We called it the “death trick” because, in the early days of railroading, we had a lot of wrecks about four o’clock in the morning.  That was before double tracks and safety inventions had made travelling by rail safer than sleeping at home, and before trainmen off duty had learned to look not on liquor that was red.  Jewett, however, was not long on the night shift.  He was a good despatcher,—­a bit risky at times, the chief thought, but that was only when he knew his man.  He was a rusher and ran trains close, but he was ever watchful and wide awake.

In two years’ time he had become chief despatcher.  During these years the country, so quiet when he first went to Bloomington, had been torn by the tumult of civil strife.

With war news passing under his eye every day, trains going south with soldiers, and cars coming north with the wounded, it is not remarkable that the fever should get into the young despatcher’s blood.  He read of the great, sad Lincoln, whom he had seen and heard and known, calling for volunteers, and his blood rushed red and hot through his veins.  He talked to the trainmen who came in to register, to enginemen waiting for orders, to yardmen in the yards, and to shopmen after hours; and many of them, catching the contagion, urged him to organize a company, and he did.  He continued to work days and to drill his men in the twilight.  He would have been up and drilling at dawn if he could have gotten them together.  He inspired them with his quiet enthusiasm, held them by personal magnetism, and by unselfish patriotism kindled in the breast of each of his fifty followers a desire to do something for his country.  Gradually the railroad, so dear to him, slipped back to second place in the affairs of the earth.  His country was first.  To be sure, there was no shirking of responsibility at the office, but the business of the company was never allowed to overshadow the cause in which he had silently but heartily enlisted.  “Abe” Lincoln was, to his way of reasoning, a bigger man than the President of the Chicago and Alton Railroad—­which was something to concede.  The country must be cared for first, he argued; for what good would a road be with no country to run through?

All day he would work at the despatcher’s office, flagging fast freights and “laying out” local passenger trains, to the end that the soldiers might be hurried south.  He would pocket the “cannon ball” and order the “thunderbolt” held at Alton for the soldiers’ special.  “Take siding at Sundance for troop train, south-bound,” he would flash out, and glory in his power to help the government.

All day he would work and scheme for the company (and the Union), and at night, when the silver moonlight lay on the lot back of the machine shops, he would drill and drill as long as he could hold the men together.  They were all stout and fearless young fellows, trained and accustomed to danger by the hazard of their daily toil.  They knew something of discipline, were used to obeying orders, and to reading and remembering regulations made for their guidance; and Jewett reasoned that they would become, in time, a crack company, and a credit to the state.