“You can have all you can hold,” cried the station-master, enthusiastically. He was only too glad to be of use.
Thus it happened that ten minutes later “The General” was speeding away from the station with a fresh supply of water and a huge pile of wood in the tender.
“That yarn worked admirably, didn’t it?” asked Andrews. The engineer and his assistant laughed. George shut the heavy door of the furnace, into which he had been throwing wood, and stood up, very red in the face, albeit smiling.
“But even if the story was true,” he suggested, “you couldn’t get through to Corinth.”
“Exactly,” laughed the leader, “but our goat-bearded friend at the station didn’t think of that fact. Corinth is away off in the state of Mississippi, near its northern border, nearly three hundred miles away from here; besides, if I were a Southerner, I couldn’t possibly reach there without running afoul of General Mitchell and his forces, either around Huntsville, or Chattanooga. However, I knew more about Mitchell’s movements than the station man did—and that’s where I had the advantage.”
“We may not have such plain sailing at Kingston,” said the engineer, as “The General” just grazed an inquisitive cow which showed signs of loitering on the track.
“We’ll have more people to deal with there,” admitted Andrews, “and we must be all the more on our guard.”
Both the men spoke wisely. It was just two hours after leaving Big Shanty, and about thirty miles had been covered, when the alleged powder-train rolled into the station at the town of Kingston.
“I hope we meet that irregular freight train here,” muttered Andrews. There were certainly plenty of cars in evidence on the sidings; indeed, the station, which was the junction for a branch line running to Rome, Georgia, presented a bustling appearance.
No sooner was “The General” motionless than a train-dispatcher emerged from a gathering of idlers on the platform and walked up to the locomotive. He held in his hand a telegraphic blank. As he saw Andrews, who was leaning out of the cab with an air of impatience that was partly real and partly assumed, the dispatcher drew back in surprise. He recognized “The General,” but there were strange men in the cab.