Yellow Bluff, Fla.,
Monday, May 16, 1864.
Dear Sister L.:—
My letters from home bring the news that you have another brother in the army, but of course you will have heard that long before this reaches you. I am not sorry he has gone. One hundred days of a summer’s campaign will be apt to knock some of the romance out of him. He thinks he has none, but the remark that he has paid $10 for a pair of boots “like yours, military, you know,” shows how his mind runs. He has been running over for three years with the desire “to be a soldier like Oliver,” and now I hope he will get his fill of it. No doubt he will make a good one and would fight like a tiger on occasion, but a little experience will change a good many of his ideas. He is not likely to see any harder fighting than a brush with guerillas. I am afraid he will consider himself in for the war after his hundred days are up, which is just what I don’t want him to do, but I won’t borrow trouble.
I hear from the Eighty-third that it is nearly full to the maximum. Captain Woodward is mustered as the Colonel and Captain McCoy as Lieutenant Colonel. All the old members of Company K, except five have re-enlisted, so Captain Hechtman writes. According to my figures “all but five” is just four, for when I left there were but nine of the old boys left.
This mail brings us the good news that colored soldiers are at last to get their dues in the matter of pay. The paymaster was here a week ago and offered the heroes of Olustee $7 a month. Most of them would not take it. Only those very much in need of money did so.
