that kind. He had visited all the sutlers, and canvassed the
scanty stocks in the few stores in Chattanooga. He had bought the sole
remaining can of tomatoes at a price which would have almost bought
the field in which the tomatoes were raised, and he had turned over the
remnant lots of herring, cheese, etc., he found at the sutler's, with
despair at imagining any sort of way in which they could be worked up to
become appetizing and assimilative to Si's stomach.

"What you and Si needs," he would say to Shorty, "is chicken and fresh
'taters. If you could have a good mess of chicken and 'taters every day
you'd come up like Spring shoats. I declare I'd give that crick bottom
medder o' mine, which hasn't it's beat on the Wabash, to have mother's
coopful o' chickens here this minute."

But a chicken was no more to be had in Chattanooga than a Delmonico
banquet. The table of the Major-General commanding the Army of the
Cumberland might have a little more hardtack and pork on it than
appeared in the tents of the privates, and be cooked a little better,
but it had nothing but hardtack and pork.

The Deacon made excursions into the country, and even ran great risks
from the rebel pickets and bushwhackers, in search of chickens. But
the country had been stripped, by one side or the other, of everything
eatable, and the people that remained in their cheerless homes were
dependent upon what they could get from the United States Commissary.

One day he found the Herd-Boss in camp, and poured forth his troubles to
him. The Herd-Boss sympathized deeply with him, and cudgeled his brains
for a way to help.

"I'll tell you what you might do," he said at length, "if you care to
take the risk. We're goin' back with some teams to Bridgeport to-morrow
mornin'. You might git in one of the wagons and ride back 10 or 15 miles
to a little valley that I remember that's there, and which I think looks
like it hain't bin foraged. I was thinkin' as we come through the other
day that I might git something goo'd to eat up there, and I'd try it
some day. No body seems to 've noticed it yit. But it may be chock full
o' rebels, for all I know, and a feller git jumped the moment he sets
foot in it."

"I'll take my chances," said the Deacon. "I'll go along with you
to-morrer mornin'."

The Deacon found that a ride in a wagon was not such an unqualified
favor as he might have thought. The poor, half-fed, overworked mules
went so slowly that the Dea