The distance was too great for all the party to reach their destination before Friday, and on the way Andrews managed to notify most of his men that the enterprise would not be undertaken until Saturday. About midnight of the 11th of April the members reached Marietta, and, with two exceptions, spent the night at a small hotel near the depot. Big Shanty (where passengers on the early morning train were allowed to take breakfast), north of Marietta, was the place where the party proposed to seize the locomotive and such part of the train as might seem practicable, the engineer (Brown) of the party to run it north, stopping at intervals only long enough to cut telegraph wires, to prevent information being sent ahead, tear up short portions of the track to prevent pursuit, and to burn bridges, the latter being the principal object of the raid. Porter and Hawkins of the party, who had lodging at a different hotel from the others, were not awakened in time, and consequently did not participate in the daring act for which the party was organized. During the night Andrews carefully instructed those at his hotel, each man being told what was expected of him. The party were almost to a man strangers to him until five days before, and hardly two of them, though of the same regiment, until then knew each other. Never before, for so extraordinary an attempt, was so incongruous a band assembled. I knew one of them--Sergeant-Major Marion A. Ross, of the 2d Ohio. He had no previous training, and no special skill for such an expedition. He was a farmer boy (Champaign Co., Ohio) of more than ordinary retiring modesty, with no element of reckless daring in his nature. He had almost white silky flaxen hair, and at Antioch College, where I first met him, he rarely associated with his schoolmates in play or amusement. He was called a ladies' man; and this because he did not care for the active pursuits usually enjoyed by young men. It is said that when Ross ascertained the number of trains, regular and irregular, with which the exigencies of war had covered the railroad, and considered also the distance to be passed over, he tried at the last moment to dissuade Andrews from undertaking the execution of the enterprise. In this he failed, but Andrews gave any of the party who regarded the design too hazardous the right to withdraw.( 2) Not one, however, availed himself of this liberty. Ross saw that the scheme must fail, but was too manly to abandon his comrades.