“Keep cool, Dickie boy, and let who will be dusty. Brooks may fail once in a hundred years in Kentucky, but they haven't failed in a thousand in Vermont. You need not remind me that the white man has been there only two or three hundred years. My information comes straight from a very old Indian chief who was the depository of tribal recollections absolutely unassailable. The streams even in midsummer come down as full and cold as ever from the mountains.” “We'll have water and plenty of it in a day or two. The scouts say that the Confederate force at the springs is not strong enough to withstand us.” “But General Buell, not knowing exactly what General Bragg intends with his divided force, has divided his own in order to meet him at all points.” “Has he done that?” exclaimed Dick aghast. Like other young officers he felt perfectly competent to criticize anybody. “He has, and it seems to me that when the enemy divided was the time for us to unite or remain united. Then we could scoop him up in detail. Why, Dick, with an army of sixty thousand men or so, made of such material as ours has shown itself to be, we could surely beat any Southern force in Kentucky!” “Especially as we have no Lees and Stonewall Jacksons to fight.” “Maybe General Buell has divided his force in order to obtain plenty of water,” said Pennington. “We fellows ought to be fair to him.” “Perhaps you're right,” said Warner, “and you're right when you say we ought to be fair to him. I know it will be a great relief to General Buell to find that we three are supporting his management of this army. Shall I go and tell him, Frank?” “Not now, but you can a little later on. Suppose you wait until a day or two after the battle which we all believe is coming.” The three boys were really in high spirits. Little troubled them but the dryness and the dust. They had tasted so much of defeat and drawn battle in the east that they had an actual physical sense of better things in the west. The horizons were wider, the mountains were lower, and there was not so much enveloping forest. They did not have the strangling sensation, mental only, which came from the fear that hostile armies would suddenly rush from the woods and fall upon their flank. Besides, there was Shiloh. After all, they had won Shiloh, and the coming of this very Buell who led them now had enabled them to win it. And Shiloh was the only great battle that they had yet really won.