Authors: Jesse Taylor Croft
“Since I started this job for Joe Johnston. And since somebody has come to try to take it away from me. I intend to save and
preserve my railroads the way Joe Johnston intends to save and preserve his army. And it’s not just me, Jane,” he added. “Railroads
are in my family. My father would never forgive me if I failed at that.”
She laughed after he said that, and he caught her eyes, but she instantly glanced away from him. “In fact, even more important
than saving and preserving the army or the railroads, we’d best be thinking of saving and protecting you,” he said. “And soon.”
“I do want to go with you,” she said, continuing to avoid his attempt to catch her eye.
“I can’t do that,” he chuckled, though he was perfectly serious. “I have no idea where I’ll be more than two or three days
from now.”
“Really?” she asked. “Then perhaps I should stay and wait for you here.”
“Out of the question!” he said. “Sherman will come into Jackson the instant Johnston leaves.”
“So? He’ll leave, too.” She was grinning, teasing him. “And then you’ll come back.”
“Absolutely out of the question. I’ll make sure you are on one of the first trains out this morning.”
“But Sherman
will
leave, won’t he? And then you will return.”
“Yes. I don’t think the Yanks will occupy Jackson for long. They have bigger fish to fry. But I can’t guarantee that they’ll
leave much for us after they depart.”
“Then I’ll just wait,” she said.
“Jesus Christ, woman! Why do you want to invite danger? Do you want to get yourself hurt? You know what Yankee soldiers are
capable of, don’t you?”
“No,” she said doubtfully.
Before she could explain herself, there was a loud noise on the stairs.
“In fact, you need protection in any case,” he said quickly, for it had dawned on him that a single woman was scarcely more
safe from her own countrymen than from the northerners. He remembered that he had provided her with protection in May, the
first time Sherman came to Jackson. “You have that pistol I gave you?”
“The Colt?” she said. “It’s under my pillow.”
“Keep it there until I get you on that train. Then take it with you in your handbag.”
“If you say so.”
The noise on the stairs was followed by a loud pounding on the door.
“Noah! Noah! For God’s sake, come quickly!” It was Gar Thomas.
“Run into the bedroom, Jane,” Noah whispered. Then, “Coming, Gar.”
Even as Noah spoke, Gar continued pounding and shouting his name. Jane, meanwhile, moved swiftly into the bedroom, picking
up her dressing gown as she went.
“Gar! For God’s sake!” Noah shouted. “I’m coming. You’ve managed to wake the dead.” As he spoke, Noah slipped on a pair of
trousers, then a shirt.
After that, he unlocked and opened the door.
“How in hell’s name did you know where I was, Gar?” he said.
“Jesus, Noah,” Gar said, breathless and panting, “there’s scarcely anyone in Jackson who doesn’t know where you are when you’re
not working.”
“What do you want?” Noah said, not pleased to learn that he hadn’t managed to keep his relations with Jane secret.
“There’s been a wreck!” Gar said as soon as he was able. “A big one—two trains head-on. About twenty miles west of Meridian.”
He stepped back. “It’s bad! The train going to Meridian was full of women and children and old folks. There’ve been many injuries…many
deaths.”
Noah looked at him, uncomprehending. Jesus Christ! he thought. Of all the worst possible things! Then he stepped back inside,
signaling Gar to follow him.
“How many dead?” he managed to say.
Gar just shrugged and shook his head.
“When?”
“Four or five hours ago,” Gar said.
“That long?”
“The Yanks cut the telegraph.”
“A grand time for that,” Noah said. “The most perfect time imaginable.” Then: “How in God’s name did a train get on that track
coming
toward
Jackson?”
At that moment Jane Featherstone appeared. She was wearing the dressing gown again.
“Hello, Mr. Thomas,” she said. And then to Noah, “I couldn’t help but hear what you two were saying. I’d like to help, if
I may.”
“Miss Featherstone,” Gar said, acknowledging her entrance. But he quickly ignored her, for Noah had all his attention.
“How did the train get on that track coming back this way?” Noah repeated.
Gar looked perplexed and guilty, as though he were somehow responsible.
“We’ll have to get out there fast,” Noah went on. And then he started firing questions as fast as they entered his mind: “How
much damage was there? Is the track usable? How long will it be out? Can we get word to Meridian? What equipment will we need
to fix all this?”
“Wait, wait, Noah,” Gar said as soon as he could make himself heard. “I left Captain Hottel in charge while I came looking
for you.”
“Is he doing all right?”
“I think so. He’s…”
“We’ll need cranes, big ones, winches, blasting powder,” Noah said, ignoring him. “Doctors, bandages. Jesus! And two or three
hundred men!”
“He’s taking care of that.”
“But we don’t know how bad it is. We don’t know how much damage there is to the track. I’m more worried about the track than
the train.”
“As I was about to say,” Gar said, “the captain was sending some people out to the wreck in a locomotive to check out what
happened. We’ll have a report from them pretty soon—if we’re lucky.”
“You left him to manage that?”
“He was doing fine,” Gar said. “And somebody had to find you.”
“Who’s told the general?” Noah asked, closing his eyes in pain at the thought.
“I sent someone.”
“Jesus!” He looked at Gar. “Have you heard anything back from him yet?”
“No, thank God.”
“Yeah.” Noah didn’t look forward to his next encounter with Johnston.
There goes all hope of getting Joe Johnston’s army out of here for several days, Noah thought.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s move. Help me with my boots, will you?” And then he looked at Jane. “And I want you packed by
the time I get back. Hear me? Pack!”
Jane Featherstone nodded to indicate that she heard and understood him. But she didn’t give him an answer one way or another.
She was thinking that the young Yankee captain, Sam Hawken, would probably enter Jackson along with the rest of General Sherman’s
army. With Sam Hawken on her mind, Jane Featherstone wasn’t sure whether she wanted to obey Noah or not.
Shortly before dawn on Friday morning the fifteenth of July, Tom Stetson met Sam Hawken at a ford on the east bank of the
Pearl River. The ford was crowded with refugees and deserters. All of them were dazed, quiescent, anxious. Before Vicksburg
some measure of courage and confidence had quickened most of these people, but courage and confidence had long since abandoned
them.
Stetson and Hawken reached the Union lines just before breakfast. During their journey back to their own lines, the captain
was more than usually quiet and pensive. It was Hawken who had engineered the rail catastrophe of the previous evening, and
he was now heartsick over the loss of innocent lives. Sam could steel himself to accept the carnage and mangled bodies of
a battlefield; it was a function of his job to do that. But he had brought terrible suffering to a great many women and children,
and he could not ignore that.
Stetson and Hawken found General William Tecumseh Sherman engaged in his morning ablutions. The general, trousered and shirtless,
was outside his tent, leaning over a wide porcelain basin on a washstand set up in front of a tree. As the two men approached,
he was splashing his face and sandy-red hair with water.
Though he and Tom had ridden hard and long to reach the general, Sam had decided not to waste time cleaning up and changing.
His information, he knew, needed to reach the general immediately. So both he and Tom were still wearing the Confederate uniforms
they’d had on the previous day.
A mirror was hanging from a peg hammered in the tree. And when the general glanced into it, he smiled wryly at the sight of
two men who were apparently Rebel officers, armed and dangerous, standing not fifteen feet from his unprotected back. A few
feet behind the two men in gray was Charles Fleming, a captain, who was another of the general’s aides. Fleming had escorted
Hawken and Stetson to the general from the guard post where they had initially been detained.
“Are you going to demand my surrender?” Sherman called out as he started to vigorously towel his face. “Or should I say my
prayers?” He paused a moment, then continued, darkly, into the towel: “If it’s to be prayers, I have a feeling that God will
not listen to me.”
“Captain Hawken and Lieutenant Stetson reporting, sir,” Sam Hawken said.
When Sherman turned around, both of his officers were saluting and standing at something resembling attention. But they were
both too filthy, trail worn, and exhausted to make any sort of military impression. The general was pleased. He would not
have wanted his two spies otherwise.
He was so glad to have them back that he walked over to the two men and clasped them warmly, one after the other, on the shoulders.
“It’s good to see you, Sam, and you, too, Tom,” he said familiarly, even though terms of endearment did not come easily to
him. Then he looked solicitously at each one. “Let’s get some food and strong coffee into you while you tell me your tale.”
Sam nodded wearily and murmured, “Yes, sir.”
“Grand,” Sherman said. “Tell it to me at my table.” Then he glanced up. “Orderly?”
A corporal moved out of the shadows. “Sir.”
“Would you help me with my uniform, please?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ten minutes later Sam Hawken and Tom Stetson were seated at the general’s field table, sipping hot cups of the strong coffee
the general had promised. Hawken sat opposite the general, and Stetson was on the general’s left. In front of them were plates
of ham and potatoes and eggs and bread.
Tom, as he took his seat, noticed yet again how closely Captain Hawken and General Sherman resembled one another. Each man
was lean, wiry, and above average height (though of the two, only Sam could truly be called tall), with nearly the same shade
of sandy-red hair. Both of them were also seemingly indifferent to the spit-and-polish look favored by parade-ground military
men. Even when he was wearing a clean and newly pressed uniform, General Sherman looked unkempt. Each man tended his beard
irregularly and impatiently, and each had hard, dark eyes that seemed to look right into a man.
There were some differences, too. Important ones. The general was older by fifteen years, and Sam was livelier and quicker
to laugh while Sherman often had the terrible, implacable air of a hero in a Greek play. He acted like a man hounded by a
hostile divinity.
Hawken’s usual good spirits were not going to be much in evidence this morning, however. He was too burdened by the weight
of the events of the past night.
“Go ahead,” Sherman said to Stetson, noticing that the young lieutenant was hesitating, “start. Dig in.” Then to Sam, granting
him one of his few meager smiles, “Now for your report, Sam. Give me the heart of it first.”
Hawken waited for a time, collecting his thoughts. “All right, then,” he said at last, “the heart of the matter is that Joe
Johnston’s original plan was to hold his line only until noon today. At least until last night, he intended to evacuate his
forces beginning this morning.” Sam closed his eyes and shook his head sadly while Sherman watched closely with growing concentration.
“I believe I have managed to delay his withdrawal at least for another day or two, though I’m neither pleased nor proud to
have done what I did.”
Sherman puckered his lips and pulled at his wispy, muchtugged-upon beard. After that, he leaned over the table and propped
his chin up with his hand. “Go on,” he said.
“I obtained passage east on a train leaving Jackson early yesterday afternoon,” Sam said. “Before I left, I instructed Tom
to take the horses and wait at a spot we chose on the other side of the river. Then I went to Meridian and commandeered a
locomotive and tender and…”
“Just like that? Single-handed?” Sherman interrupted, smiling his cool half smile and shaking his head.
Sam nodded, raised his hands palm out a couple of inches above the tabletop, and sighed. “A major usually gets listened to
with respect,” he said, “even in the Confederacy. And by the time anyone realized that I wasn’t the genuine article, I had
a pistol leveled at the locomotive driver and his fireman.”
Sherman nodded, still smiling.
“What I found out from General Dodge’s spy, Miss Featherstone—a clever and unusual lady, by the way—was that the Rebs intended
to run three trains out of Jackson early in the afternoon, including the one I took to Meridian, and then three more before
evening. That meant that if I could ram the locomotive I’d commandeered into one of the later trains, I could…” He stopped
and shrugged, leaving the general the task of completing his thought.
“I understand,” Sherman said. “And you cut the telegraph?”
“Tom took care of that while I was on the way to Meridian.”
“Good,” the general said with an approving glance at Tom Stetson. “And I take it all went well after you left Meridian?”
Sam nodded. “A few miles west of the town,” he said, “I had the engine driver stop. I ordered the driver and his fireman off
the cab and bound and gagged them out of sight of the right of way. They’re probably loose by now. But I knew they’d be no
danger to me before I’d finished with their machine.
“I drove it to a bit of a rise, where I could see what was coming, and waited, throwing wood into the firebox from time to
time to keep steam up. When I caught sight of the eastbound train, I set my engine going, lashed the throttle full open, and
jumped off.
“Not long after that, the crash came, and,” he shrugged, “locomotives and cars were strewn everywhere, crushed and broken.”
He looked at Sherman, sad-eyed, grieving. “They were passenger cars, General. It was women and children who were being carried
out on that train. There must have been two or three hundred of them packed on it. Packed,” he repeated.