This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXII PRIVATE DENNIS HOGAN, HERO It Was while I was sitting around a barrackroom fire that I picked up the following story. There were a number of old soldiers in my company--men who had served twenty-five years in the army--and their fund of anecdote and excitement was of the largest size. On Thanksgiving Day, 187--, Private Dennis Hogan, Company B, 29th United States Infantry, the telegraph operator at Fort Flint, Montana, sat in his dingy little "two by four" office in the headquarter building, communing with himself and cussing any force of circumstances that made him a soldier. The instruments were quiet, a good Thanksgiving dinner had been enjoyed and now the smoke from his old "T. D." pipe curled in graceful rings around his red head. Denny was a smashing good operator and some eighteen months before he had landed in St. Louis dead broke. All the offices and railroads were full and nary a place did he get. While walking up Pine street one morning his eye fell foul of a sign: -- "Wanted, able-bodied, unmarried men, between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five, for service in the United States Army." In his mind's eye he sized himself up and came to the conclusion that he would fill all the requirements. Now, he hadn't any great hankering for soldiering, but he didn't have a copper to his name and as empty stomachs stand not on ceremony, in he went and after being catechized by the recruiting sergeant, he was pounded for thirty minutes by the examining surgeon, pronounced as sound as a dollar, and then sworn in "to serve Uncle Sam honestly and faithfully for five years. So help me God." The space of time necessary to transform a man from a civilian to a soldier is of a very short duration, and almost before he knew it he...