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CHAPTER X.
"BOB WHEAT."
_The Boy and the Man._
(Communicated.)
In the early summer of 1846, after the victories of Palo Alto and
Resaca de la Palma, the United States Army, under General Zachary
Taylor, lay near the town of Matamoras. Visiting the hospital quarters
of a recently-joined volunteer corps from "the States," I remarked a
bright-eyed youth of some nineteen years, wan with disease, but cheery
withal. The interest he inspired led to his removal to army
headquarters, where he soon recovered health and became a pet. This
was "Bob Wheat," son of an Episcopal clergyman, and he had left school
to come to the war. He next went to Cuba with Lopez, was wounded and
captured, but escaped the garroters to follow General Walker to
Nicaragua.
Exhausting the capacity of South American patriots to _pronounce_, he
quitted their society in disgust, and joined Garibaldi in Italy,
whence his keen scent of combat summoned him home in time to receive a
bullet at Manassas. The most complete Dugald Dalgetty possible; he had
"all the defects of the good qualities" of that doughty warrior.
Some months after the time of which I am writing, a body of Federal
horse was captured in the valley of Virginia.
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