night, but I tossed restlessly and could not
sleep. At five in the morning I dressed and abandoned my bed.

I asked the maid in the dressing-room how late the train was, and she
told me two hours. She was a mulatto woman, and I noticed that her
face was haggard, with great circles under the eyes, while the eyes
themselves were wide with some haunting fear.

"What is the matter?" I asked.

"Nothing, miss; I didn't sleep well, I guess," was her reply.

I looked at her closely, and tried her with one of our signals. She
responded, and I made sure of her.

"Something terrible is going to happen in Chicago," she said. "There's
that fake* train in front of us. That and the troop-trains have made us
late."

* False.

"Troop-trains?" I queried.

She nodded her head. "The line is thick with them. We've been passing
them all night. And they're all heading for Chicago. And bringing them
over the air-line--that means business.

"I've a lover in Chicago," she added apologetically. "He's one of us,
and he's in the Mercenaries, and I'm afraid for him."

Poor girl. Her lover was in one of the three disloyal regiments.

Hartman and I had breakfast together in the dining car, and I forced
myself to eat. The sky had clouded, and the train rushed on like a
sullen thunderbolt through the gray pall of advancing day. The very
negroes that waited on us knew that something terrible was impending.
Oppression sat heavily upon them; the lightness of their natures had
ebbed out of them; they were slack and absent-minded in their service,
and they whispered gloomily to one another in the far end of the car
next to the kitchen. Hartman was hopeless over the situation.

"What can we do?" he demanded for the twentieth time, with a helpless
shrug of the shoulders.

He pointed out of the window. "See, all is ready. You can depend upon it
that they're holding them like this, thirty or forty miles outside the
city, on every road."

He had reference to troop-trains on the side-track. The soldiers were
cooking their breakfasts over fires built on the ground beside the
track, and they looked up curiously at us as we thundered past without
slackening our terrific speed.

All was quiet as we entered Chicago. It was evident nothing had happened
yet. In the suburbs the morning papers came on board the train. There
was nothing in them, and yet there was much in them for those skilled
in reading between the lines that it was intended the ord