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Here and there a tree spread its branches to the breezes, and now and then a snatch of bird song broke the stillness. But Lovey Mary kept gloomily on her way, her eyes fixed on the cross-ties. The thoughts surging through her brain were dark enough to obscure even the sunshine. For three nights she had cried herself to sleep, and the "nervous sensations" were getting worse instead of better.
The same unemotional attentiveness was in their forms as their slow feet drifted here and there always after the one leader, their eyes on his demonstrative hands, and their ears drinking in his discourse. He showed them the rails of the track, how smooth they were, how they rested on their cross-ties, and how they were spiked in place always the same width apart.
Even as late as the Civil War rails of this kind were in use in some places. The first cross-ties were of stone instead of wood, and the locomotives and cars of early days were very crude. In 1833, people who were coming from the West to attend President Jackson's second inauguration travelled part of the way by railroad.
I then learned that there was no bridge of any importance except the one at Baldwin, nine miles farther down, but as I was aware, from information recently received, that it was defended by three regiments and a battery, I concluded that I could best accomplish the purpose for which I had been detached crippling the road by tearing up the track, bending the rails, and burning the cross-ties.
To find him, Bonaventure must set out, like him on foot, south-eastward over some fifty miles of wagon-road to the nearest railway; eastward again over its cross-ties eighty miles to la ville, the great New Orleans, there to cross the Mississippi.
Ahead of the steel-layers were the Italians placing the cross-ties in position to receive the track, and here the foreman's badge of office and scepter was a pick-handle.
"That proves nothing more than poor spike-holds in a few dry-rotted cross-ties," Lidgerwood objected. "No; there were a number of others farther along also turned over and broken and bent. But the first one was the only freak." "How was that?"
"This ain't no happen-so, Mr. Lidgerwood," he said, when he got up. "The spikes are pulled!" Lidgerwood said nothing. There are discoveries which are beyond speech. But he stooped to examine for himself. Groner was right. For a distance of eight or ten feet the rail had been loosened, and the spikes were gone out of the corresponding cross-ties.
Very soon the whole froze together, solid as a board, and these we soon fashioned into the proper shape for runners. We found no difficulty in fastening the two together with cross-ties of bone, which we lashed firmly to the runners. Thus, in seven days from the time of beginning to work upon it, our sledge was complete.
More than enough to supply all our needs. If any one could gather together in one vast pile our houses and barns, our furniture, our wagons and carriages, our farm implements, all our home conveniences, our railroad cross-ties, our trolley and telephone poles, our papers and magazines, and burn them all, the whole world would be roused by the fearfulness of the loss.
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