“Then take twenty of your bravest and most intelligent men and ride toward Frankfort. It may be that we shall have to take a part in this inauguration, which I hear is scheduled for to-morrow.”
“It may be so, sir,” said Colonel Winchester, returning General Buell's grim smile. Then he and Dick saluted and withdrew.
But it did not take the colonel long to make his preparations. Among his twenty men all were natives of Kentucky except Warner, Pennington and Sergeant Whitley. Two were from Frankfort itself, and they were confident that they could approach through the hills with comparative security, the little capital nestling in its little valley.
They rode rapidly and by nightfall drew near to the rough Benson Hills, which suddenly shooting up in a beautiful rolling country, hem in the capital. Although it was now the third day of October the little party marked anew the extreme dryness and the shrunken condition of everything. It was all the more remarkable as no region in the world is better watered than Kentucky, with many great rivers, more small ones, and innumerable creeks and brooks. There are few points in the state where a man can be more than a mile from running water.
The dryness impressed Dick. They had dust here, as they had had it in Virginia, but there it was trampled up by great armies. Here it was raised by their own little party, and as the October winds swept across the dry fields it filled their eyes with particles. Yet it was one of the finest regions of the world, underlaid with vitalizing limestone, a land where the grass grows thick and long and does not die even in winter.
“If one were superstitious,” said Dick, “he could think it was a punishment sent upon us all for fighting so much, and for killing so many men about questions that lots of us don't understand, and that at least could have been settled in some other way.”
“It's easy enough to imagine it so,” said Warner in his precise way, “but after all, despite the reasons against it, here we are fighting and killing one another with a persistence that has never been surpassed. It's a perfectly simple question in mathematics. Let x equal the anger of the South, let y equal the anger of the North, let 10 equal the percentage of reason, 100, of course, being the whole, then you have x + y + 10 equalling 100. The anger of the two sections is consequently x + y, equalling 100 - 10, or 90. When anger constitutes 90 per cent., what chance has reason, which is only 10 per cent., or one-ninth of anger?”
“No chance at all,” replied Dick. “That has already been proved without the aid of algebra. Here is a man in a cornfield signaling to us. I wonder what he wants?”
As Dick spoke, Colonel Winchester, who had already noticed the man, gave an order to stop. The stranger, bent and knotted by hard work on the farm, hurried toward them. He leaned against the fence a moment, gasping for breath, and then said:
“You're Union men, ain't you? It's no disguise?”