From this time on we were constantly interrupted.  Not a half-mile passed without a rail up.  Bonnell was always at the front laying track, and I am proud to say that he accepted me as aide-de-camp.  Other fellows, unknown to me in the dark, gave hearty help.  The Seventh showed that it could do something else than drill.

At one spot, on a high embankment over standing water, the rail was gone, sunk probably.  Here we tried our rails brought from the turn-out.  They were too short.  We supplemented with a length of plank from our stores.  We rolled our cars carefully over.  They passed safe.  But Homans shook his head.  He could not venture a locomotive on that frail stuff.  So we lost the society of the “J.H.  Nicholson.”  Next day the Massachusetts commander called for some one to dive in the pool for the lost rail.  Plump into the water went a little wiry chap and grappled the rail.  “When I come up,” says the brave fellow afterwards to me, “our officer out with a twenty-dollar gold piece and wanted me to take it.  ‘That a’n’t what I come for,’ says I.  ‘Take it,’ says he, ’and share with the others.’  ‘That a’n’t what they come for,’ says I. But I took a big cold,” the diver continued, “and I’m condemned hoarse yit,”—­which was the fact.

Farther on we found a whole length of track torn up, on both sides, sleepers and all, and the same thing repeated with alternations of breaks of single rails.  Our howitzer-ropes came into play to hoist and haul.  We were not going to be stopped.

But it was becoming a Noche Triste to some of our comrades.  We had now marched some sixteen miles.  The distance was trifling.  But the men had been on their legs pretty much all day and night.  Hardly any one had had any full or substantial sleep or meal since we started from New York.  They napped off, standing, leaning on their guns, dropping down in their tracks on the wet ground, at every halt.  They were sleepy, but plucky.  As we passed through deep cuttings, places, as it were, built for defence, there was a general desire that the tedium of the night should be relieved by a shindy.

During the whole night I saw our officers moving about the line, doing their duty vigorously, despite exhaustion, hunger, and sleeplessness.

About midnight our friends of the Eighth had joined us, and our whole little army struggled on together.  I find that I have been rather understating the troubles of the march.  It seems impossible that such difficulty could be encountered within twenty miles of the capital of our nation.  But we were making a rush to put ourselves in that capital, and we could not proceed in the slow, systematic way of an advancing army.  We must take the risk and stand the suffering, whatever it was.  So the Seventh Regiment went through its bloodless Noche Triste.

MORNING.