“Has he done that?” exclaimed Dick aghast. Like other young officers he felt perfectly competent to criticize anybody.
“He has, and it seems to me that when the enemy divided was the time for us to unite or remain united. Then we could scoop him up in detail. Why, Dick, with an army of sixty thousand men or so, made of such material as ours has shown itself to be, we could surely beat any Southern force in Kentucky!”
“Especially as we have no Lees and Stonewall Jacksons to fight.”
“Maybe General Buell has divided his force in order to obtain plenty of water,” said Pennington. “We fellows ought to be fair to him.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Warner, “and you’re right when you say we ought to be fair to him. I know it will be a great relief to General Buell to find that we three are supporting his management of this army. Shall I go and tell him, Frank?”
“Not now, but you can a little later on. Suppose you wait until a day or two after the battle which we all believe is coming.”
The three boys were really in high spirits. Little troubled them but the dryness and the dust. They had tasted so much of defeat and drawn battle in the east that they had an actual physical sense of better things in the west. The horizons were wider, the mountains were lower, and there was not so much enveloping forest. They did not have the strangling sensation, mental only, which came from the fear that hostile armies would suddenly rush from the woods and fall upon their flank.
Besides, there was Shiloh. After all, they had won Shiloh, and the coming of this very Buell who led them now had enabled them to win it. And Shiloh was the only great battle that they had yet really won.
They camped that night in the dry fields. The Winchester regiment was a part of the division under McCook, while Buell with the rest of the army was some miles away. It was still warm, although October was now seven days old, and Dick had never before heard the grass and leaves rustle so dryly under the wind. Off in the direction of Perryville they saw the dim gleam of red, and they knew it came from the camp-fires of the Southern army. Buell had in his detached divisions sixty thousand men, most of them veterans and Dick believed that if they were brought together victory was absolutely sure on the morrow.
The troops around the Winchester regiment were lads from Ohio, and they affiliated readily. Most of the new men were in these Ohio regiments, and Dick, Warner and Frank felt themselves ancient veterans who could talk to the recruits and give them good advice. And the recruits took it in the proper spirit. They looked up with admiration to those who had been at Shiloh, and the Second Manassas and Antietam.
Dick thought their spirit remarkable. They were not daunted at all by the great failures in the east. They did not discount the valor of the Southern troops, but they asked to be led against them.
“Come over here,” said one of the Ohio boys to Dick. “Ahead of us and on the side there’s rough ground with thick woods and deep ravines. I’ll show you something just at the edge of the woods. Bring your friends with you.”
The twilight had already turned to night and Dick, calling Warner and Pennington, went with his new friend. There, flowing from under a great stone, shaded by a huge oak, was a tiny stream of pure cold water a couple of inches deep but seven or eight inches broad. Under the stone a beautiful basin a foot and a half across and about as deep had been chiselled out.
“A lot of us found it here,” said the Ohio boy, “and we found, too, a tin cup chained to a staple driven into the stone. See, it’s here still. We haven’t broken the chain. I suppose it belongs to some farmer close by. The boys brought other tin cups and we drank so fast that the brook itself became dry. The water never got any further than the pool. I suppose it’s just started again. Drink.”