INSIDE THE CONFEDERATE LINES--"SAIREY" WARNS TOM--OLD MAN TOMBLIN'S
"SETTLEMINT"--STEALING A LOCOMOTIVE--WILKES BOOTH GIVES THE
ALARM--A WILD DASH FOR THE UNION LINES.
Three days afterwards, Tom found himself "on special service," on the
staff of Gen. O. M. Mitchell, whose troops were pushing towards
Huntsville, Alabama. They occupied that delightfully sleepy old town,
the center of a group of rich plantations, April 12, 1862, but Tom was
not then with the column. Five days before, with Mitchell's permission,
he had volunteered for a gallant foray into the enemy's country. He had
taken prompt advantage of Lincoln's hint that he might fight a bit if he
wanted to do so. He was to have his fill of fighting now.
Tom was one of twenty-two volunteers who left camp before dawn on April
7, under the command of James J. Andrews, a daredevil of a man, who had
persuaded General Mitchell to let him try to slip across the lines with
a handful of soldiers disguised as Confederates in order to steal a
locomotive and rush it back to the Union front, burning all the railroad
bridges it passed. The railroads to be crippled were those which ran
from the South to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and from the East through
Chattanooga and Huntsville to Memphis. A few miles from camp, Andrews
gave his men their orders. They were to separate and singly or in groups
of two or three were to make their way to the station of Big Shanty,
Georgia, where they were to meet on the morning of Saturday, April 12.
Andrews took Tom with him. For two days they hid in the wooded hills by
day and traveled by night, guided by a compass and by the stars. Then
their scanty supply of food was exhausted and they had to take to the
open. Their rough clothing, stained a dusty yellow with the oil of the
butternut, the chief dye-stuff the South then had, their belts with
"C.S.A."--"Confederate States of America"--upon them, their Confederate
rifles (part of the spoils of Fort Donelson), and their gray slouched
hats made them look like the Confederate scouts they had to pretend to
be.
Danger lurked about them and detection meant death. They did their best
to talk in the soft Southern drawl when they stopped at huts in the
hills and asked for food, but the drawl was hard for a Northern tongue
to master and more than one bent old woman or shy and smiling girl
started with suspicion at the strange accents of these "furriners." The
men of the hills were all in the army or all in hiding. On the fourth
day they reached a log-hut or rather a home made of two log-huts, with a
floored and roofed space between them, a sort of open-air room where all
the household life went on when good weather permitted. An old, old
woman sat in the sunshine, her hands busy with a rag quilt, her
toothless gums busy with holding her blackened clay pipe. Behind her sat
her granddaughter, busy too with her spinning wheel. The two women with
their home as a background made a pleasing and a peaceful picture.
"Howdy," said Andrews.
The wheel stopped. The quilt lay untouched upon the old woman's lap. She
took her pipe from her mouth.
"Howdy," said she.
The conversation stopped. The hill-folk are not quick of speech.
"Please, ma'am, may I have a drink of milk?" asked Tom.
"Sairey," called the old dame, "you git sum milk."
Sairey started up from her spinning wheel, trying to hide her bare feet
with her short skirt and not succeeding, and walked back of the house to
the "spring-house," a square cupboard built over a neighboring spring.
It was dark and cool and was the only refrigerator the hill-folk knew.
While she was away, her grandmother began to talk. The man and boy would
much rather she had kept still. For she peered at them suspiciously, and
said:
"How duz I know you uns ain't Yankees? I hearn thar wuz a right smart
heap o' Yankee sojers not fur off'n hereabouts."
At this moment Sairey fortunately returned. She brought in her brown
hand an old glass goblet, without a standard, but filled to the brim
with a foaming mixture that looked like delicious milk. Alas! Tom, who
loathed buttermilk, was now to learn that in the hills "milk" meant
"buttermilk." He should have asked for "sweet milk." Sairey handed him
the goblet with a shy grace, blushing a little as the boy's hand touched
hers. He lifted it eagerly to his thirsty lips, took a long draught, and
sputtered and gagged. But the mistake was in his asking and the girl had
gone a hundred yards to get him what she thought he wanted. He was a
boy, but he was a gentleman. He swallowed the nauseous stuff to the last
drop, and made his best bow as he thanked her. Suddenly the old woman
said to him:
"Where wuz you born, bub?"
"New--New----" stammered Tom. His tongue did not lend itself readily to
a lie, even in his country's cause. When he was still too young to
understand what the words meant, his mother had told him: "A lie soils a
boy's mouth." As he grew older, she had dinned that big truth into his
small mind. Now, taken by surprise, the habit of his young life asserted
itself and the tell-tale truth that he had been born in New York was on
his unsoiled lips, when Andrews finished the sentence for him.
"New Orleans," said Andrews, coolly.
"He don't talk that-a-way," grumbled the old beldam.
"He was raised up No'th," Andrews explained, "but soon as this yer
onpleasantness began, he cum Souf to fight for we-uns."
Andrews had overdone his dialect.
"Sairey," commanded the old woman, "put up the flag."
"Why, granma," pleaded Sairey from where she had taken refuge behind her
grandmother's chair, "what's the use?"
"Chile, you hear me? You put up the flag."
From her refuge, Sairey held out her hands in a warning gesture, and
then, before she entered one of the log-houses, she pointed to a
cart-track that wound up the hill before the hut. She came out with a
Confederate flag, made of part of an old red petticoat with white
stripes sewn across it. It was fastened upon a long sapling. She put the
staff into a rude socket in front of the platform. As she passed Tom in
order to do this, she whispered to him: "You-uns run!"
"What wuz you sayin' to Bub, thar?" her grandmother asked in anger.
"I wuzn't sayin' nuthin' to nobuddy," Sarah replied.
But Andrews' ears, sharper than the old woman's, sharpened by fear, had
caught the words.
"We-uns'll haf to go," he remarked. "You-uns haz bin right down good to
us. Thanky, ma'am."
"Jes' wait a minute," the old woman answered. "I'll give you somethin'
fer yer to eat as ye mosey 'long."
She walked slowly, apparently with pain, into the dark log-room. Sairey
wrung her hand and whispered: "Run, run. Take the cart-track." Instantly
the grandmother appeared on the threshold, her old eyes flashing, a
double-barreled shot-gun in her shaking hands. She tried to cover both
man and boy, as she screamed at them:
"You-uns stay in yer tracks, you Yankees! My man'll know what to do with
you-uns."
Their guns were at her feet. There was no way to get them, even if they
would have used them against a woman.
"Run!" shouted Andrews and bounded towards the cart-track.
Tom sprang after him, but not in time to escape a few birdshot which the
old woman's gun sent flying after him. The sharp sting of them
redoubled his speed. The second barrel sent its load far astray. They
had run just in time, for from another hilltop behind the hut a dozen
armed men came plunging down to the house, shouting after the scared
fugitives. The raising of the flag had been the agreed-upon signal for
their coming. Sairey's father and several other men had taken to the
nearby hills to avoid being impressed into the Confederate army, but
they adored the Confederacy, up to the point of fighting for it, and
they would have rejoiced to capture Andrews and Tom. The old woman's
eyes and ears had pierced the thin disguise of the raiders. So she had
forced her granddaughter to fly the flag and the girl, afraid to disobey
her fierce old grandmother but loath to see the boy she had liked at
first sight captured, had warned him to flee. Man and boy were out of
gunshot, but still in sight, when their pursuers reached the house,
yelled with joy to see the abandoned guns, and ran up the cart-track
like hounds hot upon the scent. As Tom and Andrews panted to the
hilltop, they saw why Sairey had bidden them take the cart-track. At
the summit, it branched into half a dozen lanes which wound through a
pine forest. Lanes and woodlands were covered with pineneedles, the
deposit of years, which rose elastic under their flying feet and left no
marks by which they could be tracked. And beyond the forest was a vast
laurel-brake in which a regiment could have hidden, screened from
discovery save by chance. It gave the fugitives shelter and safety. Once
they heard the far-off voices of their pursuers, but only once. Ere many
hours they had the added security of the night.
When they found a hiding-place, beside a tiny brook that flowed at the
roots of the laurel-bushes, Tom found that his wound, forgotten in the
fierce excitement of the flight, had begun to pain him. His left
shoulder grew stiff. When Andrews examined it, all it needed was a
little care. Three or four birdshot had gone through clothing and skin,
but they lay close beneath the skin, little blue lumps, with tiny smears
of red blood in the skin's smooth whiteness. They were picked out with
the point of a knife. The cool water of the brook washed away the blood
and stopped the bleeding. Andrews tore off a bit of his own shirt,
soaked it in the brook, and bandaged the shoulder in quite a good
first-aid-to-the-injured way. Tom and he were none the worse, except for
the loss of their guns. And that was the less serious because both
knives and pistols were still in their belts.
They slept that night in the laurel-brake, forgetting their hunger in
the soundness of their sleep. Just after dawn, they were startled to
hear a human voice. But it was the voice of a gentle girl. It kept
calling aloud "Coo, boss, coo, boss," while every now and then it said
in lower tones: "Is you Yanks hyar? Hyar's suthin' to eat." At first
they thought it was a trap and lay still. Finally, however, spurred by
hunger, they crept out of their hiding-place and found it was Sairey who
was calling them. When she saw them, she ran towards them, while the
cows she had collected from their pasture stared with dull amazement.
"Is you-uns hurt?" she asked, clasping her hands in anxiety.
Reassured as to this, she produced the cold cornbread and bacon she had
taken from the spring-house when she left home that morning for her
daily task of gathering the family cows. Man and boy bolted down the
food.
"You're good to us, Sairey," said Tom.
"Dunno as I ought to help you-uns," the girl replied, peering slyly out
of her big sunbonnet and digging her brown toes into the earth, "but I
dun it, kase--kase--I jes' had to. Kin you get away today?"
"We'll try."
"Whar be you goin'?"
Should they tell her where they were going? It was a risk, but they took
it. They were glad they did, for Sairey was not only eager to help them
on their way, but could be of real aid. Once in her life she had been at
Big Shanty. She told them of a short cut through the hills, by which
they would pass only one "settle_mint_," as the infrequent clearings in
the hills were called.
"When you-uns git to Old Man Tomblin's settle_mint_," said Sairey, "I
'low you-uns better stand at the fence corner and holler. Old Man
Tomblin's spry with his gun sometimes, when furriners don't do no
hollerin'. But when he comes out, you-uns tell him Old Man Gernt's
Sairey told you he'd take care of you-uns. 'N he will. 'N you kin tell
Bud Tomblin--no, you-uns needn't tell Bud nothin'. Good-by."
The hill-girl held out her hand. She looked up to Andrews and smiled as
she shook hands. She looked down at Tom--she was half a head taller than
he--and smiled again as she shook hands. Then suddenly she stooped and
kissed the startled boy. Then she fled back along the lane by which she
had come, leaving the placid cows and the thankful man and boy behind
her. With a flutter of butternut skirt and a twinkle of bare, brown
feet, she vanished from their sight.
Thanks to her directions, they found Old Man Tomblin's settle_mint_
without difficulty. They duly stood at the corner of the sagging rail
fence and there duly "hollered." Old Man Tomblin and Bud Tomblin came
out of the cabin, each with a gun, and were proceeding to study the
"furriners" before letting them come in, when Andrews repeated what Old
Man Gernt's Sairey had told them to say. There was an instant welcome.
Bud Tomblin was even more anxious than his father to do anything Sairey
Gernt wanted done. The fugitives' story that they had been scouting near
General Mitchell's line of march and had lost their guns and nearly lost
themselves in a raid by Northern cavalry was accepted without demur. Old
Mrs. Tomblin, decrepit with the early decrepitude of the hill-folk,
whose hard living conditions make women old at forty and venerable at
fifty, cackled a welcome to them from the corner of the fireplace where
she sat "dipping" snuff. "Lidy" Tomblin, the eldest daughter, helped and
hindered by the rest of a brood of children, took care of their comfort.
They feasted on the best the humble household had to offer. They slept
soundly, albeit eight other people, including Mr. and Mrs. Tomblin and
Lidy, slept in the same room. In the morning they were given a bountiful
breakfast and were bidden good-by as old friends.
"I hate to deceive good people like the Tomblins," said Tom, when they
were out of earshot.
"Sometimes the truth is too precious to be told," laughed Andrews.
But Tom continued to be troubled in mind as he tramped along. He made up
his mind to fight for his country, the next time he had a chance, in
some other way. Telling a lie and living a lie were hateful to him.
The next morning found them at Big Shanty, a tiny Georgia village, which
the war had made a great Confederate camp. It was the appointed day,
Saturday, April 12, 1862. Of the twenty-two men who had started with
Andrews, eighteen met that morning at Big Shanty. The train for
Chattanooga stopped there for breakfast on those infrequent days when it
did not arrive so late that its stop was for dinner. It was what is
called a "mixed" train, both freight and passenger, with many freight
cars following the engine and a tail of a couple of shabby passenger
cars. On this particular morning it surprised everybody, including its
own train-crew, by being on time. Passengers and crew swarmed in to
breakfast. The train was deserted. The time for the great adventure had
come.
Before the train was seized, one thing must be done. The telegraph wire
between Big Shanty and Chattanooga must be cut. If this were left
intact, their flight, sure to be discovered as soon as the train-crew
finished their brief breakfast, would end at the next station, put on
guard by a telegram. To Tom, as the youngest and most agile of the
party, the task of cutting the wire had been assigned. He was already at
the spot selected for the attempt, a clump of trees a hundred yards from
the station, where the wire was screened from sight by the foliage. As
soon as the train came in, Tom started to climb the telegraph-pole. He
had just started when he heard a most unwelcome sound.
"Hey, thar! What's you doin'?"
He turned his head and saw a Confederate sentry close beside him. He
recognized him as a man with whom he had been chatting around a
camp-fire early that morning. His name was Bill Coombs. Tom's ready wit
stood by him.
"Why, Bill," he said, "glad to see you. Somethin's wrong with the wire.
The Cunnel's sent me to fix it. Give me a boost, will ye?"
The unsuspicious Bill gave him a boost and watched him without a thought
of his doing anything wrong while Tom climbed to the top of the rickety
pole, cut the one wire it carried, fastened the ends to the pole so that
from the ground nobody could tell it was cut, and climbed down. Bill
urged him to stay and talk awhile, but Tom reminded him that sentries
mustn't talk, then he strolled at first and soon ran towards the
station. He had to run to catch the train. The instant Andrews saw him
returning, he sprang into the cab of the locomotive.
[Illustration: THE LOCOMOTIVE TOM HELPED TO STEAL]
One of his men had already uncoupled the first three freight cars from
the rest of the train. All the men jumped into the cab or the tender or
swarmed up the freight-car ladders. Andrews jerked the throttle wide
open. The engine jumped forward, the tender and the three cars bounding
after it. The crowd upon the platform gaped after the retreating train,
without the slightest idea of what was happening under their very noses.
A boy came running like an antelope from the end of the platform. He
jumped for the iron step of the locomotive, was clutched by a half-dozen
hands and drawn aboard. But as he jumped, he heard a voice he had reason
to remember call out:
"They're Yanks. That's Lieutenant Strong, a Yankee! Stop 'em! Shoot
'em!"
Livid with rage, his long black hair streaming in the wind as he ran
after them, Wilkes Booth fired his pistol at them, while the motley
crowd his cry had aroused sent a scattering volley after the train.
Nobody was hurt then, but the danger to everybody had just begun.
There was instant pursuit. The train-crew, startled by the sound of the
departing train, came running from the station. They actually started to
run along the track after the flying locomotive. They jerked a hand-car
off a siding and chased the fugitives with that. At a station not far
off, they found a locomotive lying with steam up. They seized that and
thundered ahead. Now hunters and hunted were on more even terms. The
hunters reached Kingston, Georgia, within four minutes after the hunted
had left. The latter had had to make frequent stops, to cut the wires,
to take on fuel, to bundle into the freight cars ties that could be used
to start fires for the burning of bridges, and to tear up an occasional
rail. This last expedient delayed their pursuers but little. When a
missing rail was sighted, the Confederates stopped, tore up a rail
behind them, slipped it into the vacant place, and rushed ahead again.
Andrews was running the captured train on its regular time schedule, so
he could not exceed a certain speed. From Kingston, however, where the
only other train of the day met this one, he expected a free road and
plenty of time to burn every bridge he passed. He did meet the regular
train at Kingston, but alas! it carried on its engine a red flag. That
meant that a second section of the same train was coming behind it.
There was nothing to do but to wait for this second section. The
railroad was single-track, so trains could pass only where there was a
siding. But in every moment of waiting there lurked the danger of
detection. Southerners, soldiers, and civilians, crowded about the
locomotive as she lay helplessly still on the Kingston sidetrack,
puffing away precious steam and precious time.
"Whar's yer passengers?" asked one man. "I cum hyar to meet up with
Cunnel Tompkins. Whar's he'n the rest of 'em?"
"We were ordered to drop everything at Big Shanty," explained Andrews,
"except these three cars. They're full of powder. I'm on General
Beauregard's staff and am taking the stuff to him at Corinth. Jove,
there's the whistle of the second section. I'm glad to hear it."
He was indeed glad. At one of his stops, he had bundled most of his men
into the freight cars. The cars were battered old things without any
locks. If a carelessly curious hand were to slide back one of the doors
and reveal within, not powder, but armed men, all their lives would pay
the forfeit. Andrews was in the cab with engineer, fireman, and Tom, who
had been helping the fireman feed wood into the maw of the furnace on
every mile of the run. His young back ached with the strain of the
unaccustomed toil. His young neck felt the touch of the noose that
threatened them all.
"Tom, you run ahead and throw that switch for us as soon as the other
train pulls in," said Andrews. "We mustn't keep General Beauregard
waiting for this powder a minute longer than we can help. He needs it to
blow the Yankees to smithereens."
So Tom ran ahead, stood by the switch as the second section came in, and
promptly threw the switch as it passed. But his train did not move and
a brakeman jumped off the rear platform of the caboose of the second
section, as it slowed down, told Tom he was an ass and a fool, pushed
him out of the way and reset the switch.
"You plum fool," shouted the brakeman, after much stronger expressions,
"didn't ye see the flag fur section three?"
Tom had not seen it, had not looked for it, but it was too true that the
engine of section two also bore the red flag that meant that section
three was coming behind it.
Again there was a long wait, again the sense of danger closing in upon
them, again the thought of scaffold and rope, again the necessity of
playing their parts with laughter and good-natured chaff amid the foes
who thought them friends. The slow minutes ticked themselves away. At
last the third section came whistling and lumbering in. Thank fortune,
it bore no red flag. This time Tom threw the switch unchecked and then
jumped on the puffing engine as she reached the main-track and sped
onwards.
"Free, by Jove!" said Andrews, with a deep breath of deep relief. "Now
we can burn Johnny Reb's bridges for him!"
* * * * *
Four minutes later, while section three of the train that had so long
delayed them was still at Kingston, a shrieking locomotive rushed into
the station. Its occupants, shouting a story of explanation that put
Kingston into a frenzy, ran from it to an engine that lay upon a second
sidetrack, steam up and ready to start. They had reached Kingston so
speedily by using their last pint of water and their last stick of wood.
They saved precious minutes by changing engines.
Five seconds after their arrival, the station-agent had been at the
telegraph-key, frantically pounding out the call of a station beyond
Andrews's fleeing train. There was no reply.
"Wire cut!" he shouted, running out of the station. Of course that had
been done by the fugitives just out of sight of Kingston. "Wire cut! I
kain't git no message through."
"We'll take the message!" answered the Confederate commander, from the
cab of the locomotive that was already swaying with her speed, as she
darted ahead.
They came near delivering the message within four miles of Kingston.
Andrews's men, with a most comforting sense of safety had stopped and
were pulling up a rail, when they heard the whistle of their avenging
pursuer.
"Quick, boys, all aboard," Andrews called. "They're closer'n I like to
have 'em."
Quickly replacing the rail, the Confederates came closer still. Around
the next curve, quite hidden from sight until close upon it, the
fugitives had put a rail across the track. It delayed the pursuit not
one second. Whether the cowcatcher of the engine thrust it aside or
broke it or whether the engine actually jumped it, nobody knew then in
the wild excitement of the chase and nobody knows now. The one thing
certain is that there was no delay. Very likely the rail broke. Rails
of those days were of iron, not steel, and throughout the South they
were in such condition that at the close of the Civil War one of the
chief Southern railroads was said to consist of "a right-of-way and two
streaks of rust." The locomotive whistled triumphantly and sped on.
On the Union train, Tom had crept back to the rear car along the
rolling, jumping carroofs, with orders to set it on fire and stand ready
to cut it off. The men inside arranged a pile of ties, thrust fat pine
kindling among them, and touched the mass with a match. It burst into
flame as they scuttled to the roof and passed to the car ahead. A long
covered wooden bridge loomed up before them. Halfway across it, Andrews
stopped, dropped the flaming car, and started ahead again. In a very few
minutes the bridge would have been a burning mass, but the few minutes
were not to be had. The Confederate locomotive was now close upon them.
It dashed upon the bridge, drove the burning car across the bridge
before it, pushed it upon a neighboring sidetrack and again whistled
triumphantly as it took up the fierce chase. The two remaining cars were
detached, one by one, but in vain. The game was up.
"Guess we're gone," said Andrews, tranquilly, as he looked back over the
tender, now almost empty of wood, to the smokestack that was belching
sooty vapor within a mile of them. "By this time, they've got a telegram
ahead of us. Stop 'round that next curve in those woods. We must take to
the woods. Don't try to keep together. Scatter. Steer by the North Star.
Make the Union lines if you can. We've done our best."
The engine checked its mad pace, slowed, stopped.
"Good-by, boys," shouted Andrews, as he sprang from the engine and
disappeared in the forest that there bordered the track. "We'll meet
again."
Seven of them did meet him again. It was upon a Confederate scaffold,
where he and they were hung. The other six of the fourteen who were
captured were exchanged, a few months later. Three others reached the
Union lines within a fortnight, unhurt. But where was Tom Strong?