“Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” Not a good excuse, but it has been sufficient on many occasions to be true. The soldier on campaign passes life easily. He holds it in no strong grip, and the Merry Christmas evening is as liable to be spent in the saddle in fierce contact with the blizzard as in his cosey tepee with his comrades and his scant cheer. The jug containing the spirits of the occasion may have been gotten from a town fifty miles away on the railroad. It is certainly not the distillation of the summer sunlight, and is probably “tough” enough stuff to mingle naturally with its surroundings; but if one “drinks no more than a sponge” he may not have the jaded, retrospective feeling and the moral mending on the day to come. To sit on a camp chest, and to try and forget that the soldier’s quart cup is not filled with best in the market, and then to enter into the full appreciation of the picturesque occasion, is to forget that long marches, “bull meat,” and sleepless, freezing nights are in the background. Pleasant hours sit so nicely in their complemental surrounding of hard ones, since everything in the world is relative. As to the eating in a cavalry camp on campaign, it is not overdone, for beans and coffee and bacon and bacon and coffee and beans come round with sufficient regularity to forestall all gormandizing. The drinking is not the prominent [239]
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[241]feature either, but helps to soften the asperities of a Dakota blizzard which is raging on the other side of the “ducking.”

The Sibley tent weaves and moans and tugs frantically at its pegs. The Sibley stove sighs like a furnace while the cruel wind seeks out the holes and crevices. The soldiers sit in their camp drawing-room buttoned up to the chin in their big canvas overcoats, and the muskrat caps are not removed. The freemasonry of the army makes strong friendships, and soldiers are all good fellows, that being a part of their business. There are just enough exceptions to prove the rule. The cold, bloodless, compound-interest snarler is not in the army, and if he were he would be as cheerless on a damp evening as he would in a fight. One man is from Arizona, another from Washington, and the rest from the other corners of Uncle Sam’s tract of land. They have met before, and memory after memory comes up with its laughter and pathos of the old campaigns. One by one the “shoulder-straps” crawl in through the hole in the tepee. And, mind you, they do not walk in like a stage hero, with dash and abandon and head in the air; they prostrate themselves like a Turk at prayer, and come crawling. If they raise the flap ever so much, and bring company of the Dakota winds, they are met with a howl of protests. After gaining erectness, they brush the snow from their clothes, borrow a tin cup, and say, “How! how!”

The chief of scouts buttons up to his eyes, and must go look after his “Inguns”; the officer of the day comes in to make his papers, and if he keeps the flying jokes out of his statistics, he does well enough. The second lieutenant, fresh from West Point, doesn’t hesitate to address the grizzled colonel of twenty campaigns—nay, he may even deign to advise him on the art of war; but that is unsatisfactory—the advising of colonels—because the colonel’s advice to the sub has always to be acted upon, whereas the sub’s advice to the colonel is mostly nullified by the great powers of discretion which are vested in the superior rank. The life-study of a sub should be to appear like the cuckoo-bird in a German clock—at the proper moment; and when he appears at wrong intervals, he is repaired. Colonels are terrible creatures, with vast powers for promoting happiness or inflicting misery. If he will lend the moderating influence of his presence, it is well; but if he sends his man around to “present his compliments, and say that the d—— row will immediately cease,” his wishes if not his personality are generally respected.

It is never a late evening, such a one as this; it’s just a few stolen moments from the “demnition grind.” The last arrival may be a youngster just in from patrol, who explains that he just “cut the trail of forty or fifty Sioux five miles below, on the crossing of the White River;” and you may hear the bugle, and the bugle may blow quick and often, and if the bugle does mingle its notes with the howling of the blizzard, you will discover that the occasion is not one of merriment. But let us hope that it will not blow.

The toasts go around, and you use your tobacco in a miserly way, because you can’t get any more, since only to-day you have offered a dollar for a small plug to a trooper, and he had refused to negotiate, although he had pared off a small piece as a gift, and intimated that generosity could go no further. Then you go to your tepee, half a mile down the creek at the scout camp, and you stumble through the snow-laden willows and face the cutting blast, while the clash and “Halt!” of the sentinel stop you here and there. You pull off your boots and crawl into your blankets quickly before the infernal Sibley stove gives its sigh as the last departing spark goes up the chimney, and leaves the winds and drifting snows to bellow and scream over the wild wastes.