Four of our company were already dead. Jacob Lowry and John Beach were
standing near the gate one day when some one snatched the guard's blanket
from the post where he had hung it, and ran. The enraged sentry leveled
his gun and fired into the crowd. The balls passed through Lowry's and
Beach's breasts. Then Charley Osgood, son of our Lieutenant, a quiet,
fair-haired, pleasant-spoken boy, but as brave and earnest as his gallant
father, sank under the combination of hunger and cold. One stinging
morning he was found stiff and stark, on the hard ground, his bright,
frank blue eyes glazed over in death.

One of the mysteries of our company was a tall, slender, elderly
Scotchman, who appeared on the rolls as William Bradford. What his past
life had been, where he had lived, what his profession, whether married
or single, no one ever knew. He came to us while in Camp of Instruction
near Springfield, Illinois, and seemed to have left all his past behind
him as he crossed the line of sentries around the camp. He never
received any letters, and never wrote any; never asked for a furlough or
pass, and never expressed a wish to be elsewhere than in camp. He was
courteous and pleasant, but very reserved. He interfered with no one,
obeyed orders promptly and without remark, and was always present for
duty. Scrupulously neat in dress, always as clean-shaved as an
old-fashioned gentleman of the world, with manners and conversation that
showed him to have belonged to a refined and polished circle, he was
evidently out of place as a private soldier in a company of reckless and
none-too-refined young Illinois troopers, but he never availed himself of
any of the numerous opportunities offered to change his associations.
His elegant penmanship would have secured him an easy berth and better
society at headquarters, but he declined to accept a detail. He became
an exciting mystery to a knot of us imaginative young cubs, who sorted up