y the first general scatter, the government swiftly
mustered out all the State volunteers not actually on duty in the
distant islands, filled up the regulars with raw recruits, and shipped
them straightway, undisciplined, undrilled, across the wide Pacific.
Then new regiments of volunteers were authorized,--National volunteers,
instead of State,--and, though their field officers as a rule were
chosen from the regular service, there were by no means enough to go
around among the many deserving applicants. The forty odd colonelcies
went, in most cases, to the right men, but there were many "left," and
Billy Ray was one. He had had no luck whatever with his Kentucky
regiment. He had been sent to Chickamauga, and thence to Florida, and
thence nowhere worth mentioning. They saw no service without the States;
heard no hostile bullets whistle; found, like most of the State
volunteers, they were to have no part in the Cuban campaign, and, that
being the case, they wished to go home. They hadn't enlisted to play
soldier, said they, and much as they admired and honored Colonel Ray,
they could not be made to love soldier life that had no fighting. "Give
us a chance to _do_ something," was their cry, "and we'll stay till hell
freezes over; but no more of this sort of thing for us." Ray had tried
hard to keep alive regimental interest and enthusiasm, but few could
feel either interest or enthusiasm in a daily routine of drill, parade,
and police duty in a hot, malarious Southern camp under Southern summer
skies. Other regiments about them were getting orders to go home for
muster out, and some of these individual Kentuckians had begun to go,
too. If Ray could have moved them a few miles away from the other camps,
and close to the sparkling sea water, things might have gone better, but
his original brigade commander, a regular whom he knew, and who knew
him, had gotten orders for the Philippines, and gone.

He was succeeded by a brigadier whom Ray had never heard of, nor
apparently had anybody else outside the contracted limits of his
commonwealth, and this gentleman, having never before served with
troops, and knowing nothing about modern military conditions, had
imbibed his impressions from foreign pictorial papers. His conception of
the functions of a general officer found concrete form in a daily
circuit of his camps, mounted and accompanied by his full staff and
escort. When not so occupied he sat in much state under the fly of h