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The men, scattering as they reached the edge of the camp, dropped into every spot of shelter, and at the same moment Stanley, mounted and alive with the vim and fire of the soldier, led a smaller body of men rapidly back to guard the rear of the camp, deploying his little force about the box-cars and flat cars as they hastened on.
"But will that thing pull a train? Is that the notion?" "Notion! It's no notion it's a simple, mathematical certainty, my dear Griggs. In that Alcomotive it's run by vapors of alcohol, you know we have sufficient power to pull fifteen parlor cars, twelve loaded day-coaches, twenty ordinary flat-cars, eighteen box-cars, or twenty-seven "
At eight o'clock the engine drew out, pulling after it a dozen box-cars laden with stock and household goods, and on the roof of a freight caboose, together with several other young Jasons, I rode, bound for the valley of the James. It was a marvellous adventure. All the morning we rattled and rumbled along, our engine snorting with effort, struggling with a load almost too great for its strength.
It was evidently the freight station for some town not far distant, for a couple of old-fashioned box-cars stood on a siding, and Pee-wee contemplated them with the joy of sudden inspiration. "Crinkums, that would be a dandy place to sleep," he thought, for it was blowing up cold and he had but scant equipment. He went up to the nearest car and felt of the sliding door.
"I have twenty tons of powder in those cars." He waved toward the empty box-cars empty except for the sixteen men in the last. He swung aboard the General. "Go ahead," he ordered. Knight was at the throttle. After the one curve which took them out of sight of Adairsville, the tracks stretched straight ahead of them, and there was a slight down grade. Knight opened the throttle wide.
His hat, in the mêlée, had disappeared, and, swinging a heavy Colt's revolver, which the Indians shrank from with a healthy instinct of danger, he pressed back the hungry red line again and again, supported only by such musketry fire as the men crouching under, within, and between the box-cars could offer.
But a far more frequent use for such cars has escaped the notice of the public at large. As any old railroader can testify, trainhands are forever finding in box-cars every genus and species of stray. These finds range all the way from cats and dogs and discarded white rabbits and canaries, to goats.
We traveled in rude box-cars, that were wet and filthy, and the journey was rendered still more uncomfortable by the idea of going back to our old quarters in the wretched prison at Chattanooga. However, by the time we arrived there, our captain, who had never been a very warm secessionist, and, therefore, had no very hard feelings towards us, had become quite friendly.
The railroad bridges and tracks, extending from the Rapidan in Orange County to Fairfax, a distance of fifty miles, had been destroyed, so that it would require several weeks before the Confederates could reach the hospitals in Richmond and Charlottesville, and then in box-cars, over rough, improvised roads. Those of the Federal army were cut off in like manner from their hospitals in the North.
Box-cars, and even platform-cars, answer the purpose well enough, but they, should always have rough board-seats. For sick and wounded men, box-cars filled with straw or bushes were usually employed.
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