It was a singular coincidence that the Southerners were making a military occupation of Frankfort with a Union army only a day’s march away. The colonel found a certain grim irony in it as he took his last look and turned away to join Buell.
A half mile into the forest and they heard the crashing of hoofs in the brushwood. Colonel Winchester drew up his little troop abruptly as a band of men in gray emerged into an open space.
“Confederate cavalry!” exclaimed Dick.
“Yes,” said the colonel.
But the gray troopers were not much more numerous than the blue. Evidently they were a scouting party, too, and for a few minutes they stared at each other across a space of a couple of hundred yards or so. Both parties fired a few random rifle shots, more from a sense of duty than a desire to harm. Then they fell away, as if by mutual consent, the gray riding toward Frankfort and the blue toward the Union army.
“Was it a misfortune to meet them?” asked Dick.
“I don’t think so,” replied Colonel Winchester. “They had probably found out already that our army was near. Of course they had out scouts. Kirby Smith, I know, is an alert man, and anyway, the march of an army as large as ours could not be hidden.”
It was dawn again when the colonel’s little party reached the Union camp, and when he made his report the heavy columns advanced at once. But the alarm had already spread about at Frankfort. The morning there looked upon a scene even more lively than the one that had occurred in Buell’s camp. The scouts brought in the news that the Union army in great force was at hand. They had met some of their cavalry patrols in the night, on the very edge of the city. Resistance to the great Union force was out of the question, because Bragg had committed the error that the Union generals had been committing so often in the east. He had been dividing and scattering his forces so much that he could not now concentrate them and fight at the point where they were needed most.
The division of the Southern army that occupied Frankfort hastily gathered up its arms and supplies and departed, taking with it the governor who was never inaugurated, and soon afterward the Union men marched in. Both May and Powell had the satisfaction of entering their homes by the front doors, and seeing the parents who did not know until then whether they were dead or alive.
Dick had a few hours’ leave and he walked about the town. He had made friends when he was there in the course of that memorable struggle over secession, and he saw again all of them who had not gone to the war.
Harry and his father were much present in his mind then, because he had recently seen Colonel Kenton, and because the year before, all three of them had talked together in these very places.
But he could not dwell too much in the past. He was too young for it, and the bustle of war was too great. It was said that Bragg’s forces had turned toward the southeast, but were still divided. It was reported that the Bishop-General, Polk, had been ordered to attack the Northern force in or near Frankfort, but the attack did not come. Colonel Winchester said it was because Polk recognized the superior strength of his enemy, and was waiting until he could co-operate with Bragg and Hardee.
But whatever it was Dick soon found himself leaving Frankfort and marching into the heart of the Bluegrass. He began to have the feeling, or rather instinct warned him, that battle was near. Yet he did not fear for the Northern army as he had feared in Virginia and Maryland. He never felt that such men as Lee and Jackson were before them. He felt instead that the Southern commanders were doubtful and hesitating. They now had there no such leaders as Albert Sidney Johnston, who fell at Shiloh when victory was in Southern hands and before it had time to slip from their grasp.