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Brown himself was gladder to see me on that occasion than he ever has been since. I relieved him and sent all his men home within a day or two, to be mustered out of service. Within ten days after reading Ironton I was prepared to take the offensive against the enemy at Greenville.
The path that ran through the woods to the big road leading from Cape Girardeau to Lesterville, the place where Rodney's companions would take leave of him and turn toward Ironton, was all of three miles long, and so narrow that they were obliged to ride in a single file. Mr.
Shortly after my promotion I was ordered to Ironton, Missouri, to command a district in that part of the State, and took the 21st Illinois, my old regiment, with me. Several other regiments were ordered to the same destination about the same time. Ironton is on the Iron Mountain railroad, about seventy miles south of St. Louis, and situated among hills rising almost to the dignity of mountains.
The war and the federal control of the railways interrupted the cycle of reorganization. The road owns 343 miles of track, has 52 miles of branches, and 45 miles of trackage rights over other roads. It goes from Detroit almost due south to Ironton on the Ohio River, thus tapping the West Virginia coal deposits.
Brown himself was gladder to see me on that occasion than he ever has been since. I relieved him and sent all his men home within a day or two, to be mustered out of service. Within ten days after reading Ironton I was prepared to take the offensive against the enemy at Greenville.
It has never made any difference with us whether we multiplied what we were doing by five or five hundred. Size is only a matter of the multiplication table, anyway. The Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railway was organized some twenty-odd years ago and has been reorganized every few years since then. The last reorganization was in 1914.
The railroads in general have broken down, and if the former conduct of the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton is any criterion of management in general there is no reason in the world why they should not have broken down.
There was no hurry, but fair marches were made every day until the Illinois River was crossed. There I was overtaken by a dispatch saying that the destination of the regiment had been changed to Ironton, Missouri, and ordering me to halt where I was and await the arrival of a steamer which had been dispatched up the Illinois River to take the regiment to St. Louis.
Doubtless before the late civil war, all the ante-bellum travelers agree in this, when the blight of slavery was resting on Virginia and Kentucky, the south shore of the Ohio was as another country; but to-day, so far as we can ascertain from a surface view, the little villages on either side are equally dingy and woe-begone, and large Southern towns like Wheeling, Parkersburg, Point Pleasant, and Maysville are very nearly an offset to Steubenville, Marietta, Pomeroy, Ironton, and Portsmouth.
Jimmie took off his sheepskin-lined overcoat, and unbuttoned his sweater underneath, and from an inside pocket of his jacket took out the precious card with the due-stamps initialled by the secretaries of Local Leesville and Local Hopeland and Local Ironton. The stranger studied it, then nodded. "Good! I trust you." As he handed back the card he remarked, "My name is Kalenkin. I am Bolshevik."
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