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Updated: May 11, 2025
But at length he had reached the valley, and had lingered here for days; for it happened that a man in bought clothing was there just then, roaming around and hammering pieces off the rocks, who gave 'Thanase the chance to earn a little something from him, with which the hard-marched wanderer might take the train instead of the cross-ties for as far as the pittance would carry him.
The loose earth looked as if the cross-ties of some railroad had been removed, the space formerly occupied having been but partly filled, and these depressions were across the probable direction of motion. "Whatever was capable of chasing mastodons and carrying such weights," said Ayrault, "will, I suspect, have little to fear from us.
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.
Merritt, with the remaining brigades of his division, holding fast at Baltimore crossroads to await events. After Gregg and Custer had gone, it was discovered that the railroad bridge over the Pamunkey, near the White House, had been destroyed but partially the cross-ties and stringers being burned in places only and that it was practicable to repair it sufficiently to carry us over.
Back behind them stretched two lines of shining rails, which, even as he watched, advanced, advanced on the embankment, being firmly spiked upon their cross-ties so as to form a highway for the cars which brought more dirt, more dirt, more dirt to send the raw embankment on ahead of them.
"No," said Foy, slowly, speaking in a whisper; "we'll build on snow, for it's hard and safe; and in the spring we'll ease it down and make a road-bed." They did so. They built and bedded the cross-ties on the snow, ballasted with snow, and ran over that track until spring without an accident. They were making mileage slowly, but the awful strain was telling on the men and on the bank account.
The chances seemed good that Fuller and Murphy would be wrecked. We broke out the end of our last box-car and dropped cross-ties on the track as we ran, thus checking their progress and getting far enough ahead to take in wood and water at two separate stations.
But one evening, as he paced the cross-ties of a railway that hugged a huge forest-clad mountain-side, with the valley a thousand feet below, its stony river shining like a silken fabric in the sunset lights, the great hillsides clad in crimson, green, and gold, and the long, trailing smoke of the last train a rare, motionless blue gauze gone to rest in the chill mid-air, he met a man who suddenly descended upon the track in front of him from higher up the mountain, a great, lank mountaineer.
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.
'Bout a year ago I was goin' 'long toward Hi Stephens's mill a-lookin' for muskrats when I heard some feller's axe a-workin' away, and I says to Hi, 'Hi, ain't that choppin' goin' on on the wife's land? and he said it was, and that Luke Shanders and his boys had been drawin' out cross-ties for the new railroad; thought I knowed it.
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