The Railroad War by Jesse Taylor Croft Page B

else—eagerness? “You’re quite handsome, you know. And interesting.”
    He nodded.
    “Until we meet again?” she said, offering her hand.
    “Until then,” he said, and turned to leave.
    Once outside in the blazing heat, he sighed. Jesus! he said to himself. That’s one hard lady. Never mind her softness and
     her silence. I’ve never been kept so off balance by a woman. At least, he added, not since Miranda Kemble.
    And then he remembered where he had seen a cock of the head like hers before. It was at West Point, the day before he graduated.
     And the woman—the girl—he’d noticed doing it was Miranda Kemble herself—so very different from this strange women. She was
     so much more open and direct and spirited. And yet…
    He wondered about Miranda. He hadn’t heard from her since the start of the war. Before that, there had been letters, but he
     had not seen her since she was fifteen.
    He shook his head sadly.
Damn the war!
    A Confederate major—a genuine Confederate major—was directing and organizing the trains at the Jackson, Mississippi, train
     yard for General Joe Johnston. Major Noah Ballard stood on the edge of the yard where the tracks converged toward the bridge
     over the Pearl. A few yards away a locomotive had just been attached to a fourteen-car load. And while Noah was waiting for
     it to start, he glanced up at the sky. It was a few minutes after one o’clock by his watch, and already huge summer rain clouds
     had started to pile up in the west. How long will they hold off? he thought to himself, grim-faced, worried about his already
     desperately perilous schedule.
    Though he was an engineer and not a railway manager, he did what he was told, and he went where he was sent. And of course,
     railroads were in his blood. His father was still president of the Atlanta and Western, a line that the war had made more
     vital than ever.
    Noah had been at this job for ten days. Before that, he had planned the fortifications around Jackson, then directed their
     construction.
    A leather pouch slung around his neck and perched on his hip was stuffed full of papers indicating where and what had to be
     moved, and what he had available to move it in. But the information in the papers scarcely began to approximate the reality
     he was facing in the job General Johnston had given him: to move an army of over thirty thousand with all its baggage and
     equipment and impediments out of Jackson by noon the following day, and to do it under the noses of a larger Federal army
     that had every intention of stopping them.
    If he failed, and if Sherman defeated or captured Johnston’s army, then there would be only one weak Confederate force, Braxton
     Bragg’s army in eastern Tennessee, between Grant and Atlanta.
    And meanwhile, Noah had 18 usable locomotives, and somewhere between 130 and 150 cars, depending on luck and the always precarious
     final stages of wear and tear. Each car might carry as much as sixteen thousand pounds of baggage or equipment, and each locomotive
     could pull, with yet more luck, trains of up to 15 cars.
    And he had hundreds of thousands of tons to ship.
    The railroads of northern and eastern Mississippi showed on their books three to four times that number of engines and cars.
     Noah had no idea where the hell they had gotten to. And he didn’t have time to find out.
    How many angels can dance on a pinhead? he asked himself, shaking his head. That’s an easy one compared with, How can I in
     one day move an army of thirty thousand with 18 locomotives and 130 cars?
    It was an impossible situation, and he knew it. On top of that, he had only one way out by rail: the rickety Southern Line
     that ran between Jackson and Meridian, ninety miles to the east. All the other lines out of Jackson—the New Orleans and Jackson
     to the south, the Great Northern to the north and Memphis, and of course the Vicksburg and Jackson to the west—had all been
     taken by the Federals.
    He became