soundly except Sergeant Whitley, who sat by the door leading to the
next car.

All that afternoon and into the night the train rattled and moved into
the west. The beautiful rolling country was left behind, and they were
now among the mountains, whirling around precipices so sharply that
often the sleeping boys were thrown from the seats of the coaches.
But they were growing used to hardships. They merely climbed back again
upon the seats, and were asleep once more in half a minute.

The rain still fell and the wind blew fiercely among the somber
mountains. A second engine had been added to the train, and the speed
of the train was slackened. The engineer in front stared at the
slippery rails, but he could see only a few yards. The pitchy darkness
closed in ahead, hiding everything, even the peaks and ridges. The
heart of that engineer, and he was a brave man, as brave as any soldier
on the battlefield, had sunk very low. Railroads were little past their
infancy then and this was the first to cross the mountains. He was by
no means certain of his track, and, moreover, the rocks and forest might
shelter an ambush.

The Alleghanies and their outlying ridges and spurs are not lofty
mountains, but to this day they are wild and almost inaccessible in many
places. Nature has made them a formidable barrier, and in the great
Civil War those who trod there had to look with all their eyes and
listen with all their ears. The engineer was not alone in his anxiety
this night. Colonel Newcomb rose from an uneasy doze and he went with
Major Hertford into the engineer's cab. They were now going at the rate
of not more than five or six miles an hour, the long train winding like
a snake around the edges of precipices and feeling its way gingerly over