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: