L. P. Brockett, The camp, the battlefield, and the hospital: or, lights and shadows of the great rebellion

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[198] distance above Calhoun they saw, for the first time, the runaway train ahead of them. The “Yanks,” supposing themselves now well out of danger, were quietly oiling the engine, taking up track, etc., but finding themselves discovered, they mounted and sped away, throwing out upon the track, as they fled, the heavy cross-ties with which they had provided themselves; which was done by breaking out the end of the hindmost box car, and pitching them out. The rails which they had last taken up they now carried off with them, but their rebel pursuers, on coming to where the rails were torn up, stopped, tore up the rails behind them and laid them down, without fastening, before the engine, which ran over them cautiously but safely; and then carefully throwing off from the track the cross-ties which had been thrown there to impede their progress, pushed on after the fugitives. Now the race became terrible in its intensity. “Nip and tuck” the two trains swept with fearful speed past Resaca, Tilton, and on through Dalton, where the rebel train stopped to put off the telegraph operator, with instructions to telegraph to Chattanooga to have them stopped there, in case he should fail to overhaul them. On and on, fast and still faster the rebel train pressed with hot speed, sometimes in sight, as much to prevent their cutting the wires before the message could be sent, as to catch them. The caring Yankees indeed stopped just opposite, and very near to the encampment of a rebel regiment, and cut the wires, but the operator who had been dropped at Dalton had put the message through about two minutes before. They also again tore up the track, cut down a telegraph pole, and placed the two ends of it under the cross-ties,