In the middle of the night Shorty woke up with a yell. "Great Cesar's ghost!" he howled, "what's the matter with me? I'm sicker'n a dog. Must've bin them dodgasted peaches. Si, don't you feel nothin'?" "No," said Si sheepishly; "I'm all right. Didn't you eat nothin' else but them?" "Naw," said Shorty disgustedly. "Nothin' but my usual load o' hardtack and pork. Yes, I chawed a piece o' sassafras root that one of the boys dug up." "Must've bin the sassafras root," said Si. He hated to lie, and made a resolution that he would make a clean breast to Shorty--at some more convenient time. It was not opportune now. "That must've bin a sockdologer of a dose the Surgeon gave me," he muttered to himself. Shorty continued to writhe and howl, and Si made{156} a hypocritical offer of going for the Surgeon, but Shorty vetoed that emphatically. "No; blast old Sawbones," he said. "He won't do nothin' but give me bluemass, and quinine, and I never could nor would take bluemass. It's only fit for horses and hogs." Toward morning Shorty grew quite weak, and correspondingly depressed. "Si," said he, "I may not git over this. This may be the breakin' out o' the cholera that the folks around here say comes every seven years and kills off the strangers. Si, I'll tell you a secret. A letter may come for me. If I don't git over this, and the letter comes, I want you to burn it up without reading it, and write a letter to Miss Jerusha Ellen Briggs, Bad Ax, Wis., tellin' her that I died like a man and soldier, and with her socks on, defendin' his country." Si whistled softly to himself. "I'll do it. Shorty," he said, and repeated the address to make sure. The crisis soon passed, however, and the morning found Shorty bright and cheerful, though weak. Si was puzzled how to get the whisky to Shorty. It would never do to let him know that he had gotten it especially for him. That would have been so contrary to Si's past as to arouse suspicion. He finally decided to lay it where it would seem that someone passing had dropped it, and Shorty could not help finding it. The plan worked all right. Shorty picked it up in a few minutes after Si had deposited it, and made quite an ado over his treasure trove.