The means at command were twenty-five hundred men, divided into two bodies, and separated by a hundred miles of mountain country. This country was infested with guerrillas, and occupied by a disloyal people. The sending of dispatches across it was next to impossible; but communication being opened, and the two columns set in motion, there was danger that they would be fallen on and beaten in detail before they could form a junction. This was the great danger. What remained--the beating of five thousand Rebels, posted behind intrenchments, by half their number of Yankees, operating in the open field--seemed to the young Colonel less difficult of accomplishment. Evidently, the first thing to be done was to find a trustworthy messenger to convey dispatches between the two halves of the Union army. To this end, the Yankee commander applied to the Colonel of the Fourteenth Kentucky. "Have you a man," he asked, "who will die, rather than fail or betray us?" The Kentuckian reflected a moment, then answered: "I think I have,--John Jordan, from the head of Baine."[B] Jordan was sent for. He was a tall, gaunt, sallow man of about thirty, with small gray eyes, a fine, falsetto voice, pitched in the minor key, and his speech the rude dialect of the mountains. His face had as many expressions as could be found in a regiment, and he seemed a strange combination of cunning, simplicity, undaunted courage, and undoubting faith; yet, though he might pass for a simpleton, he talked a quaint sort of wisdom which ought to have given him to history. The young Colonel sounded him thoroughly; for the fate of the little army might depend on his fidelity. The man's soul was as clear as crystal, and in ten minutes the Yankee saw through it. His history is stereotyped in that region. Born among the hills, where the crops are stones, and sheep's noses are sharpened before they can nibble the thin grass between them, his life had been one of the hardest toil and privation. He knew nothing but what Nature, the Bible, the "Course of Time," and two or three of Shakspeare's plays had taught him; but somehow in the mountain air he had grown to be a man,--a man as civilized nations account manhood. "Why did you come into the war?" at last asked the Colonel. "To do my sheer fur the kentry, Gin'ral," answered the man. "And I didn't druv no barg'in wi' th' Lord. I guv Him my life squar' out; and ef He's a mind ter tuck it on this tramp, why, it's a His'n; I've nothin' ter say agin it." "You mean that you've come into the war not expecting to get out of it?" "That's so, Gin'ral." "Will you die rather than let the dispatch be taken?" "I wull." The Colonel recalled what had passed in his own mind when poring over his mother's Bible that night at his home in Ohio; and it decided him. "Very well," he said; "I will trust you."