CVI
I WAS terribly provoked this evening. I had just got comfortably settled down to write a letter when I was ordered out on a detail. I soon found it was to load boards, at the wharf, for the sutler. As I was on guard last night, and going on again tomorrow, it looked to me very much like crowding the mourners; and more than that, I did not like being ordered out to do work they have no right to put on a soldier anyway; but to keep peace in the family I went and did the work, and now, at ten o’clock, I have got back to my letter. I have been very busy today, and have something to show for it. Dan. and I got hold of some more boards and immediately proceeded to build a palace. We have a good one, the walls four feet high with our big tent perched on top, a bunk on each side, a table, and lots of spare room, not to mention a well-fitted board floor.
We have an addition to our company in the shape of a contraband who come across from Virginia in a little dugout canoe the other night. We took him in to the cook, and he is earning his keep.
We are getting quite a gathering of prisoners here. Several hundred arrived yesterday. The increasing force of prisoners calls for extra vigilance on our part. We now have two Dahlgren boat howitzers posted so as to command the rebel camp, and are going to have four more. The rebels are set to do their own work—to dig wells, build cook houses, &c. In such a crowd you will always find a proportion of smarties, and a few of the lordly ones kicked up a rumpus and swore they would not do any work for the United States. They changed their mind when they were strung up without any parley, and the joke of the thing was that a good many of the prisoners were tickled to death to see them disciplined.
Did you ever know Sam. Newell? He was one of the squad that enlisted from our company into the regular cavalry last fall. When we were in Washington on our way down here, he came on from the front with a lot of dismounted cavalrymen, and when we came down here he simply got homesick. So he got on board the boat and came along with us. This was nothing more nor less than desertion, and he was arrested here and put under guard. But one fine morning Samuel turns up missing and is not heard from again for several days, when he appears at the guard house under full military escort and is again in the toils and more carefully guarded than before. When he ran away he went up country about forty miles and let himself to work in a sawmill. The owner has a schooner on which he ships wood down here to the Point, and the next trip he made Sam. came along to help work the boat. He kept pretty shady while they were unloading here, but one of our officers got his eye on him and Sam. was ingloriously dragged out of his hole. I guess most of those fellows who went into the cavalry wish they had stayed with the old Second. They missed that long furlough at home, and life with the regulars is not like soldiering with your own crowd of old-time friends and acquaintances.