Pretty soon New Orleans receded to just a yellow-fever blotch on the mottled green of Louisiana, and above, the Gulf shown like a mirror. In fact I was too preoccupied to enjoy the panorama. I was hanging my head out the rusty porthole and spitting out the ballast of my retrograde digestion. I worried that I had the Fever, but I didn't, unless you called it Gin Fever. The iron gondola stunk like the devil. We of the 7th Infantry "Cotton Balers" were so crowded in, true to our namesake, that some of our foreign-borns said that by comparison, it made steerage-class to the New World seem like a Tammany boss's Flying Cabriolet. Because of the parsimoniousness of Congress, Secretary Marcy couldn't give General Taylor half the balloons he had promised. So, overloaded, underpowered, our ship's wobbly- wabbly trim swung her gondola like a bell clapper. The gyre of our revolving wheels pressed down against the Moonward-inclined rudders, so our upward progress was slow. The two Ericsson-Screw propelled steam balloons had a better time of it. Our ship, the Celestial City, wasn't designed for this kind of transit. The C. C., or Sea-Saw as we called her, was so ungainly, wallowing into sudden gales and gusts, our five-layered hammocks banged one another and flopped over. Once we rose up high enough, and were obliged to shut the portholes, smoke and fumes from the funnels and `scape pipes below kept creeping through the old joints, setting a hundred men to coughing and cursing.

Before even a day up-and-over New Orleans, a couple men started spitting black bile. That meant the Fever. Almost every day of that long transit, another couple men started spitting their black out the porthole. Three days of air-steaming, and we formed ranks. The bugles groaned, the drums thumped and rattled, and we dropped our first corpse overboard, sliding out of a flag. A week off the coal tethers, and we ceased to bother with such ceremony for such a routine ballast drop.

My brother, Kelly, who sold six horses to buy himself a commission, led my company. Every morning at five bells we fell out of our hammocks and into our ranks, and marched, with pack and musket, around and around the mess hall, the last man of our column a yard behind the first man. Kelly said it was to keep us out of idleness. I argued, "What did god give us a deck of cards and 7 dollars a month for?"

Nights were peaceful and sweet, sometimes. A lone hurricane lantern lit up the regimental colors and the giant stars and stripes fluttering beside the silk stitching, CELESTIAL CITY. The stars got bigger and brighter. The enormous Moon made the striped fabric glow. And the wind sung sweetly in the wheel paddles.

A Company K, 2nd Dragoon mechanic filled in as the ship's Petty Engineer, in order to save War Department notes. He was a skinny, consumptive foreign-born, a spleeny Nay-Sayer of a fellow, named John W. Klager, but we came to call him "Hernani". One day I was reading a funny Loco-Foco editorial in an old New York Evening Post to my long-necked, big-eared friend, name of Bourdett, (called, for obvious reasons, Six-Fingers), and when I read-

Secretary Marcy has got it wrong. The spoils don't go to the victor; on the contrary. The victor goes to the spoils - just like rats to garbage. Sometimes you have to burn the barn to kill the rats. The rats are the no good Hunkers. And the barn, my friends, is the Democratic Party.

- this fellow came over and applauded. You see, he was a cross between a Barnburner and a Loco-Foco, I mean, a Liberty Party fellow; in other words, that strange stripe of biped, a Foe-to-Texas. Appropriately, keeping the boiler fires hot was his main duty. Turns out this fellow had a liking for the practice of versifying. Accordingly, he had some strange things to say. He said the telegraph would change the way we speak. He said Napoleon was no hero. He said poets were our unknown true legislators.

"Not the Freemasons?" I asked.

"No, poets!"

"That accounts for the tariff," said Six-Fingers.

"How's that?" asked Hernani, scratching his ear with a wrench.

"Tax rhymes with hacks."

"Heck, Hernani," I complained, "Those true congressmen are sleeping on the job, I figure. I thought we got to fight Injuns for glory and all that. No one told me I'd have to ride a sea-saw to the Moon." But it was account of that I was cooped up and bored and so spent my liberties with Corporal Hernani Klager. He was lonely and said I was a good fellow.

Though he was starting to go bald, Hernani wore his hair long and wild. He also liked to wear a red ribbon on his uniform. I asked him why his sweetheart gave him a red ribbon instead of a green one for the green laurel. Hernani said sadly, "My sweetheart died of Fever. Since then, I don't wish for happiness. That's why I joined the Army. But this ribbon..."

Brightening with memory, he explained that back sixteen years ago he'd worn a red waistcoat at the opening of the Hernani. The ribbon was the surviving fragment of the waistcoat.

"What's a Hernani?" I wondered.

"My friend, The `Ernani was the declaration of independence for my generation, and Hugo he was our Jefferson! Tell me, who is the Jefferson of your generation?"

I spoke without hesitation:"James Polk."

Six-Fingers shook his head. "Brigham Young."

Hernani looked disappointed and changed the subject back to Hernani.

This Hernani fellow was some kind of bandit and ladies' beau who for some reason gives some old geezer a trumpet. Whenever the old geezer tooted on that horn, poor Hernani had to die. Seems that Hernani owed him a pretty big favor, because he, the old geezer, (and the king too, for some reason, who in my opinion was the real troublemaker) all loved one lady, and consequently all wanted to pepper each other's hide with buckshot. Just when Hernani finally gets the belle into his arms, the old geezer blows the horn. Guess what happens next? Well, after the horn gets tooted, Hernani, the lady, and the old geezer all commit suicide.

That's some kind of trumpet, sure. Must have been worse than hearing reveille on a bugle, I reckon. I don't know much about blowing horns. I used to beat on a pot and pan come election day, though. But in a way it was the toot of a locomotive steam-whistle that got me to dreaming about glory. So I figured the story wasn't entirely loco-foco, judged loosely.

Corporal Hernani Klager wrote up some pretty intolerable poetry himself. He taught it to the boiler's firemen, mostly Negroes, and made them sing it. They didn't understand the words I bet, but they didn't have a choice, neither, no more than the boiler did when asked to boil by Marster Fire. Sometimes I'd hear them sing to the rhythm of the ponderous piston:

Boiler, wrench that vapor, ho! turn that wheel! drive the sledge!

We're miners of the crepuscule:Clouds receive thy wedge!

Winged-locomotive riders, feed that ugly fire -

Stoke a stack of coal! We rise up one foot higher!

We must not stop! We're slaves to steam! Dare we of soot forswear the air?

Oh no! Not us! We're cursed by Cain, with G inverse D-square.

It was strange to think that just a few months ago, the farm was my world, taking care of Ma was my duty, and the glory of fighting savages was my dream. After two months in Camp Greenhorn, our steamer transport left Baltimore and arrived in Saint Augustine, where, to my surprise, we just took on coal and kept on going. It turns out that once the U. S. Army figured out a way to capture Chief Osceola - they invited him to a Peace Pow-Wow, he came out of the alligator swamps, and then they grabbed him, easy - the Seminoles' gumption for fighting (and they didn't have cannon) slowly gave out. So, our steamer kept going south, around the peninsula, all the way to New Orleans. Then all of us seven thousand Dough-Boys who made up the little Regular Army marched down Canal Street to an open field, where, tethered to three dozen masts, the colossal steam balloons were taking on coal, enough to carry us all the way up to the Peninsula of Texas.

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