“To save, if possible, the life of Curtis Remington.” “Nay, nay, child; you are insane now, to think of it.” Wild and impracticable as the venture seemed then, succeeding events not only made it possible but feasible and imperative as well; of this more anon. CHAPTER VI. TO DIE AT ONCE. General J. E. Johnston, the commander of the Confederate forces in Georgia, at the head of forty-five thousand men, was intrenched at Dalton, lying in wait for the advancing troops of Sherman, then marching into this stronghold of the Confederacy from Chattanooga. The last Confederate gunboat had been driven from the Mississippi and the great basin of the south and west was safe in Union keeping. The great strength of the South now was its inland armies, which were fed by the granaries and supported by the factories of Georgia. Here were the great grain growing prairies which afforded the sustenance that an army requires. In the heart of the state, the center of a net-work of manufacturing cities and villages, was Atlanta, from which the army was supplied with powder, shot--in fact, all the appurtenances of war. Through Macon and Atlanta ran the great railroad lines between the eastern and the western Confederacy. Georgia then was the Confederate stronghold. To rend it asunder from mountain to sea as had been done in the Mississippi was the next work of the Northern troops. The man called upon to undertake this herculian task was Sherman. He had just performed his superb march of four hundred miles from Vicksburg to Chattanooga and added to this another hundred miles to Knoxville in season to relieve Burnside. At the head of one hundred thousand men he was now at Ringgold, on the other side of the mountain, in direct line with Dalton and Atlanta biding his time of action. To follow the fortunes of Cavalry Curt, however, we must go to the Confederate headquarters. On the afternoon of the same day that witnessed the scout’s capture, General Johnston, in company with subordinate officers, was in his tent busily examining a lot of charts and papers that lay before him. “They are still impatient at Richmond for me to begin the offensive,” said the commander after a pause, as he looked up from the documents, and reading for the third time the latest dispatch from the Confederate capital. “But I am no better prepared to do it than when I first declined to do so last Christmas. Their plans look well enough on paper, but put into actual practice must fail. Sherman’s army more than double ours in number, and then he is fortified at the very apex of the two entrances into Georgia. The moment that I advance on either hand our rear is open to his attack. Once our supplies from Atlanta are cut off, we are lost. No,” he continued thoughtfully, slowly shaking his head, “I dare not take the risk. Our wisest course is to draw the northern forces on as near to Atlanta as possible before we engage in regular battle with them. I am anxious----”