"And you know he saved great-grandfather's, too," answered Tom, "and now you have saved mine."
He looked shyly at his preserver. He was still weak with the after-effects of the drug that had been given him. The Hans Rolf he saw was a bit blurred by the unshed tears through which he saw him.
"Nonsense," said the surgeon, "whatever I've done is just in the day's work. But you must stop at York and rest. I can't let my patient travel just yet, you know. And this may be your last chance to see me at home. I go into the army next month."
However, Tom was not to be persuaded to stop. Duty called him Westward and to the West he went, as fast as the slow trains of those days could carry him. But when Hans Rolf and he parted, a few hours after they had met, they were friends for life.
It took Tom two days to get from Harrisburg to Cairo, the southernmost town in Illinois. It lies at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The latter pours a mass of beautiful blue water—the early French explorers named the Ohio "the beautiful river"—into the muddy flood of the Mississippi. For miles below Cairo the blue and yellow streams seem to flow side by side. Then the yellow swallows the blue and the mighty Mississippi rolls its murky way to the Gulf of Mexico. A gunboat took the young messenger from Cairo to General Grant's headquarters.
MISSISSIPPI RIVER GUNBOATS
A Western gunboat was an odd thing. James B. Eads, an eminent engineer, who after the war built the St. Louis bridge and the New Orleans jetties, which keep the mouth of the Mississippi open, had launched a flotilla of gunboats for the government within four months of the time when the trees which went to their making were growing in the forests. On a flat-boat of the ordinary Western-river type, Mr. Eads put a long cabin, framed of stout timbers, cut portholes in the sides, front and rear of it, mounted cannon inside it, covered it with rails outside (later armor-plate was used), and behold, a gunboat. The one which sped swiftly with Tom down the Mississippi and waddled slowly with him up the Tennessee, against the current of the Spring freshets, finally landed him at Grant's headquarters.
Tom approached the tent over which headquarters' flag was flying with a beating heart. It beat against the long envelope that lay in the inner pocket of his waistcoat. He was about to finish his task and he was about to see the one successful soldier of the Union, up to that time. The Northern armies had not done well in the East—the defeat had been disgraceful and the panic sickening with the raw troops at Bull Run, Virginia, and little had been gained elsewhere—but in the West Grant was hammering out success. All eyes turned to him.