Helena was a pestiferous swamp, worth more than an active campaign to our enemies, filling our hospitals, and furrowing the levee bank with graves. It was too hot for much drilling, and we kept our better horses in order by daybreak races. With the local fever feeling its way into my veins, I was too listless to care much for any diversion; but Ike came to me one evening to say that he "reckoned" Ruby was as good a horse as anybody had in the "camps," and he might as well take a hand in the games. I told him I had no objection to his being run, if he could find a suitable boy, but that both he and I were too heavy for race-riding. "I don't weigh only about a hundred and a half," said the ambitious man. "Well, suppose you don't, that is ten pounds too much." "I reckon a man can ride ten pound lighter 'n he is if he knows how to ride; anyhow, if Rube can't skin anything around here, I don't know nothin' about horses." "Ike, did you ever run that horse?" "Well, Colonel, now you ask me, I did jest give Dwight's darkey a little brush once." Conquering my indignation and my scruples, I went over, just for the honor of the establishment, and made up a race for the next day. I have seen crack race-horses in my time, but I never saw more artistic riding nor more capital running than that summer morning on the River Road at Helena, just as the sun began to gild the muddy Mississippi. The satisfaction of this conquest, and the activity with which new engagements were offered by ambitious lieutenants, who little knew the stuff my man and horse were made of, kept off my fever for some weeks; but I steadily declined all opportunity of racing with horses outside of our command, for I had been reared in a school of Puritan severity, and had never quite overcome my convictions against the public turf. A corporal of an "Injeanny rege_ment_" took occasion to crow lustily--so I heard--because "one of them French coveys" was afraid to run him a quarter for five dollars. It appeared that a cleanly European was always supposed by this gentry to be French; and in the army at large I was better known by the company I kept than by my New England characteristics.