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Updated: May 11, 2025
The adventurers abandoned their attempt, leaped to their places in cab and car, and "The General" again sped onward. There were no cross-ties remaining; this form of obstruction could no longer be used. It was now raining hard; all the fates seemed to be combining against the plucky little band of Northerners. Andrews began at last to see that the situation was growing desperate.
Since early dawn he had been up and out on the observation platform, noting, this time with the eye of mastership, the physical condition of the road; the bridges, the embankments, the cross-ties, the miles of steel unreeling under the drumming trucks, and the object-lesson was still fresh in his mind. To a disheartening extent, the Red Butte demoralization had involved the permanent way.
This we did, and obstructed the track as well as we could, by laying on cross-ties at different places. We also cut the telegraph wire between every station. Finally, when we were nearly to the station where we expected to meet the last train, we stopped to take up a rail.
Coming to where the rails were torn up, they stopped, tore up rails behind them, and laid them down before, till they had passed over that obstacle. When the cross-ties were reached, they hauled to and threw them off, and thus proceeded, and under these difficulties gained on the frightened fugitives. At Dalton they halted a moment.
But you have piles and piles of logs over there," she meant the cross-ties, "couldn't you build a sort of cobhouse ridge with those between your track and Uncle's, and cross behind the car? Don't laugh, please." But Winton was far enough from laughing at her. Why so simple an expedient had not suggested itself instantly he did not stop to inquire.
The daring adventurers stopped just opposite and very near to where Colonel Glenn's regiment is encamped, and cut the wires; but the operator at Dalton had put the message through about two minutes before. They also again tore up the track, cut down a telegraph pole, and placed the two ends of it under the cross-ties, and the middle over the rail on the track.
The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth.
The cross-ties were piled in heaps, on these were laid the rails, and all set on fire; then for miles and miles up and down the road the crackling flames, the black smoke twining around the trees and curling upward, shrouded the whole earth with a canopy of black and blue, and told of the destruction that was going on.
Perhaps the circumstances mentioned some pages back had obscured his star; but if so, a few short hours swept away the cloud, and it blazed, Sirius-like, over the land. I approached him with the suggestion that the railway bridge might be passed by stepping on the cross-ties, as the enemy's guns bore less directly on it than on the upper bridge. He nodded approval.
Be not too much stricken of amazement, therefore, when now these cold ones, who would not have bought an American railroad without counting the cross-ties and weighing every spike and fish-plate, were ready to send millions adrift on a sightless invasion of Asia ten thousand miles away. Besides, as the five with Mr.
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