Every month if the paymaster’s iron cart finds us we send ten dollars to the poet McSweny for Winona Cole. She’s back working blackface for Mr Noone so she got her own fortune if three dollars a week be ever a fortune. Our fortune is twenty-and-some letters from Winona tied in a shoelace. She sends us all her news in her nice handwriting. She hopes for our return but she don’t want us to get shot by a) the Rebels or b) the colonel, for desertion. She says she hope we got victuals and that we get a good wash once a month as she always insisted.
