Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/337

Rh you have to get used to. And mind you," he admonished the lieutenant, "a man 's like a horse. He shies at a thing that 's new to him. Don't you be too quick to call a man a coward. You 'll probably find there are some things he 's a mighty sight braver about than you are. I 've learned that.

"Well, we got to Carthage. Ed Nash was agent there, and he stopped us with a lantern and called me in to the telegraph key. 'Come in here,' he said. 'Some fool 's asking questions. See what you make of it.'

I did n't make anything of it, at first—except that there was something familiar about the 'send.' It was some one who wanted to know who we were. We wanted to know where he was. And we kept sparring with him till suddenly it came to me that perhaps it was Ellsworth, Morgan's operator. He used to work on our line once, and I thought I recognized his way of handling the key. Telegraphers were scarce in those days. And the artillery officer kept asking: 'What is it? What is it?'

"I said to him, with a wink at Nash: 'It 's the man at Dayton. The line 's clear. Get aboard and we'll go ahead.' And when we'd got rid of him, I said to Nash: 'He 's tapped our wire. Cut him off from Cincinnati so he won't get hold of any messages. Wire them that we 've gone ahead.'

"You see, I figured that if we did n't want to meet Morgan, it was just as likely that he didn't want to meet us either. If he had wanted to, he could have