To deceive Marshall as to his real strength and designs, Garfield orders a small force of infantry and cavalry to advance along the river, drive in the Rebel pickets, and move rapidly after them as if to attack Paintville. Two hours after this force goes off, a similar one, with the same orders, sets out on the road to the westward; and two hours later still, another small body takes the middle road. The effect is, that the pickets on the first route, being vigorously attacked and driven, retreat in confusion to Paintville, and dispatch word to Marshall that the Union army is advancing along the river. He hurries off a thousand infantry and a battery to resist the advance of this imaginary column. When this detachment has been gone an hour and a half, he hears, from the routed pickets on the right, that the Federals are advancing along the western road. Countermanding his first order, he now directs the thousand men and the battery to check the new danger; and hurries off the troops at Paintville to the mouth of Jenny's Creek to make a stand there. Two hours later the pickets on the central route are driven in, and, finding Paintville abandoned, flee precipitately to the fortified camp, with the story that the Union army is close at their heels and occupying the town. Conceiving that he has thus lost Paintville, Marshall hastily withdraws the detachment of one thousand men to his fortified camp; and Garfield, moving rapidly over the ridges of the central route, occupies the abandoned position. So affairs stand on the evening of the 8th of January, when a spy enters the camp of Marshall, with tidings that Cranor, with thirty-three hundred (!) men, is within twelve hours' march at the westward. On receipt of these tidings, the "big boy,"--he weighs three hundred pounds by the Louisville hay-scales,--conceiving himself outnumbered, breaks up his camp, and retreats precipitately, abandoning or burning a large portion of his supplies. Seeing the fires, Garfield mounts his horse, and, with a thousand men, enters the deserted camp at nine in the evening, while the blazing stores are yet unconsumed. He sends off a detachment to harass the retreat, and waits the arrival of Cranor, with whom he means to follow and bring Marshall to battle in the morning. In the morning Cranor comes, but his men are footsore, without rations, and completely exhausted. They cannot move one leg after the other. But the canal-boy is bound to have a fight; so every man who has strength to march is ordered to come forward. Eleven hundred--among them four hundred of Cranor's tired heroes--step from the ranks, and with them, at noon of the 9th, Garfield sets out for Prestonburg, sending all his available cavalry to follow the line of the enemy's retreat and harass and delay him.