The locomotive seemed covered with erect, resolute-looking young fellows in gray. They stood thick on the running-boards. They crowded the cab, and each held his musket in a sturdy grasp, with its gleaming bayonet pointed at an angle downward. The enemy need be many and bold who would dare charge that thick-set hedge of prickly steel. Each platform of every car in the long train was guarded in a similar manner. It was, as Billings, who had returned to the baggage-car, quaintly expressed it to Myles, “A sign that read, ‘No boarders need apply.’”
Through the open windows the crowd could see that every seat was filled with men in gray, each grasping a ready musket. It was fearful to imagine what a withering, death-dealing sheet of flame and storm of bullets might in an instant leap from those open windows at a single word of command. The crowd instinctively recoiled from them, and a great silence fell upon it.
As the train stopped a squad of men sprang from each car and cleared spaces in which the companies might form. Then the gray columns poured forth quietly, steadily, and without a break until the ten companies were full and the regiment stood in line, rigid, motionless, and expectant.
When all was in readiness the colonel came to the door of the car, from a window of which Myles and Billings had watched the forming troops, and said:
“Now, Mr. Manning, will you let me introduce you to my boys?”
THE NEXT MOMENT HE FOUND HIMSELF STANDING ON THE PLATFORM BESIDE THE COLONEL. (Page [227].)
Myles hesitated. He had dared face death in the heat of that exciting race against time; but to face a thousand men was quite another thing.
It was Billings who urged him on by saying: