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."
The dispatch was written on tissue paper, rolled into the form of a bullet, coated with warm lead, and put into the hand of the Kentuckian. He was given a carbine, a brace of revolvers, and the fleetest horse in his regiment, and, when the moon was down, started on his perilous journey. He was to ride at night, and hide in the woods or in the houses of loyal men in the day-time.