Morgan mulled this advice while his men guarded the fords of the Pacolet. As dusk fell on January 15, Tarleton and his army appeared on the south bank of the river. He saw the guards and wheeled, marching up the stream toward a ford near Wofford’s iron works. On the opposite bank, Morgan’s men kept pace with him, step for step. Then, with no warning, the British disappeared into the night. Retreating? Making camp? No one knew. It was too risky to venture across the swollen river to follow him. The British Legion cavalry always guarded Tarleton’s flanks and rear. On the morning of the 16th, a militia detachment miles down the river in the opposite direction made an alarming discovery. Tarleton was across! He had doubled back in the dark and marched most of the night to cross at Easterwood Shoals. He was only 6 miles from Morgan’s camp on Thicketty Creek. Leaping on their horses, the guards galloped to Morgan with the news. Morgan’s men were cooking breakfast. Out of his tent charged the general to roar orders at them, the wagoners, the infantry, the cavalrymen. Prepare to march immediately! The men grabbed their half-cooked cornmeal cakes and stuffed them into their mouths. The militia and the cavalry ran for their horses, the wagoners hitched their teams, the Continentals formed ranks, and the column got underway. Morgan pressed forward, ignoring the pain in his hip, demanding more and more speed from his men. He headed northwest, toward Cowpens, on the Green River Road, a route that would also take him to the Island Ford across the Broad River, about 6 miles beyond Cowpens. All day the men slogged along the slick, gooey roads, Morgan at the head of the column setting a relentless pace. His sciatic hip tormented him. Behind him, the militiamen were expending “many a hearty curse” on him, one of them later recalled. As Nathanael Greene wryly remarked, in the militia every man considered himself a general. But Daniel Morgan was responsible for their lives and the lives of his Continentals, some of whom had marched doggedly from battlefield to battlefield for over four years. In the company of the Delaware Continentals who served beside the Marylanders in the light infantry brigade, there was a lieutenant named Thomas Anderson who kept track of the miles he had marched since they headed south in May 1780. At the end of each day he entered in his journal the ever-growing total. By January 16, it was 1,435. No matter what the militia thought of him, Daniel Morgan was not going to throw away such men in a battle simply to prove his courage. Seldom has there been a better example of the difference between the professional and the amateur soldier. In his letters urging militiamen to join him, Morgan had warned them against the futility of fighting in such small detachments. He had asked them to come into his camp and subject themselves to “order and discipline ... so that I may be enabled to direct you ... to the advantage of the whole.”