But the extreme delicacy
of the tension came to Dick's aid. People hesitated to ask questions,
lest questions equally difficult be asked of them in return. It was a
great time to mind one's own business.
He rode on, fortune with him for the present, and his course was still
west slightly by north. He slept under roofs, and he learned that in
the country into which he had now come the Union sympathizers were
more numerous than the Confederate. The majority of the Kentuckians,
whatever their personal feelings, were not willing to shatter the
republic.
He heard definitely that here in the west the North was gathering armies
greater than any that he had supposed. Besides the troops from the
three states just across the Ohio River the hardy lumbermen and pioneers
were pouring down from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Hunters
in deerskin suits and buffalo moccasins had already come from the far
Nebraska Territory.
The power of the west and the northwest was converging upon his state,
which gave eighty thousand of its men to the Northern cause, while half
as many more went away to the Southern armies, particularly to the one
under the brilliant and daring Albert Sidney Johnston, which hung a
sinister menace before the Northern front. One hundred and twenty
thousand troops sent to the two armies by a state that contained but
little more than a million people! It was said at the time that as
Kentucky went, so would go the fortunes of the Union and in the end it
was so.
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