One night, during the anxious two weeks before the Battle of Guilford Court House, Greene sent for him again. The army was moving stealthily along muddy roads through the dusk of starlight, for the general thought his force still too weak to risk an engagement and evaded Cornwallis by shifting his camp every twenty-four hours, in the dark. The footsore men plodded forward silently. Loss of sleep was wearing them out. Greene himself had hardly slept for a week, and physical exhaustion united with his judgment in declaring that the strain could not last much longer. If sufficient reënforcements did not arrive soon, he would have to fight without them, and disaster would result. He sighed and settled himself wearily in the saddle. For a moment his overburdening anxiety slipped from him, and he dozed as he rode. Then he straightened himself with a start. A small lanky figure had bobbed up beside his horse out of the obscurity of the night, and he caught the motion of a salute. “Ah, Neil,” he said, “I sent for you to see if you are ready to undertake another dangerous errand. I fear my last message to Colonel William Campbell has been intercepted. I want some one to go out, try to meet him, and hurry him forward. If he has not heard of our recent movements, he may be marching toward the Dan River.” He hesitated a moment, as if he had more to say, but Neil did not wait for it. “I’m your man, sir!” he declared. The general smiled at the boy’s confidence. “That was my impression, too,” he admitted. “Yet there is one strong argument against your going. Gillespie, one of the scouts, has just come in. He’s been hanging around Tarleton’s Legion and he’s heard you spoken of. It seems that the enemy took notice of you in the affair at the mill the other day, and that rascal who has your name, Davidson, the bushwhacker, is with the Legion, and he swears to capture you; so if any of Tarleton’s men come across a boy of your size and description, he will have hard work to get away from them.” “But even if they are on the lookout for a boy, they’re just as much on the lookout for every grown man in your army,” Neil urged. “Anybody that the Tories get hold of will have to give a good account of himself.” “So I reasoned,” the general said, “and at the same time I am unwilling to have you undertake this without some safeguard. You are about the height of an ordinary young woman, and when we reach Mrs. Bynum’s plantation, where we shall make our next camp, I shall have her furnish you with clothing and a side-saddle, and you will go disguised as a girl. That is all for the present. Report to me at the Bynum house as soon as you reach the plantation, and keep this to yourself in the meantime.”