TAPPING THE TELEGRAPH WIRE.—"ARE THE YANKS IN FREDERICKSBURG?"
This was readily agreed to. I was furnished a couple of men and directed to the nearest "main road." This, as I now recall it, was a road running west from Richmond toward the Valley. My impression—gathered from the colored people—was, that the road led to Lexington or Staunton. Anyway, I followed it out some way until we found an old-fashioned telegraph line. I mean by this, one of the early kind built along the highways.
There seemed to be but little travel along that route just then, so we had a good chance to get at the wire without being seen. One of the men held our horses and kept guard while another climbed or reached up to the wire from a fence.
I felt sure, from its dilapidated appearance, that it was some abandoned old wire. It was rusted so deeply that it snapped asunder at the first touch of the nippers. While hastily drawing it together again I felt the shock of a live current in the hand which held the wire. This satisfied me that we would get something for our trouble.
After I had inserted my instrument into the circuit, the delicate little armature was at once strongly attracted to the magnet. Adjusting my spring, I discovered, to my surprise, that our cutting of the wire had interrupted some dispatches. That they were important, I gathered from the impatient manner of the operator, demanding to know why he should be stopped so long in such an important dispatch. I let the two operators fight it out among themselves for a few moments on that line, each accusing the other of being responsible for the delay. When they got started again, I quietly listened to the ticks of the sending operator. The first words seemed to be giving an account of a battle, in which certain friends had been injured.
Not being able to restrain my curiosity, and knowing, too, that we occupied dangerous ground on that highway, I "broke in," at the first chance, to say:
"Are the Yanks in Fredericksburg?"
"Not much," was the answer which came to my ears and made my heart sink.