went up against the effete East. The East
hadn't the slightest intention of giving free transportation to two
thousand hoboes. Kelly's Army lay helplessly for some time at Council
Bluffs. The day I joined it, made desperate by delay, it marched out
to capture a train.

It was quite an imposing sight. General Kelly sat a magnificent black
charger, and with waving banners, to the martial music of fife and
drum corps, company by company, in two divisions, his two thousand
stiffs countermarched before him and hit the wagon-road to the little
burg of Weston, seven miles away. Being the latest recruit, I was in
the last company, of the last regiment, of the Second Division, and,
furthermore, in the last rank of the rear-guard. The army went into
camp at Weston beside the railroad track--beside the tracks, rather,
for two roads went through: the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, and
the Rock Island.

Our intention was to take the first train out, but the railroad
officials "coppered" our play--and won. There was no first train. They
tied up the two lines and stopped running trains. In the meantime,
while we lay by the dead tracks, the good people of Omaha and Council
Bluffs were bestirring themselves. Preparations were making to form a
mob, capture a train in Council Bluffs, run it down to us, and make us
a present of it. The railroad officials coppered that play, too. They
didn't wait for the mob. Early in the morning of the second day, an
engine, with a single private car attached, arrived at the station and
side-tracked. At this sign that life had renewed in the dead roads,
the whole army lined up beside the track.

But never did life renew so monstrously on a dead railroad as it did
on those two roads. From the west came the whistle of a locomotive.
It was coming in our direction, bound east. We were bound east. A stir
of preparation ran down our ranks. The whistle tooted fast and
furiously, and the train thundered at top speed. The hobo didn't live
that could have boarded it. Another locomotive whistled, and another
train came through at top speed, and another, and another, train after
train, train after train, till toward the last the trains were
composed of passenger coaches, box-cars, flat-cars, dead engines,
cabooses, mail-cars, wrecking appliances, and all the riff-raff of
worn-out and abandoned rolling-stock that collects in the yards of
great railways. When the yards at Council Bluffs had been completely
cleane