Major."
The laughter that followed this sally naturally reached the ears of the
seniors, and so Brax never let up on the command until the review went
off without an error of any appreciable weight, without, in fact, "a
hitch in the fut or an unhitch in the harse," as Doyle expressed it. It
was high noon when the battalion got back to barracks and the officers
hung out their moist clothing to dry in the sun. It was near one when
the battery men, officers and all, came steaming up from the stables,
and there was the colonel's orderly with the colonel's compliments and
desires to see Captain Cram before the big battery man had time to
change his dress.

Braxton's first performance on getting into cool habiliments was to go
over to his office and hunt through the book-shelves for a volume in
which he never before had felt the faintest interest,--the Light
Artillery Tactics of 1864. There on his desk lay a stack of mail
unopened, and Mr. Drake was already silently inditing the summary note
to the culprit Waring. Brax wanted first to see with his own eyes the
instructions for light artillery when reviewed with other troops,
vaguely hoping that there might still he some point on which to catch
his foeman on the hip. But if there were he did not find it. He was
tactician enough to see that even if Cram had formed with his leading
drivers on line with the infantry, as Braxton thought he should have
done, neither of the two methods of forming into battery would then have
got his guns where they belonged. Cram's interpretation of the text was
backed by the custom of service, and there was no use criticising it
further. And so, after discontentedly hunting through the dust-covered
pages awhile in hopes of stu