For a mile or two all went on swimmingly.  Then sudden disaster came.  The car struck a broken rail and was hurled headlong from the track, sending its occupants flying into the muddy roadside ditch.  This was enough to discourage anybody with less go in him than Conductor Fuller.  But in a moment he was on his feet, trying his limbs.  No bones were broken.  A mud-bath was the full measure of his misfortune.  Murphy was equally sound.  The car was none the worse.  With scarce a minute’s delay they sprang to it, righted it, and with some strong tugging lifted it upon the track.  With very few minutes’ delay they were away again, somewhat more cautiously than before, and sharply on the lookout for further gifts of broken rails from the runaways ahead.

Leaving the pair of pursuers to their seemingly hopeless task, we must return to the score of locomotive pirates.  These men who had done such strange work at Big Shanty were by no means what they seemed.  They were clad in the butternut gray and the slouch hats of the Confederacy, but their ordinary attire was the blue uniform of the Union army.  They were, in truth, a party of daring scouts, who had stealthily made their way south in disguise, their purpose being to steal a train, burn the bridges behind them as they fled, and thus make useless for a time the only railroad by which the Confederate authorities could send troops to Chattanooga, then threatened by the Union forces under General Mitchel.

They had been remarkably successful, as we have seen, at the beginning of their enterprise.  Making their way, by devious routes, to Marietta, they had gathered at that place, boarded a train, and started north.  The rush of passengers and trainmen into the refreshment-room at Big Shanty had been calculated upon.  The presence of a Confederate camp at that out-of-the-way station had not been.  It might have proved fatal to their enterprise but for the stolid stupidity of the sentinel.  But that peril had been met and passed.  They were safely away.  Exhilaration filled their souls.  All was safe behind; all seemed safe ahead.

True, there was one peril close at hand.  Beside the track ran that slender wire, a resting-place, it seemed, for passing birds.  In that outstretching wire their most imminent danger lurked.  Fast as they might go, it could flash the news of their exploit a thousand-fold faster.  The flight of the lightning news-bearer must be stopped.  The train was halted a mile or two from the town, the pole climbed, the wire cut.  Danger from this source was at an end.  Halting long enough to tear up the rail to whose absence Conductor Fuller owed his somersault, they sprang to their places again and the runaway train sped blithely on.

Several times they stopped for wood and water.  When any questions were asked they were answered by the companion of the engineer, James J. Andrews by name, a Union spy by profession, the originator of and leader in this daring enterprise.