“Oh, yes! You are the commander, Cap’n Moseley, an’ I’m the army. Ain’t I the gayest army you ever had under you? I’ll tell you what, Cap’n Moseley (I’d call you Dick, like I useter, if we wasn’t in the ranks), when I j’ined the army I thought I was goin’ to fight the Yankees, but they slapped me in the camp of instruction over there at Adairsville, an’ now here we are fightin’ our own folks. If we ain’t fightin’ ’em, we are pursuin’ after ’em, an’ runnin’ ’em into the woods an’ up the mountains. Now what kind of a soldier will one of these conscripts make? You needn’t tell me, Cap’n! The law won’t pan out.” “But it’s the law,” said Captain Moseley. The captain had been wounded in Virginia, and was entitled to a discharge, but he accepted the position of conscript officer. He had the grit and discipline of a veteran, and a persistence in carrying out his purposes that gave him the name of “Hardhead” in the army. He was tall and muscular, but his drooping left shoulder showed where a Federal bullet had found lodgment. His closely cropped beard was slightly streaked with gray, and his face would have been handsome had not determination left its rude handwriting there. The two rode on together in silence a little space, the cold mists, driven by the wind, tingling in their faces. Presently Private Chadwick, who had evidently been ruminating over the matter, resumed the thread of his complaints. “They tell me,” he said, “that it’s a heap easier to make a bad law than it is to make a good one. It takes a lot of smart men a long time to make a good one, but a passel of blunderbusses can patch a bad one up in a little or no time. That’s the way I look at it. “What’s the name of this chap we are after? Israel Spurlock? I’d like to know, by George, what’s the matter with him! What makes him so plague-taked important that two men have to be sent on a wild-goose chase after him? They yerked him into army, an’ he yerked himself out, an’ now the word is that the war can’t go on unless Israel Spurlock is on hand to fling down his gun an’ run when he hears a bung-shell playin’ a tune in the air.” Captain Moseley coughed to hide a smile. “It’s jest like I tell you, Cap’n. The news is that we had a terrible victory at Chattanooga, but I notice in the Atlanta papers that the Yankees ain’t no further north than they was before the fight; an’ what makes it wuss, they are warmin’ themselves in Chattanooga, whilst we are shiverin’ outside. I reckon if Israel Spurlock had been on hand at the right time an’ in the right place, we’d a drove the Yanks plumb back to Nashville. Lord! I hope we’ll have him on the skirmish line the next time we surround the enemy an’ drive him into a town as big as Chattanooga.”