Amid all the dangers of battle ever walks the spirit of humor, and there is no day so terrible that it fails to hold some laughable incident. I recall one such on the Shiloh field which illustrates the fact that man is the wildest creature of the animal kingdom when thoroughly frightened. Early on Monday morning a small squad of us was preparing a hasty breakfast of “hardtack” and bacon behind our line, having staked our horses out to bushes, when firing began suddenly on the line, followed by the passage of a wild-eyed rider, proclaiming the arrival of Buell at Hamburg, shouting that he was surrounding us and warning us to run for our lives. There was a large, long-haired trooper in our crowd, who made a hurried run for his horse, mounted him, and put the spurs to him, overlooking the fact that the horse was tied to a bush with a long rope. As the spurs went home in the horse’s flanks, he began wildly racing around the bush, taking as wide a circle as his line would allow. The excited trooper tossed his head from side to side, trying to keep an eye on the firing line, while the horse increased his speed and narrowed his circle as the rope gradually wound around the bush until it became so tight that it brought him to a sudden stop and sent the trooper on a flying dive to the ground. We were all laughing at him when he ended his wild race, and he was so embarrassed and humiliated that he secured a transfer to another company. Immediately after our return to Corinth I was detailed to pilot the corps of engineers in locating the line of breastworks that was to protect our front against the advance of the Union Army from Shiloh battle field. [Illustration: text decoration] CHAPTER VII CORINTH AFTER SHILOH Captain J. H. Lockett was chief of the corps of engineers in throwing the line of fortifications around Corinth. We made the first general survey, commencing at a point on the Memphis and Charleston (now the Southern) Railway about one mile and a half east of Corinth and running north and west in a circle, keeping about the same distance from the town until we came to the Ijams crossing, west of Corinth. I felt keenly the responsibility of my work as a pilot, but in boyhood and youth I had learned the faces of these hills and woods as one comes to know the kindly countenances of loving friends. In these quiet places I had played every game known to the boys of my day, including “Hookey.” I knew where the landscape smiled with sunny meadows or laughed with purling springs or frowned with the gloom of a tangled thicket or grew calm and dignified in the cooling shadows of stately groves.