168 HENRY HILL GOODELL 



was to be lost. I could hear the engine puffing across the 

 waters. Shouting to a darkey who seemed to rise up pre- 

 ternaturally out of the ground, I ordered him to row me 

 over; and a more astonished man I think I never saw, than 

 he was, when, on reaching the opposite shore, with but 

 ten minutes to spare, I bolted from the boat without a word 

 and started on the run for headquarters. The general was 

 asleep, but an aide carried in my pass, signed by General 

 Banks, brought it back countersigned, and in five minutes 

 more I was aboard the train moving on to New Orleans. 



Of this part of my journey I have a very indistinct re- 

 membrance. My impression is that I dozed whenever I 

 sat down, and I was so dog-tired I could hardly stand. I 

 had had nothing to eat since the night before, and was faint 

 and exhausted with hunger and my exertions. Nothing 

 but the special training my class had taken in the gymna- 

 sium during the previous year for just such an emergency 

 pulled me through the long run and long fast following it. 

 It was only a run of one hundred miles, but I think we must 

 have stopped to wood and water at every cottonwood grove 

 and swamp along the way; and I remember at one of these 

 periodical stops going out on the platform and there f ailing 

 into an altercation with a little red-headed doctor, who 

 whether he had scented my secret or not, with that divine 

 intuition for discovering the hidden peculiar to the craft, 

 had made himself officiously offensive to me, and now 

 wanted to borrow my revolver to shoot a copper-head that 

 lay coiled up by the side of the track. Refused in that, he 

 next wanted to examine my sword; and when, under some 

 trifling pretext, I abruptly left him, and, going inside the 

 car, sat down as near as possible to a bluff-looking lieuten- 



