After the noon meal, which figured as “Luncheon” on the hotel bill of fare, and was, in point of fact, a heavy and dispiriting midday dinner, he braved the elements and went in a closed sight-seeing car to the Chickamauga battle-field. The drive proved to be a damp test of endurance, and he brought nothing back from it better than a memory of rain-sodden fields and forest; of endless colonnades of gray, ghostly monuments, a majority of them assuring the beholder in letters of granite that here the Ohio troops fought nobly; of parkings of ancient cannon, the guns pointing in so many different directions that no human being could guess which way the battle had run; of the droning singsong of the chauffeur pouring his explanation patter into the reversed megaphone for the benefit of his few fares. The return to the hotel was merely a change from outdoor dreariness to indoor. The lobby was a gathering-ground for a scattering of disgruntled tourists, who had used their battle-field stop-over privilege only to find themselves marooned by the weather. Tregarvon smoked in solitary misery for what remained of the afternoon, and past the evening meal, begged some of the hotel stationery, and wrote a letter to Elizabeth Wardwell. “It is a sin and a shame to write you after such a day as I’ve been wearing out here,” he began, “but you know my weakness for afflicting other people--for unloading my woes upon the nearest pair of sympathetic shoulders. Your shoulders have always been that; and sometimes I wonder that you can still stand up straight and queenly, as you do, after having carried so many of my burdens.” Here followed an account of the events of the exciting Saturday forenoon, and he tried, as well as the written words would serve, to transmit some picture of the boiler explosion, tagged with an attempt to portray the tenterhooks of suspense upon which the disaster had impaled him. “You see where it leaves me,” he went on; “still in the air as to whether the Ocoee is something or nothing. For a few little minutes, after the drill had passed the eighteen-inch dead-line, I saw rose-colored, saw my chance to provide for the home-folks, and to ignore forever and a day, the Uncle Byrd legacy. But now I am no better assured than I was before we began drilling; and, to make it more interesting, Hartridge happened along after the explosion--the whole college turned out and came tramping over through the wood to see what had broken loose--and he says the sandstone dike is still under us. We shan’t know positively, of course, until we can get a new engine, and haul it by inches up the mountain, and drag it into place and set it going; and by that time I shall be a raving maniac.