And of such was my supper at Kingston. The whistle sounded, and we got aboard and were off for Chattanooga. Night fell peacefully upon Kingston and its dirty peddlers of unwholesome pies, as a curve in the road hid it and them from our reproachful gaze.
As the darkness increased, and we went dashing at break-neck speed over a road that had had little or no care bestowed upon it since the opening of the campaign, I thought of the humorous young man's remark, and of how unpleasant and inconvenient it would be to have this long train thrown off and its contents, as Meister Karl hath it, "pepperboxically distributed" in the adjacent ditch.
And then to have one of Wheeler's men take advantage of a fellow, as he lay there with a broken leg, and rob him of the few dollars he had borrowed to go home on! Well, we had been taking our chances for the last three years, and it was no new thing to take them now. With this comforting reflection, I sat down on my valise, and, wrapped in my great-coat, awaited the coming of "the balmy." It was rather unsatisfactory waiting. Something in my head kept going rattlety-bang, jerkety-jerk, bumpety-bump, in unison with the noise of the cars; and when I did get into a doze, I was harassed by the dim shadow of a fear that we were about to leave the track and go end-over-end down an embankment. At last weariness overcame me, and I slept soundly, half-lying on the dirty floor, half-leaning on my valise, coiled up in one of those attitudes in which only an old campaigner can sleep at all; I woke amid an unearthly whizzing of steam, to find the train standing still, and myself mysteriously entangled with various arms and legs that didn't belong to me. I extricated myself and looked out. Through the thick darkness of the early morning there glared upon me the light of what seemed to be innumerable fierce, unwinking eyes. I began to think that I had taken the wrong train and brought up in the lower regions; but a little reflection and rubbing of the eyes disclosed to me that we had reached Chattanooga in safety, and that those fierce eyes were the head-lights of the locomotives that had arrived during the night, and were now blowing off their superfluous steam in that wild, unearthly manner. As soon as it was daylight I inquired about trains going North, and learned that there was no telling when a train would go, as Forrest was said to be in the neighborhood of the road. So there was nothing to do but to go to the Crutchfield House and wait. Alas for the man whose purse is slim, under any circumstances! Alas and alas for him if he was obliged to wait in Chattanooga at Crutchfield prices! It was a dollar that he had to pay for each scanty meal, a dollar for the use of a densely populated bed, and a dollar must be deposited with the clerk to secure the return of the little towel he wiped his face on. Besides the pecuniary depletion that he suffered, he was bored to death with weary waiting, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Chattanooga was far from being a cheerful place, especially in the rainy season, when nothing was visible out of doors except the lonesome sentinels pacing their beats in dripping ponchos, and with guns tucked under their arms, and here and there a team of steaming mules, struggling to draw a creaking, lumbering wagon through the detestable clay.