Now the railroad which suffered most from the Confederate raid was the one upon which Tom was traveling eastward. The train he had taken came to a sudden stop at a way-station in Ohio, where a red flag was furiously waved.
"Morgan's torn up the track just ahead," shouted the man who held the flag.
Nothing more could be learned there and then. Of course the raiders had cut the wires. By and by fugitives began to straggle in from the eastward, farmers who had fled from their farms driving their horses before them, villagers who feared the sack and ruin that really came to no one, women and children on foot, on horseback, in carts, in wagons, in buggies. Every fugitive had a new tale of terror to tell, but nobody really knew anything. Tom questioned each newcomer. Piecing together what they said, he concluded that Morgan had swept northward; that the track had been destroyed for but a mile or so, possibly less: and that the quickest way for him to get to Washington was to walk across the short gap and get a train or an engine on the other side. He could find no one who would go with him, even as a guide, but well-meant directions were showered upon him. So were well-meant warnings, about ten warnings to one direction. The railroad, however, was his best guide-post. He started eastward, riding a horse he had bought from one of the fugitives. The big bay brute stood over sixteen hands high, but the price Tom paid for him was a good deal higher than the horse.
All went well at first. He soon reached the place where the Confederates had wrecked the railroad. Their work had been thorough. Every little bridge or trestle had been burned. Rails and ties had been torn up, the ties massed together and set on fire, the rails thrown upon the burning ties and twisted by the heat into sinuous snakes of iron. Occasionally a hot rail had been twisted about a tree until it became a mere set of loops, never to serve again the purpose for which it had been made. The telegraph poles had been chopped down and the wires were tangled into a broken and useless web. In some places the rails had entirely disappeared. Doubtless these had been thrown into the little streams which the burned bridges had spanned. Altogether the road-bed looked as if some highly intelligent hurricane and earthquake had co-operated in its destruction. It would be many a day before a train could again run upon it. Morgan's system of wrecking a railroad was almost as perfect as his system of horse-stealing.