"
"General Buell ain't here yet."
"But he's coming."
"But he ain't here yet," persisted the sergeant, "an' he can't be here
for several days, 'cause the roads are mighty deep in the spring mud.
Don't say any man is here until he is here. An' I tell you that General
Johnston, with whom we've got to deal, is a great man. I wasn't with
him when he made that great march through the blizzards an' across the
plains to Salt Lake City to make the Mormons behave, but I've served
with them that was. An' I've never yet found one of them who didn't say
General Johnston was a mighty big man. Soldiers know when the right
kind of a man is holdin' the reins an' drivin' 'em. Didn't we all feel
that we was bein' driv right when General Grant took hold?"
"We all felt it," said the three in chorus.
"Of course you did," said the sergeant, "an' now I've got a kind of
uneasy feelin' over General Johnston. Why don't we hear somethin' from
him? Why don't we know what he's doin'? We haven't sent out any
scoutin' parties. On the plains, no matter how strong we was, we was
always on the lookout for hostile Indians, while here we know there is a
big Confederate army somewhere within fifty miles of us, but don't take
the trouble to look it up."
"That's so," said Warner. "Caution represents less than five per cent
of our effectiveness. But I suppose we can whip the Johnnies anyway."
"Of course we can," said Pennington, who was always of a most buoyant
temperament.
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