Si Klegg Author:John McElroy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The next day Si's feet felt as if there was a separate and individual jumping toothache in every sinew, muscle, tendon and toe-nail; but that didn't matter. With... more » Bragg's infantry ahead and John Morgan's cavalry in the rear, the 200th Ind. had to SI'S LOAD BEGINS TO GET HEAVY. go forward so long as the boys could put one foot before the other. The unloading went on even more rapidly than the day before. "My knapsack looks like an elephant had stept on it," Si said, as he ruefully regarded it in the evening. "Show me one in the regiment that don't," answered his comrade. Thenceforward everything seemed to conspire to teach Si how vain and superfluous were the things of this world. The first rain-storm soaked his cherished album until it fell to pieces, and his sister's portfolio did the same. He put the photographs in his blouse pocket and got along just as well. When he wanted to write he got paper from the sutler. A mule tramped on his fancy coifee-pot, and he found he could make quite as good coffee in a quart-cup. A wagon-wheel ran over his cherished frying-pan, and he melted an old canteen in two and made a lighter and handier pan out of one-half of it. He broke his bowie-knife prying the lid off a cracker- box. He piled his knapsack with the others one day when the regiment was ordered to strip them off for a charge, and neither he nor his comrades ever saw one of them again. He never attempted to replace it. He learned to roll up an extra pair of socks and a change of underclothing in his blanket, tie the ends of this together and throw it over his shoulder sash fashion. Then, with his socks drawn up over the bottoms of his pantaloons, three days' rations in his haversack and 40 rounds in his cartridge- box, he was ready to make his 30 miles a day in any direct...« less