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On the 25th he surprised and captured Forrest's dismounted camp at Verona, Mississippi, on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, destroyed the railroad, sixteen cars loaded with wagons and pontoons for Hood's army, four thousand new English carbines, and large amounts of public stores.
The next day Innis's engineers, with the assistance of the detail that had felled the timber, cut and half-notched the logs, and put the bridge across; spanning the main channel, which was swimming deep, with four or five pontoons that had been sent me for this purpose.
In methodical, machine-like progress came the ammunition wagons, commissariat carts, field kitchens, teams of heavy horses attached to pontoons, traction engines hauling enormous siege guns, motor plows for excavating trenches, aeroplanes, carriages containing surgeons, automobiles for the commanders, and motor busses in which staff officers could be seen studying their maps.
We floated there like a derelict dark, silent, save for the lapping of the water against our aluminite pontoons. The patrol's searching beams swept within a hundred feet of us missed us by a miracle. And as the patrol passed on, we rose again to our course. Argo gave us one of the small cabins to ourselves that night.
Whether it be true or not that the Prussians had cut a dam, or whether, as sometimes occurs with literary generals, the pontoons were too few in number, is not yet clear.
His plan, I think I can state, was to attack the detached forces of Grant in his front; cut his way through there; cross the Nottoway and other streams by means of pontoons, which had been provided; and, forming a junction with General Johnston, crush Sherman or retreat into the Gulf States. All this was, however, reversed by one wretched, microscopic incident.
The noise of the shooting coming through the heavy air had its sharpness taken from it, and sounded in thuds. There was a halt upon the bank above the pontoons. When the column went winding down the incline, and streamed out upon the bridge, the fog had faded to a great degree, and in the clearer dusk the guns on a distant ridge were enabled to perceive the crossing.
Finally the stranger stopped and rose to the surface between two rows of submerged pontoons which, row upon row, extended in every direction as far as the telescope could reach. "Well, Dot, we're where we're going, wherever that is." "What do you suppose it is? It looks like a floating isleport, like what it told about in that wild-story magazine you read so much."
The bridge builders swung their pontoons into the water and soon the sound of timbers falling into place could be heard with the splash of the anchors and the low quick commands of the officers. The grey sharpshooters, concealed on the other shore, began to fire across the water through the fog. The sound was strangely magnified. The single crack of a musket seemed as loud as a cannon.
The approaches to the pontoons had been so trodden by the myriad feet of men and beasts, and cut by the heavy wheels of laden wagons and artillery, that we found the roads almost bottomless. But as we had seen mud many times before, we moved forward undismayed, though somewhat retarded, and were soon on Northern soil.
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