In the summer of 1863, three men ran the gauntlet of shot and shell and rifle-fire for forty miles to save an army, with death dogging them all the way. Brigadier-General Thomas, who afterward earned the title of the Rock of Chickamauga by his brave stand in that disastrous battle, was entrenched on one of the spurs of the hills around Chattanooga. General Bragg with a much superior army of Confederates had hunted the Union soldiers mile after mile. At times they had stopped and fought, at times they had escaped by desperate marches. Now exhausted and ringed about by the whole Confederate Army, they must soon have help or be starved into surrender. Yet only forty miles to the eastward was a body of thirty thousand men commanded by General Stockton. This general was one of those valuable men who obey orders without any reasoning about the why and the wherefore of the same. He had been commanded to hold a certain pass in the mountains until further orders and that pass he would hold, as General Thomas well knew, until relieved or directed to do otherwise. If only the duty had been assigned to some other officer, it might be that not hearing anything from the main body, he would send out a reconnoitering party. Not so with General Stockton. That general would stay put and only a direct order or an overpowering force of the enemy would move him. It was in vain that General Thomas tried to get a messenger through with secret despatches in cipher. General Bragg knew that he had the Union Army cornered and he had stationed a triple row of pickets who caught or shot every man that General Thomas sent.